Germany -
Booming Sex Industry - Prostitution, Trafficking, Brothels +
When Germany
legalised prostitution in 2002 it triggered an apparently unstoppable growth in
the country’s sex industry. It’s now worth 15 billion euros a year and embraces
everything from 12-storey mega-brothels to outdoor sex boxes. Nisha Lilia Diu visits some of them to
find out who won and who lost
A corridor in Pascha, Cologne,
shows the high chairs on which prostitutes sit outside their doors, waiting
for customers (Albrecht Fuchs)
Paradise is a brothel in Stuttgart.
It’s one of Germany’s
“mega-brothels” and, like a lot of those establishments, it has a Moroccan
theme. Picture a Sultan’s palace crossed with a Premier Inn, then wedge it
between anonymous office blocks on an endless industrial park and you’re there:
Paradise.
This isn’t my first time in
a brothel. In Bangkok aged 19 I
checked in to a place called Mango Inn with two school friends. Within a couple
of hours we’d seen enough to get the joke. But that scuzzy little concern, with
its scarlet-haired manager and beery tourist crowd, was seriously small fry
compared to this.
Paradise
is a chain, like Primark or Pizza Hut, with five branches and three more on the
way. So business is booming, I say to Michael Beretin, a partner in the
company. “Yes, yes!” he laughs, his £100,000 Audemars Piguet watch glinting in
the light of the pierced metal lamps.
Beretin, a shamelessly
flirtatious man with a grin like Jack Nicholson’s Joker and a habit of slipping
between English and German mid-sentence, is about to open the 15,000 square
foot, 4.5 million-euro Paradise Saarbrücken. It’s modelled on the Stuttgart
flagship, which he invites us to visit on a day blighted by icy, spitty rain.
Each of its six floors is picked out with a thick stripe of burgundy cladding making
it look from the outside like a very tall, stale slice of red velvet cake.
Inside, it’s baking. “Take your clothes off!” cries Beretin, tugging at my
coat.
It’s six o’clock in the
evening at Paradise and about thirty men are padding
about the swirly red carpet in wine-coloured towelling robes and green plastic
slippers. The women sit in the men’s laps at the bar. One is cuddling up to a
pot-bellied man on a day bed. Several are clustered together, looking bored in
their black glitter basques and hot pink fishnets, waiting for it to get
busier.
People think Amsterdam is
the prostitution capital of Europe but Germany has more prostitutes per capita
than any other country in the continent, more even than Thailand: 400,000 at
the last count, serving 1.2 million men every day. Those figures were released
a decade ago, soon after Germany
made buying sex, selling sex, pimping and brothel-keeping legal in 2002. Two
years later, prostitution in Germany
was thought to be worth 6 billion euros – roughly the same as Porsche or Adidas
that year. It’s now estimated to be 15 billion euros.
Prostitution was legalised
“for the government to make a lot of money,” Beretin says, strolling past a
woman in a lime green lycra shrug (and nothing else) while another woman, nude
except for black hold-up stockings, leans against the bar. Quite a few people
agree with Beretin – and not all of them are brothel owners grumbling about
their tax bills. But that isn’t how the legalisation argument was won 12 years
ago.
The idea of the law, passed
by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democrat-Green coalition, was to
recognise prostitution as a job like any other. Sex workers could now enter
into employment contracts, sue for payment and register for health insurance,
pension plans and other benefits. Exploiting prostitutes was still criminal but
everything else was now above board. Two female politicians and a Berlin
madam were pictured clinking their champagne glasses in celebration.
It didn’t work. “Nobody
employs prostitutes in Germany,”
says Beretin. None of the authorities I spoke to had ever heard of a prostitute
suing for payment, either. And only 44 prostitutes have registered for
benefits.
What did happen was the
opening of Europe’s biggest brothel – the 12-storey, neon-wrapped Pascha in Cologne.
Not to mention a rash of FKK, or “naked”, clubs where men can spend the evening
drifting between the sauna, the bar and the bedrooms. Bargain-hunters might try
the “flat rate” brothels, where an entry fee of between 50-100 euros buys you
unlimited sex with as many women as you want, or cruise the caravans at
motorway truck stops, or the drive-through “sex boxes” in the street-walking
zones. (They look like stables and are known as “verrichtungsboxen” - “getting
things done boxes”.) At the truck stop on Am Eifeltor near Cologne,
prostitutes work out of caravans. There are around 30 caravans here. The
prostitutes pay 150 euros a month in tax to the city (Albrecht Fuchs)
The Netherlands
legalised prostitution two years before Germany,
just after Sweden
had gone the other way and made the purchase of sex a criminal offence. Norway
adopted the Swedish model - in which selling sex is permitted but anyone caught
buying it is fined or imprisoned - in 2009. Iceland
has followed suit, and France and Ireland
look set to do the same.
The Home Office insists Britain’s
byzantine prostitution laws (in brief: you can buy and sell sex indoors under
certain circumstances) are not up for review. But that might not be the case
for long.
Mary Honeyball, the Labour
MEP, has been leading the charge to have the Swedish model adopted across Europe.
Her bill was voted through by the European Parliament on 26 February, formally
establishing the EU’s position on the issue. A few days later, on Monday, a
cross-party report in Britain
also recommended the model.
Pressure to review
prostitution laws is coming from an EU anti-trafficking directive that obliges
member states to “reduce demand” for human trafficking. Given that at least 70
per cent of trafficking in Europe is into forced
prostitution, a lot of people are arguing that the best way to reduce demand
for trafficking is to reduce demand for prostitution. And one way to do that is
to criminalise the buyer.
Sex trafficking statistics
are frustratingly incomplete, but a recent report estimated the number of
victims in Europe at 270,000. And Germany
and the Netherlands
have repeatedly ranked among the five worst blackspots.
There is “absolutely” a
correlation between legalised prostitution and trafficking, says Andrea
Matolcsi, the programme officer for sexual violence and trafficking at Equality
Now. “For a trafficker it’s much easier to go to a country where it’s legal to
have brothels and it’s legal to manage people in prostitution. It’s just a more
attractive environment.”
She points out that Denmark,
which decriminalised prostitution in 1999 – the same year Sweden
made the purchase of sex illegal - has four times the number of trafficking
victims than its neighbour despite having around half the population.
It’s one reason the Netherlands
has gone into reverse with legalisation. The Deputy Prime Minister, Lodewijk
Asscher, has called it “a national mistake”. As Deputy Mayor of Amsterdam
he spent millions of euros buying back window brothels, turning them into shops
and restaurants in an effort to rid the city of the gangs that had moved in.
Chancellor Angela Merkel
attempted to raise the issue in the summer of 2013 but things got so out of
hand (there were riots at conferences) that the matter was quietly dropped.
Meanwhile,
men like Michael Beretin and his business partner, Jürgen Rudloff, are getting
rich. They’re in high spirits about the opening of the new Paradise
in April. Saarbrücken is a small city of 180,000 inhabitants that happens to be
just five kilometres from the French border. It’s about an hour’s drive from
the European Parliament in Strasbourg.
The new brothel’s prospects
are looking better than ever. In December, the French parliament voted to
criminalise the purchase of sex with fines of upward of 1500 euros for a first
offence. “Thank you so much to France!”
says Beretin, 48, his chest heaving with giggles inside its quilted waistcoat.
He ushers us around the Stuttgart
club - the sauna, porn cinema and private function room with old episodes of
Knight Rider playing on the TV. “Keep your scanners on, Kitt,” says a
baby-faced David Hasselhoff. Beretin spanks a passing woman on her bare bottom.
“Prices are going down,”
says Suzi, a 29-year-old Romanian who’s been working at Pascha for two years.
“Every day less.” Paradise is near the top of the
market. Pascha is a couple of rungs lower and there are many more rungs below
that. At the “sex boxes” in Cologne’s
Geestemünder Strasse it’s possible to buy sex for as little as 10 euros. “One
woman here will even do it for a Big Mac,” a prostitute called Alia told a
German newspaper last year.
Germany
has been flooded with foreign sex workers, mostly from Eastern
Europe. Their sheer number, and willingness to accept lower rates,
has driven prices so low one American punter, who takes three sex trips to
Germany each year, calls the country “Aldi for prostitutes”.
As
in many German cities, Saarbrücken’s sex industry really exploded in 2008 when Romania
and Bulgaria
were acceded to the EU. “Prostitution has reached intolerable levels here,”
says Saarbrücken’s mayor, Charlotte Britz. There are at least 100 brothels in
the city. I walk past five in the ten minutes it takes me to get from the train
station to her office. Their garish hoardings look strikingly out of place in
the pretty cobbled streets.
Britz, 55, sips tea from a
china cup as she recounts stories of men being approached by prostitutes in
supermarket car parks and even, once, at a funeral. Residents complain about
used condoms littering the bus stops their children use to go to school. “I am
not OK with that,” she says.
“Saarbrücken used to be
famous for its food,” a 52-year-old local called Stephanie tells me. Its
candlelit restaurants were known for their fine Mosel
wines. “Now it’s famous for prostitution,” she says, complaining about the
loutish behaviour of sex tourists at the weekend. A man in his forties with two
young children describes the awkwardness of having to explain who the ladies on
the side of the road are. “You don’t want to answer these questions to your
children when they’re small.”
The law leaves Britz with
her hands tied. “It’s easier to open a brothel in Germany
than a chip shop,” she says. That’s actually true: while premises serving food
need special licences there are no restrictions on brothels. That’s because all
they do, technically, is rent rooms. The prostitutes are their customers just
as much as the punters are. Sometimes, more so.
Müller senior took the
building over after legalisation but this tower block covered in blinking
lights has been used by prostitutes for 40 years. It was purpose-built by the
city of Cologne in 1972 in an
attempt to get them off the streets, and its age and institutional beginnings
show. It has the blue-and-orange colour scheme of a municipal leisure centre.
At Pascha (which Beretin
calls “the shit shop”) women pay 175 euros for 24 hours’ use of a room. They
sit on stools outside their open doors in long, dark corridors that smell of
cigarettes and air freshener. Rock music is pumping. Some of them look anxious.
They will need to sleep with at least four men to break even.
The punters – around 1000
every day - pay 5 euros’ entrance to an enormous security guard who looks like
something out of Grand Theft Auto. They might visit the glory hole on the first
floor or the transsexuals on the seventh. As at Paradise,
the money paid for sex is negotiated directly with the prostitute and not
shared with the club.
Also as at Paradise,
Pascha has an on-site hairdresser. The prostitutes can get a colour for 40
euros there. “Cheaper than in the city centre,” says Andersson, the camp,
sweet-faced Brazilian that rents the space from Pascha’s management. Pascha has
a tanning and nail salon, too, as well as a self-service restaurant (run by a
former prostitute called Linda) and a boutique selling glittery platform shoes
and condoms in packs of 100. German lessons are free and include a one-hour
tutorial in sexual practices taught using disturbingly childlike cartoons drawn
by a local kindergarten teacher.
The prostitutes are not
Pascha’s employees, they are its customers. “In reality the brothel owner and
the prostitute don’t want to have an employment contract,” the Frankfurt-based
expert in prostitution law Guntram Knop tells me. “They want to save the social
security contribution.”
Both parties certainly cut
their costs by eliminating health insurance and pension contributions. A lot of
the women that Müller (junior) and Beretin welcome to their clubs only come to Germany
for eight weeks. Some make several trips a year but few live permanently in the
country, so they have little incentive to hand over a chunk of their earnings
to social security. For those self-employed prostitutes who do want health
insurance, premiums are high - about 500 euros a month - because it’s such a
risky job.
Most are in a similar
situation to Suzi: her family has no idea what she’s doing and she has no
desire to have an official record of her years in prostitution. “This work is
not for a long time,” she says. “Very soon I will stop.” Once she’s saved up
enough money, she plans to get a job in a hotel or a restaurant. Kristina
Marlen, a tantric dominatrix in Berlin and a spokeswoman
for Germany’s
Trade Association for Erotic and Sexual Services, agrees. “A lot of people just
do it for a short period in their lives. They don’t want to have in their CV,
‘I was a whore from 2007 to 2009’.”
The brothel-owner’s
rationale isn’t purely financial either. When a journalist asked Paradise’s
Jürgen Rudloff if the women at his clubs are working voluntarily, Rudloff, who
has four teenage children, answered, “That’s not my business.” Strictly
speaking, he was right. As long as they’re just renting rooms, the brothels
have no real accountability towards the prostitutes.
“People don’t employ
prostitutes in Germany
because it’s complicated,” says Beretin, leaning back in his leather desk
chair. Beside him is a framed photograph of himself standing by a Harley
Davidson (Beretin owns five). On the opposite wall there’s a poster of the logo
of the arms manufacturer, Heckler and Koch, right under a blown-up photograph
of his youngest child. Beretin is married with three sons aged 20, 18 and 9.
“You can’t give orders to
your employees. It’s not allowed,” he says. Actually, says Knop, managing
prostitutes is completely legal. The problem is making sure you don’t cross the
line between “managing” them and “exploiting” them.
Helmut Sporer, Detective
Chief Superintendent of the Crimes Squad in Augsburg,
Bavaria, is one of many German policemen
frustrated by the law’s greyness in this area. In October, he talked at a
seminar in Brussels about a “flat rate” brothel in Augsburg.
“Flat rate” places pay the prostitutes for a shift, making their money from the
bar and the punters’ entry fees. The women working here were given strict
rules: they had to be completely naked at all times and, according to Sporer,
were sometimes obliged to offer unprotected sex. If they broke a rule, they had
to pay a fine to the brothel. “The court declared all this to be legal,” said
Sporer, because the brothel owners had “right of direction” over the women - as
they would over any other employee.
Nonetheless, most brothels
prefer to pass on their “right of direction”. Whether it’s being exercised by
someone else isn’t really their problem. I ask Suzi if any of the women working
at Pascha have a pimp. “You know, the name is not ‘pimp’ anymore. It’s the
‘man’,” she tells me. “They call it, ‘my man’.”
Do some of the girls at
Pascha have a man? “A lot of girls have a man.” Sometimes their pimp is their
boyfriend, she says. “But I think that if the man loves the woman, really he
cares about her, he doesn’t send her here. I think that for a good man it
doesn’t matter if you make money or if you don’t make money.”
Hermann Müller’s girlfriend
is a prostitute at Pascha. “But I don’t pimp her. I don’t take her money!” he
says. She’s Romanian and they’ve been together for two years, “or maybe more.
She’s going to kill me now if I got that wrong.” Do you mind that other people
have sex with her, I ask him. “Well, if you work in this industry for so many
years, prostitution becomes like a regular job.” They live together in a room
at the club. I’m guessing she rents a separate room when she’s working, though?
“Of course!” he says, laughing uproariously.
Suzi, who is single, spent
years working as a cleaner in hotels in Italy,
Spain and Greece
before becoming a prostitute. “A friend who did it said it’s fast money. I
cannot say easy money because it’s not easy. Anyone who thinks this is easy
money is wrong.” In what way is it difficult? “You can find here all kinds of
persons, difficult persons”. She squirms. “Some come with fantasies.” She tells
me about a man who likes to be defecated on and another that wants to be walked
around the brothel on a leash, “like a doggy”. Some men just turn up, tell her
something dreadful from their childhood and leave. She finds those ones
exhausting. “You know, you must be like a gum – malleable. Become whatever they
need.”
One
Pascha regular is Robert. He comes two or three times a week with friends or a
couple of colleagues from the pizzeria where he works. “We go first to the
table dance [on the ground floor], have some fun, look at the girls and then we
split off and everybody goes upstairs separately.”
There are “a lot of idiots”
walking around here, Robert says, who are “drunk and disrespectful” to the
women. “Like, ‘hey, bitch, I am too nice for you.’” But Robert likes it here.
He feels comfortable at Pascha and thinks it’s a good thing that prostitution
is legal. Before, he tells me, if men didn’t get “the fantasies they want” at
home, “they go to rape a girl.”
Robert is 23. He’s an
average-looking guy with a gentle manner. Sure, he’s no Brad Pitt, but couldn’t
he just chat up a girl in a bar? “It’s easier here. You spend your money, you
know what you get. You don’t have to talk about anybody or anything.”
Robert
has noticed “a few girls” at Pascha who seem unhappy. What would he do if he
thought someone was being forced? “I couldn’t do anything. I just wouldn’t go
with her in the room.”
His attitude is not
unusual. Barbara Birkhold in the Stuttgart Police Department tells me that men
contact the police “far too rarely” about women they think might be being
coerced. “They are often more scared that it will become known that they used
prostitutes.”
Myria Vassiliadou, the EU
anti-trafficking co-ordinator, tells me about a Nigerian woman she met recently
in London. This woman was
trafficked to Britain
where she served up to 20 clients a day. “She was telling these clients that
she didn't want to be there, that she was forced and that she would be killed
if she didn't do what the traffickers said. She told the men and the men would
say, ‘I don’t care. I paid for this.’”
Forced prostitution comes
in many guises. Some women are kidnapped, others are tricked with the promise
of jobs as nannies or waitresses. Others choose to work as prostitutes but have
no idea of the conditions that await them. Often, a woman’s pimps or
traffickers are people from her own town. They know where her family lives and
aren’t afraid of harming them in order to control her. Sometimes it’s the
families who pressure girls into prostitution in the first place - unable, or
unwilling, to think of another way for a woman to earn a living.
Hermann Müller knows that
some of the women working in Pascha have pimps, “but [the pimps] are not
allowed to come in the club,” he says. If a woman asks them for help, they put
her in touch with the police. “Two weeks ago,” he says running his hands over
his close-cropped hair, “a girl said to our manager that some guy wanted to
have money from her because he drove her from Romania
to Germany. And
then he wanted to have money from her every week or something.” Pascha called
the authorities and the girl went with them. Müller’s not too sure where.
Hopefully, she wound up
somewhere like Solwodi. Lea Ackermann is the “foundress” of Solwodi, a charity
with 16 counselling centres and seven shelters in Germany
for victims of sex trafficking or forced marriage. She’s travelled the world
with her work and exudes warmth, kindness and wisdom. It’s like talking to a
Disney grandmother, only one who is telling the most terrible stories.
She tells me about a
17-year-old Russian - let’s call her Klara – whose father had fallen ill. The
family was getting desperate for money so when Klara saw a newspaper advert
offering temporary work as a prostitute in Germany,
“she thought, ‘it will be awful but for three months I can bear it.’ And then
she was raped by several men the night she arrived to “get her ready” for
prostitution. They took her passport. There was another girl there who wouldn’t
do something a customer wanted and they broke a bottle, a glass bottle, and
raped her with that. She was cut inside. It was shown to all the others.” Klara
was trapped there for four years.
Herbert
Krauleidis, the owner of Gesext.de, is talking me through his website on a huge
screen in his light-flooded boardroom in Stuttgart.
Gesext is basically eBay for sex: people (mostly women) post pictures of
themselves and a description of what they’re open to and other people (mostly
men) bid for them.
The site makes about 10m
euros a year from its 15% cut of the sale price. Krauleidis, 59, is currently
in talks with investors about expanding Gesext to “countries with laws that
allow it, like Austria, Spain,
Switzerland and the UK.”
Gesext features a
mind-boggling array of categories from slaves to gang bangs via nude cleaners.
The biggest earners are virgins (Gesext asks for proof from the girl’s doctor);
one 19-year-old from Hanover sold
her virginity for 17,800 euros. Men selling themselves to women fare worst. As
Krauleidis, 59, browses the site, I spot one: “Hallo Lady”, a tanned
middle-aged man posing on a sail boat, has just sold for 80 euros.
“Hallo Lady,” runs his
blurb. “Would you like to be treated as a woman and get lustful joyful feelings
and orgasms like you haven’t had in a long time? Feel free to call me, I’m
going to make you feel like a real woman. I’m 52, 175cm tall and I can go for a
long time. We should meet around Munich.”
“The men aren’t good for
business,” says Krauleidis mildly. “Even in the sales they don’t sell much.” Gesext’s
office is so close to Paradise that I can see its red
stripes on the other side of the autobahn. But Krauleidis and Michael Beretin
couldn’t be more different. Krauleidis, with his well-polished Mercedes, fluffy
balding head and bookshelf of businessmen’s biographies (Richard Branson, Bill
Gates, Jack Welch), reminds me of the owner of a successful regional chain of
shoe shops. Except the owner of a regional chain of shoe shops probably
wouldn’t have a personalised number plate reading “SEX 69”.
One of the women on his
site is Jacky, 36, a single mother from Stuttgart
who works in a bistro. Her 15-year-old daughter lives with Jacky’s parents, but
everyone’s your neighbour on the internet and she soon discovered that her
mother was selling sex online. What does her daughter say about it? “She
doesn’t ask much about it. But I buy her presents. Last year I paid for a trip
to England so
she could learn the language. And now she’s going to get a smartphone, I think
an iPhone. She always gets the newest one.”
Jacky has seen about 100
men over two years, making 100-150 euros each time. She’s had a 76-year-old
client die of a heart attack during an appointment. It was, as Jacky puts it,
“horrible for his wife”.
On
Gesext, whoever places the highest bid is the man Jacky has to meet. Would-be
bidders register with their full name and address and that, along with an
informal ratings system, is the sum total of Gesext’s safeguards. Krauleidis is
launching a new mobile app in April called “Touch & Sex”. His press officer
is describing it to me, “so you check into a hotel and look at your smart
phone, you choose a woman,” – “like a pizza,” Krauleidis interrupts,
absent-mindedly scrolling through his emails.
Back
in Paradise, I notice a copy of Emma magazine in
Beretin’s office. It’s run by Alice Schwarzer, an old school German feminist
who published a petition calling for a ban on prostitution last year signed by
almost 100 celebrities, politicians and academics. Since then, there have been
a number of counter-petitions from sex worker unions in Germany
and, as the debate has spread, elsewhere in Europe.
Schwarzer went quiet in
January when she got embroiled in a scandal involving a Swiss bank account.
“She hates me,” says Beretin jovially. “I would smack her in the face but she’s
smacked herself in the face already.”
Beretin knows the law is
full of holes, though. “The law wasn’t thought through well enough 12 years
ago. It’s not strong enough and it’s going to be stricter.” Some politicians
are trying to introduce brothel licences and ban “flat rate” offers. Others
want to criminalise punters who buy sex from a coerced prostitute.
The standard argument
against increasing regulations is that it will push prostitution underground.
That’s an argument that underestimates the police. As Simon Haggstrom, an
officer in the prostitution unit of the Stockholm Police, observes, “If a sex
buyer can find a prostituted woman, the police can do it.” And, really, what’s
the alternative? Just do nothing?
Herbert Krauleidis is the
only person I speak to who is completely at ease with the law as it stands.
“Oh, my colleague!” trills Beretin when I mention Gesext to him. “It’s a big
problem that women can sell themselves on the internet. You can’t control if
it’s really a woman alone or if there’s a man in the background. It’s too
dangerous, the internet.” Beretin thinks (of course) that “bigger clubs are a
much better way to control the business. Easier to regulate.”
That’s debatable, but at
least clubs like Paradise and Pascha have onsite
security which gives prostitutes a safe environment in which to work.
“Prostitutes are undoubtedly the most vulnerable group of people in society,”
says Chris Armitt, the national police lead for prostitution in England
and Wales where
around 80,000 prostitutes work.
Armitt’s Merseyside force
has an excellent record when it comes to punishing crimes against prostitutes.
Since 2006, it has stopped arresting streetwalkers (even though soliciting is
illegal in Britain)
and started working with them instead. “The sex workers will tell us, ‘there’s
a girl being pimped and she’s had her passport taken,’ and that information
gets to us quickly and we’re able to act.”
But for now, at least,
legalised prostitution hasn’t translated in to safer prostitution. Far more
prostitutes are murdered in countries where prostitution is legal than in
countries that have criminalised the purchase of sex.
It’s
a gloomy day and the clouds hang heavy above the “sex boxes” on Cologne’s
Geestemünder Strasse. It’s an incredibly depressing place. Tucked behind some
trees, amid the chugging machinery of a steel works and the smoking chimneys of
a rubbish incineration plant, is a small loop of road fenced off by barriers.
Behind them is a series of
miniature bus stops sitting against a ribbon of green tarpaulin. It’s feeble
shelter on this wind-whipped day. The women hover around the bus stops, blowing
their noses and pulling on woolly gloves. If and when a man selects them they’ll
get in to his car and drive to a row of pastel-coloured "boxes" -
that look like somewhere you’d keep cattle.
The
boxes are completely bare inside apart from a panic button. The partition is
hard against the drivers’ side so he can’t open the door and there’s a clear
space on the passenger side to enable a quick escape. “These women are fighting
for their survival,” says Sabine Reichert, a social worker with SkF Cologne,
the Catholic women’s group that runs the “sex boxes”. “Some are funding their
drug use. Others use drugs so that their work will be more bearable for them.”
Between 30 and 50 of them come here each day.
One of them, a skinny lady
in her 50s with a low ponytail, looks like someone you’d see doing the
supermarket shop, her Mazda 2 parked outside. Others look ravaged. A
puffy-faced blonde waggles her fingers at a passing van, her enormous breasts
popping out of her stretchy top. It’s lunch hour and the road is busy. When a
policeman stops our car for a few minutes a queue forms behind us.
The policeman wants to know
why our male photographer has brought two women in to the area. Is he a pimp?
I’m heartened by this until Reichert points out that most pimps aren’t stupid
enough to drop their girls off at the gate.
The women at Geestemünder
Strasse are the lucky ones. The social workers invite them into the
neighbouring drop-in centre to warm up and slowly build up trust. They start
with hot drinks, condoms and clean needles and move on to housing, jobs and
legal aid. “We strengthen the women in their self-esteem,” says Reichert. The
streetwalkers working in Germany’s
autobahns, parks and forests don’t even have this.
The fact is, prostitution
is not a job like any other. You’re in daily physical danger, your health is at
risk, it’s difficult to have a relationship and, as you get older, you’re left
with dramatically diminished earning potential and little to recommend you to
an employer. Oh, and it involves letting strangers into your body.
But, she says, “there are
some people working in the sex industry who shouldn’t be there.” Sex workers
can find themselves in “very precarious positions and not all the women can
articulate themselves as I can.” Even she has had “moments in which it wasn’t
clear to me how to communicate boundaries.” You need to be thick-skinned and
good at negotiating with strong boundaries and high self-esteem. There isn’t
much of what’s been called “willing supply”.
Back in 2002, the liberal
left imagined a sex industry in which responsible managers would push out
exploitative pimps. Empowered prostitutes would work in safety and the money
from this hitherto black market would go into pension pots and the German
treasury. Well, they got their taxes.
Paradise’s Jürgen Rudloff
appeared in a documentary about prostitution in Germany
last summer. In one scene he’s sitting in his spacious kitchen dressed in an
open-necked white shirt and linen jacket, surrounded by his four shiny-haired,
privately-educated children.
Would he be happy for
either of his two daughters to work at Paradise, the
interviewer asks. Rudloff turns puce. “Unthinkable, unthinkable,” he says. “The
question alone is brutal. I don’t mean to offend the prostitutes but I try to
raise my children so that they have professional opportunities. Most
prostitutes don’t have those options. That’s why they’re doing that job.He
pauses and looks away.
“Unimaginable, he repeats.
“I don’t even want to think about it.”