Some in our Community might be interested in this view of the quite Legal Hobby in Deutschland as viewed by the neoliberal conservatives at England’s The Economist magazine which despite the name is something between Time and Business Week with British spelling.
Naturally, as Britons the authors are more than a little envious of afraid of their more numerous and more prosperous German cousins and focus on contrasting Germany’s decriminalization approach to sexwork to Sweden’s dour and Politically Correct tack of decriminalizing sexwork for women and criminalizing it for the male customer guys. Buying sex is as illegal as selling it right here in River City (and the rest of the Republic of Texas) but the Law seldom bothers much with customer guys except those who are foolish enough to try to buy from a fancy clothes female officer on the street.
There is a movement to view all sex work as “human trafficking”, all sexworkers as victims of trafficking, even if they think they are independent self employed businesswomen and all customer guys as Sex Traffickers at whom the Book ought to be thrown and very, very hard. That view hasn’t gained much traction around here but it’s coming since it adds capital F Feminists and human rights advocates to the traditional alliance of preachers, wives and law men.
Did you know the APD has Both a Human Trafficking Unit And a Vice Squad? Believe it, it’s true.
What do you think? Which model to follow: German normalization or Swedish men should learn to keep their filthy hands (and other parts) to themselves or among themselves or we will put them in jail (or sex offender rehab)? Is it a hard choice?
My emphasis supplied below - GM
A giant Teutonic brothel
HOW modern and liberated Germany’s Social Democrats and Greens sounded in 2001. They were in government and wanted to raise the legal and social status of prostitutes. So they enacted a law to remove the stigma from sex work by, for example, giving prostitutes full rights to health insurance, pensions and other benefits. “Exploiting” sex workers remained criminal, but merely employing them or providing them with a venue became legal. The idea was that responsible employers running safe and clean brothels would drive pimps out of the market.
Germany thus embarked on an experiment in liberalisation just as Sweden, a country culturally similar in many ways, was going in the opposite direction. In 1999 the Swedes had made it criminal to pay for sex (pimping was already a crime). By stigmatising not the prostitutes but the men who paid them, even putting them in jail, the Swedes hoped to come close to eliminating prostitution.
The two countries’ divergent paths have become hot political fodder in Germany. The centre-right camp led by Angela Merkel, the chancellor, voted against the 2001 prostitution law. In September it won the election but fell short of a majority in parliament. Mrs Merkel is now negotiating with the Social Democrats (SPD), the co-authors of the law, to form a coalition. And although the SPD is reluctant to acknowledge that it made an outright mistake, it is conceding that changes are needed.
Prostitution seems to have declined in Sweden (unless it has merely gone deep underground), whereas Germany has turned into a giant brothel and even a destination for European sex tourism. The best guess is that Germany has about 400,000 prostitutes catering to 1m men a day. Mocking the spirit of the 2001 law, exactly 44 of them, including four men, have registered for welfare benefits.
The details vary regionally, because the federal states and municipalities decide where and how brothels may operate. (Berlin is the only city without zoning restrictions.) In some places, streetwalkers line up along motorways with open-air booths nearby for quickies. In others, such as Saarbrücken, near the border with a stricter country like France, entrepreneurs are investing in mega-brothels that cater to cross-border demand.
If all these sex workers were in the business of their own free will, that would still be within the spirit of the 2001 law. Prostitutes’ associations insist that this is largely the case. But nobody denies that many women become sex workers involuntarily. Of particular concern are girls from poor villages in Romania and Bulgaria who may have been forced, tricked or seduced to come to Germany. Once there, they are trapped as Frischfleisch (fresh meat) in brothels, perhaps because they owe money to their traffickers or fear reprisals against their families at home.
Extreme opponents of prostitution in Germany, such as Alice Schwarzer, a radical feminist, conflate modern slavery and sex work, arguing that they are “inextricably entangled”. (Ms Schwarzer has issued a petition, signed by celebrities, to criminalise paying for sex as Sweden has.)
Barbara Kavemann and Elfriede Steffan, two social researchers, say that slavery and sex work are in fact separate phenomena, and that occurrences of forced labour by Romanians and Bulgarians in the trade, as in agriculture and other sectors, “have little to do with the prostitution law” and much more with the accession of those countries to the European Union in 2007.
Known cases of human trafficking have actually decreased in Germany, from 987 in 2001 to 482 in 2011. Sceptics counter that most cases never become known because the girls are afraid to testify. The link between liberalisation of prostitution and human trafficking thus remains controversial. One study of 150 countries found that legalisation expands the market for sex work and thus increases human trafficking. Prostitutes’ associations have attacked the study as poorly sourced.
In the end, the policy choice comes back to culture and ideology, argues Susanne Dodillet at the University of Göteborg. Both the Swedish and the German laws originated in the feminist and left-leaning movements in these countries. But whereas progressive Swedes view their state as able to set positive goals, Germans (the Greens, especially) mistrust the state on questions of personal morality as a hypocritical and authoritarian threat to self-expression. Only this can explain why Swedes continue overwhelmingly to support their policy, and Germans theirs.
http://www.economist.com/news/europe...utonic-brothel
Gmouse here again: The poor countries of the formerly Soviet Bloc Eastern and Southeastern Europe look to be a lot like our poorer neighbors to the South. except the income gap across our southern border is larger and people with the European Union have more official freedom of movement within the EU. In either case it is a short trip from a poorer country with few prospects to richer one with unmet demand for commercial sex. Not exact a choice among many good choices but a choice all the same, with the usual bad guys looking to exploit the situation.
Prostitution in Germany as seen from Britain
