A giant Teutonic brothel - Has liberalization gone too far?

[Zanza]

Prostitution in Germany
A giant Teutonic brothel

Has the liberalisation of the oldest profession gone too far?


She can get health insurance and a pension

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/21589922-has-liberalisation-oldest-profession-gone-too-far-giant-teutonic-brothel

I don't really have a strong opinion about this either way. On the one hand it is obvious that a lot of Eastern Europeans work as prostitutes in Germany. I live in a very conservative city, but close to a smallish red-light district and there are prostitutes waiting for customers on the next street from my house in the evenings. So it's really ubiquitous. And I guess that there is a lot of crime around prostitution still, especially human trafficking. On the other, I don't think the state has any business to regulate this beyond let's say work safety regulations and the like.

[derspiess]

I'm okay with legalizing, regulating, and taxing it & all, but I object to calling them "sex workers".

[Admiral Yi]

It's a sad commentary on the current state of France that they have to travel to Germany to hump.

[derspiess]

It's a sad commentary on the current state of France that they have to travel to Germany to hump.

It's not legal there?

[Razgovory]

I was a bit thrown off by this statement"

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.

44 people out of 400,000 people have signed up for welfare benefits?  That doesn't sound like a lot.

[Zanza]

Rereading that article, I am surprised about the numbers given. 400,000 prostitutes are about 1% the workforce. Under the assumption that they'll be overwhelmingly female that suggests that 1 in 50 working females is a prostitute. That sounds like the number is too high and might be inflated for political reasons. Under the assumption that most of their business will be domestic and not sex tourism, the number of 1 million customers per day also seems rather high. That would mean that adult German males visit a prostitute about ten times per year if it was perfectly evenly distributed, which I very highly doubt. I would assume that many never ever visit a prostitute, so the remaining minority (?) would have to be very regular customers. 

[crazy canuck]

And people wonder why Germany has such a such a high trade balance.

[Admiral Yi]

It's not legal there?

Don't know.  But the article did say there are giant sex factories at the border serving Frenchman boys.

[Razgovory]

Rereading that article, I am surprised about the numbers given. 400,000 prostitutes are about 1% the workforce. Under the assumption that they'll be overwhelmingly female that suggests that 1 in 50 working females is a prostitute. That sounds like the number is too high and might be inflated for political reasons. Under the assumption that most of their business will be domestic and not sex tourism, the number of 1 million customers per day also seems rather high. That would mean that adult German males visit a prostitute about ten times per year if it was perfectly evenly distributed, which I very highly doubt. I would assume that many never ever visit a prostitute, so the remaining minority (?) would have to be very regular customers.

That's nothing.  In Victorian England it was estimated that 1 in 12 unmarried women above the age of puberty was a prostitute.

[The Brain]

Sweden retardedly made buying sex illegal around the turn of the century.

[Grey Fox]

What do you mean it has gone too far? It seems to be working.

[viper37]

Prostitution in Germany
A giant Teutonic brothel

Has the liberalisation of the oldest profession gone too far?


She can get health insurance and a pension

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/21589922-has-liberalisation-oldest-profession-gone-too-far-giant-teutonic-brothel

I don't really have a strong opinion about this either way. On the one hand it is obvious that a lot of Eastern Europeans work as prostitutes in Germany. I live in a very conservative city, but close to a smallish red-light district and there are prostitutes waiting for customers on the next street from my house in the evenings. So it's really ubiquitous. And I guess that there is a lot of crime around prostitution still, especially human trafficking. On the other, I don't think the state has any business to regulate this beyond let's say work safety regulations and the like.

Numbers aside (I tend to agree with you), I don't really see a problem with that.  if prostitution is illegal in Sweden, it will certainly be harder to validate the exact numbers.
For social benefits, well, some of them probably have "cover" jobs, like "consultant" or something other to avoid too much scrutiny by fiscal authorities, and they possibly kept it by habit.  Some others, well, some others might be too stoned to understand the concept of "social benefits" or foreign workers who are probably not eligible.

[11B4V]

Awesome.

[crazy canuck]

Prostitution in Germany
A giant Teutonic brothel

Has the liberalisation of the oldest profession gone too far?


She can get health insurance and a pension

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/21589922-has-liberalisation-oldest-profession-gone-too-far-giant-teutonic-brothel

I don't really have a strong opinion about this either way. On the one hand it is obvious that a lot of Eastern Europeans work as prostitutes in Germany. I live in a very conservative city, but close to a smallish red-light district and there are prostitutes waiting for customers on the next street from my house in the evenings. So it's really ubiquitous. And I guess that there is a lot of crime around prostitution still, especially human trafficking. On the other, I don't think the state has any business to regulate this beyond let's say work safety regulations and the like.

Liverals 

[DGuller]

It hasn't gone far enough.  It's still an ocean away.