The Telegraph has the story:
Welcome to Paradise (Paradise is the name of a brothel in Stuttgart.). It's an unusually good article, so here is an unusually long set of excerpts. One of the reasons I follow this kind of debate is because of the similar, ongoing debate about whether the sale of kidneys should be legal.
"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...
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"Paradise is a chain, like Primark or Pizza Hut, with five branches and three more on the way.
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"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.
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"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”.)
"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.
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"More than 55,000 men come to Paradise every year. Everyone – punter and prostitute – pays a 79 euro entry fee. That includes food (there is a buffet right by the Jacuzzi into which a naked middle-aged man is lowering himself) but the sex is extra. That’s negotiated between the men and the women and all of the money from that activity is kept by her. The going rate at Paradise is about 50 euros for half an hour, slightly cheaper than the hammam – another extra – which is offered at 53 euros for 30 minutes.
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"The law leaves [Saarbrücken’s mayor, Charlotte] 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.
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"Most [prostitutes] 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’.”
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"“People don’t employ prostitutes in Germany because it’s complicated,” says Beretin...
"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.
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"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.
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"All the sex workers I spoke to, in Britain and in Germany, told me it’s “not for everyone.” Kristina Marlen, the Berlin dominatrix, sees her work in terms of “celebrating the sexual part of the person” (though “sometimes people come in and I am like ‘Ew’. But I can work with them.”) She’s bisexual and currently in an open relationship with a woman. She thinks of prostitution as its own kind of “sexual orientation”.
"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”.
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