“Germany Has Turned Into A Giant Brothel”

In sharp contrast with the Swedes:

[In 2001, Germany’s Social Democrats and Greens] 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 liberalization 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 stigmatizing not the prostitutes but the men who paid them, even putting them in jail, the Swedes hoped to come close to eliminating prostitution.

The results?

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.

Update from a reader:

You should link to sources that are skeptical of the Swedish model bullshit. Start here and go on to the Australian Prostitution Licensing Authority’s analysis of the Swedish model. No one outside of radical circles and the Swedish government believes their model is working. In the meantime, charges of trafficking in Germany have fallen in half in the last ten years.

Another:

Your reader mentioned the Queensland Prostitution Licensing Authority analysis; if you’d like to read, link, or download a copy of that, the pdf is here. If you would rather just read a synopsis, that would be here.

(Photo: Exterior of a Frankfurt brothel by Chris Pirillo)