Thank you for inviting me here to Vancouver. Thank you to all the organizations that have made this possible, especially Suzanne Jay, who invited me and organized everything.
Prostitution has always been legal in Germany, except a short period of time in the early 20th century. Germany instituted a law in 2002 that tried to make out of prostitution a job as any other. The politicians thought, that it wasn´t prostitution itself that was the problem, but the discrimination of the women by the society and the lack of rights they had. Considering the problem from this perspective, they wanted to strengthen the women as best as possible. (They said): Prostitution should not be seen any more as something “against the good morals“, but as a job. For now on, the women were considered as workers, “sex workers.” And if they are workers, they should have the same rights as any other worker that run a business or is employed somewhere, like having a social security or if their rights are not respected, they should have the right to enforce a claim by legal action. The state didn´t want to put any regulations concerning the sex practices. They said that nobody can say how people should have sex. As they run a business, they are also allowed to make publicity for it. So the new law cancelled the restriction of promoting prostitution.
The total revenue is 14.6 billion Euros with 3500 registered brothels. This are the official numbers. They are many apartment brothels that are not registered.
The growth of demand: 15 years ago it was estimated that 400,000 women were in prostitution. Today many police officers say that the number has increased by at least 30%.
infections that spread from their genitals down their legs.
We observe a reduction in the rate of pay for women: 30 Euros for sexual intercourse, while they must pay around 160 Euros for a room and 25,– Euro taxes per day; So they have to serve 6 men before starting earning money. In the streets it starts as low as 5 Euros.
The working conditions have become disastrous. They developed “Verrichtungsboxen”, which means “things that are getting done in a box,” like cow boxes, without water, toilets, nothing.
Or brothels in a garage.
You have publicity everywhere. The official tourist guide of Munich runs promos for brothels.
A guided tour of brothels for new students in Berlin is offered.
Or here, it was 2 weeks ago in Frankfurt: an open house evening in the red light district. Even knowing that the red light district is in the hands of the Hells Angels, so an organized crime group, the townspeople came to celebrate the day.
Violence against women became a structural violence, it means that society and the institutions (the political, educational, executive and judicative authority) are not questioning it anymore. It is internalized.
Here in my hometown, also 2 weeks ago: this is a normal clothing shop that had the idea to make publicity like this. Prostitution affects everybody, not only women in prostitution.
The police inspectors say themselves that they feel helpless. Manfred Paulus, a criminal inspector who worked for years in this field says that Germany with this law became an Eldorado for traffickers, pimps and brothel owners. The women who come from abroad and work in the red light district don´t get to know the Germany that the Germans know and appreciate. No, they are prisoners of a parallel society that is highly criminal.
The law from 2002 didn´t help for preventing trafficking at all: in 2000, they were 151 persons condemned (does this mean convicted in court?) for trafficking, in 2011 only 32. The police recorded 636 cases of trafficked women in 2011, 3 times less than 10 years before. 13 of them were younger than 14 years old, 77 were under 18. The police complain that they have just little power to intervene, because without serious proof, they can not enter the brothels. Also, the legal proceedings depend on the women´s statement. Very often they are too afraid to give testimony and the procedures get stopped.
The law that forbids pimping was easy to bypass, they simply became hoteliers renting rooms to the sex workers.
It is estimated that 1.2 million men buy sex every day. 18% are regular consumer, 80% have been in a brothel.
Blasen ohne Gummi bis zum Finale – Blowjob without condom and with swallowing the sperma.
Männerüberschuss) Ejaculating in the face.
GS = Gruppensex – Group Sex.
tbl, = tabulos, ALLES ist erlaubt – without taboo, everything is allowed.
ZA = Zungenanal (am / im Hintereingang lecken) – lick the anus.
The sexbuyers want distraction. Women are called “Frischfleisch”, it means: fresh meat. More than half of the prostituted women don´t have a fixed residence but are shipped from one town to the other. Sometimes, they don´t even know in which town they are. The women live in the brothels, eat and sleep in the same room they serve the sex buyers. They sleep approximately 5 hours a day. The rest of the time, they have to be “ready” for the sex buyers. Here is an advertisement announcing new girls.
I was asked by the World Health Organization to speak at the conference in Dublin next year about the mental health situation of prostituted women in Germany. What can I say? What is the mental health situation of a women that is reduced to a piece of meat? They are totally destroyed. A woman that is working in an exit program for prostituted women told me that there are just little (very few) women going out of prostitution. They will stay until they break down physically. It is just a matter of time. I asked myself, why it is like this? Because their will has been broken. They are not existing anymore as a person that has an identity and a future they can imagine for themselves. We are talking here about complex traumatisation.
The German model is producing hell on earth. The lives and the rights of those women are sacrificed, but for what? Are they defending our democracy? Is it to protect our land from invasions or terrorism? No, those women are sacrificed so that some men can have sex whenever they want and with whom they want. And this is the problem. We have to focus on the sex buyer.
The sex buyer is a social construction, it is not a fate. The numbers all over the world prove it: In England, you have 7% of the men who are sex buyers, in Spain 39%, 37% in Japan, 73% in Thailand… It is a result of the unequal gender education. Prostitution does not resolve men´s problem, it is increasing their fear of entering into an equal relationship to women.
When we talk about prostitution, we have to think about what kind of a society we want, not only about harm reduction. We need a new generation of men that does not resort to sexual exploitation and domination of women to define itself.  It is false to think that male sexuality is not controllable. Men have to learn a new way to deal with frustration.
Normalizing prostitution means cementing the inequality between men and women and accepting violence against women. And this concerns all of us, women and men. That´s why, also Germany, needs the Swedish model.
Pictures from Manuela Schon from her Artikel: „Deutschland ist das Bordell Europas und wir sollten uns dafür schämen“. 14.05.2016.