Prostitution in Germany

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Prostitution in Germany is legal and widespread. In 2002, the government changed the law in an effort to improve the legal situation of prostitutes. However, the social stigmatization of prostitutes persists, forcing most prostitutes to lead a double life. Authorities consider the common exploitation of women from Eastern Europe to be the main problem associated with the occupation.

Contents 1 Forms and extent of prostitution 2 Legal situation 3 History 3.1 Law of 2002 3.2 Football World Cup 2006 4 Politics 5 Trafficking in women 6 High profile crimes and scandals 7 References 8 Sources and external links

[edit] Forms and extent of prostitution

Studies in the early 1990s estimated that about 50,000 - 200,000 women and some men worked as prostitutes in Germany.^[1] The prostitutes' organization HYDRA puts the number at 400,000, and this is the number typically quoted in the press today. From other studies, it is estimated that between 10% and 30% of the male adult population have had experiences with prostitutes.

Prostitution for the procurement of narcotics. In every major German city there are prostitutes who offer their services to procure drugs. This often takes place near the main railway stations, while the act usually takes place in the customer's car or in a nearby rented room. These prostitutes are the most desperate, often underage, and their services are generally the cheapest. Pimps and brothel owners try to avoid drug-addicted prostitutes, as they are inclined to spend their earnings solely or primarily on drugs. Other prostitutes tend to look down on them as well, because they are considered as lowering the market prices.

Street prostitution. (Straßenstrich) Regular street prostitution is often quite well organized and controlled by pimps. Some prostitutes have a nearby caravan, others use the customer's car, still others use hotel rooms. With recent economic problems, in some large cities "wild" street prostitution has started to appear: areas where women work temporarily out of short-term financial need.

Eros centers. (Bordell, Laufhaus) An eros center is a house or street (Laufstraße) where women can rent small one-room apartments for some 80-150 Euro per day. They then solicit customers from the open door or from behind a window. Prices are normally set by the prostitutes; they start at 30-50 Euros for short-time sex. The money is not shared with the brothel owner. Security and meals are provided by the owner. The women may even live in their rooms, but most do not. Minors, and women not working in the eros center are not allowed to enter. Eros centers exist in almost all larger German cities. The most famous is the Herbertstraße near the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. The largest brothel in Europe is the eros center Pascha in Cologne, a 12 story building with some 120 rooms for rent and several bars.

Escort services. (Begleitagenturen) Escort services, where the customer calls to have a woman meet him at home or at a hotel for sexual services, exist in Germany as well, but are not nearly as prevalent as in the U.S.

Bars. In bars, women try to induce men to buy expensive drinks along with the sexual services. Sex usually takes place in a separate but attached building. Prices are mostly set by the bar owner, and the money is shared between the owner and the prostitute.

Apartment prostitution. (Wohnungspuffs) There are many of these advertised in the daily newspapers. Sometime run by a single woman, sometimes by a group of roommates and sometimes as safehouses for traffickers, with the women being moved around on a weekly basis.

Partytreffs and Pauschalclubs are a variation on partner-swapping swing clubs with (sometimes, but not always) paid prostitutes in attendance, as well as 'amateur' women and couples. Single men pay a flat-rate entrance charge of about 80 to 120 euros, which includes food, drink and unlimited sex sessions, with the added twist that these are performed in the open in full view of all the guests. Women normally pay a low or zero entrance charge.

Sauna clubs or FKK clubs. Typically, these are houses with swimming pool and sauna in the basement, a large meeting room on the first floor and bedrooms on the second floor. Women are typically nude or topless, men wear robes or towels. Men and women often pay the same entrance fee, from 35 to 65 euros, including use of all facilities, food and drinks. The women keep all money they receive from customers; prices are set by the club's owner, typically from 25 to 100 euro for a 20 to 60 minute session. In some clubs, the money is shared between prostitute and owner. This form of prostitution, which was mentioned in the rationale of the recent prostitution law as providing good working conditions for the women, exists sporadically all over Germany, but mainly in the Ruhrgebiet and in the area around Frankfurt am Main. Among the largest clubs of this type was Atlantis, located north of Frankfurt and closed after a police raid in 2004, and Artemis in Berlin, opened in the fall of 2005. (Most public saunas in Germany have nothing to do with sex work of any kind, and customers that mistake them for sex clubs can get in serious trouble.)

Sexual services for the disabled. The agency Sensis in Wiesbaden connects prostitutes with disabled customers. Nina de Vries somewhat controversially provides sexual services to severely mentally disabled men and has been repeatedly covered in the media.

Male prostitutes. A comparatively small number of males offer sexual services to females, usually in the form of escort services, meeting in hotels. The vast majority of male prostitutes serve male clients, typically but not exlusively in the street prostitution scene to procure drugs.

Brothels of all kinds advertise for sex workers in the weekly female-orientated magazine Heim und Welt.^[2]

[edit] Legal situation

Prostitution is legal in Germany, though it doesn't quite have the same status as a regular occupation. Income from prostitution is taxed at a slightly higher rate than income from other occupations. Prostitutes even have to charge VAT for their services, to be paid to the tax office. In practice, prostitution is a cash business, and taxes are almost never paid and rarely enforced.

Prostitutes and brothels are technically not allowed to advertise but that prohibition is not enforced. Many newspapers carry daily ads for brothels and for women working out of apartments. Many have websites on the Internet. In addition, sex shops and newsstands sell magazines specializing in advertisements of prostitutes ("Happy Weekend", "St Pauli Nachrichten", "Sexy" and many more).

Every city has the right to zone off certain areas where prostitution is not allowed (Sperrbezirk). The various cities handle this very differently. In Munich, street prostitution is forbidden almost everywhere within the city limits, in Berlin it is allowed everywhere, and Hamburg allows street prostitution near the Reeperbahn during certain times of the day. In most smaller cities, the immediate city center as well as residential areas are declared off-limits.

The only city in Germany with an explicit prostitution tax is Cologne. It was initiated early in 2004 by the city council ruled by a coalition of the conservative CDU and the leftist Greens. This tax applies to striptease, peep shows, porn cinemas, sex fairs, and prostitution. In the case of prostitution, the tax amounts to 150 euros per month and working prostitute, to be paid by brothel owners (the eros center Geestemünder Straße owned by the city is exempt). Containment of prostitution was one explicitly stated goal of the tax.

Foreign women from most countries can obtain a three-month tourist visa for Germany without problems. Many of them then work in prostitution. This is technically illegal, as the tourist visa does not include a work permit.

Pimping, admitting persons under the age of eighteen to a brothel, and affecting persons under the age of twenty-one to take up prostitution are illegal. The regular age of consent (sixteen) applies to prostitutes (i.e., the client acts illegally if the prostitute is under 16). To combat sex tourism, this age of consent applies to all people Germans have sex with, even when these Germans are travelling abroad.

Senior services: The "Pascha" in the western city of Cologne has introduced reduced rates for sex sessions for clients aged 66 and above -- provided they can prove they are old enough.

"All clients need to do is show us some proof of age," said a spokesman for the brothel's managing director Armin Lobscheid. "A 'normal session' costs 50 euros with us -- and we're now paying 50 percent of that for these older guests."

"We don't earn as much money, but we're establishing ourselves across a broader range of age groups," he added.

After testing the water with reductions for senior citizens once a week, the Pascha decided earlier this month to offer 50 percent off sex services between midday and 5 p.m every day.

"There's been plenty of demand and people have certainly been taking advantage of the offer," the spokesman said. "Older folks are more active than you think."

The brothel's Web site is keen to stress this point.

"Life begins at 66!" it says in an advert for its "senior citizens afternoon" next to a picture of a motorcycle rider.

[edit] History

Prostitution in the area of today's Germany has been described since the middle ages. Emperor Sigismund (1368-1437) thanked the city of Konstanz in writing for providing some 1,500 prostitutes for the Council of Constance which took place from 1414 to 1418.

Prostitution was legalised and regulated in Germany in the 1920s to control sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Prostitutes had to be registered with local health authorities and submit to regular STD tests.

During the Nazi era, street prostitutes were seen as degenerate and were often sent to concentration camps. Between 1942 and 1945, ten such camps, including Auschwitz, contained brothels, mainly used to reward cooperative inmates.^[3] Not only prostitutes were forced to work there.

After World War II, the country was divided into East Germany and West Germany. In East Germany, as in all countries of the communist Eastern Block, prostitution was illegal and according to the official position it didn't exist. However there were high-class prostitutes working in the hotels of East Berlin and the other major cities, mainly targeting Western visitors; the Stasi employed some of these for spying purposes. Street walkers and female taxi drivers were available for the pleasure of visiting Westerners, too.

In West Germany, the registration and testing requirements remained in place but were handled quite differently in the various regions of the country. In Bavaria, in addition to scheduled STD check-ups regular HIV tests were required since 1987, but this was an exception. Many prostitutes did not submit to these tests, avoiding the registration. A study in 1992 found that only 2.5% of the tested prostitutes had a disease, a rate much lower than the one among comparable non-prostitutes.^[1] The compulsory registration and testing was abandoned in 2001. Since then, anonymous, free and voluntary health testing has been made available to everyone, including illegal immigrants. Many brothel operators require them.

[edit] Law of 2002

Anything done in the "furtherance of prostitution" (Förderung der Prostitution) remained a crime until 2001, even after the extensive criminal law reforms of 1973. This put the operators of brothels in constant legal danger. Most brothels were therefore run as a bar with an attached but legally separate room rental. However, many municipalies built, ran and profited from high rise or townhouse-style high-rent Dirnenwohnheime (above described under "eros centers"), to keep street prostitution and pimping under control. These are now mostly privatized and operate as Eros Centers.

The highest courts of Germany have repeatedly ruled that prostitution is against morality (verstößt gegen die guten Sitten), with several legal consequences. Any contract that is considered immoral is null and void, so a prostitute could not sue for payment -- thus her dependency on gang structures that can enforce payment through violent means was heightened. Prostitutes working out of their apartment could lose their lease. Prostitutes had difficulties entering the German system of health care and social security because of their occupation. Finally, bars and inns could be denied a license if prostitution took place on their premises.

In 1999, Felicitas Weigmann lost the license for her Berlin cafe Psst! which was being used to initiate contacts between customers and prostitutes and had an attached room-rental also owned by Weigmann. She sued the city, arguing that society's position had changed and prostitution no longer qualified as offending good morals. The judge conducted an extensive investigation and solicited a large number of opinions; eventually he agreed with Weigmann's claim. The prostitution law of 2002 reaffirmed this position.

In 2002 a one page law sponsored by the Green Party was passed by parliament. It removed the general prohibition on furthering prostitution and allowed prostitutes to obtain regular work contracts. The law's rationale stated that prostitution should not anymore be considered as immoral. The law has been largely criticized as half-hearted and not very effective.^[4]

Early in 2005, English media reported that a woman refusing to take a job as a prostitute might have her unemployment benefits reduced or removed altogether [1]. A similar story appeared in mid-2003; a woman received a job offer through a private employment agency. In this case however, the agency apologized for the mistake, stating that a request for a prostitute would normally have been rejected, but the client mislead them, describing the position as "a female barkeeper". To date, there have been no reported cases of women actually losing benefits in such a case, and the employment agencies have stated that women would not be made to work in prostitution. ^[5]

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[edit] Football World Cup 2006

Officials speculated that up to 40,000 illegal prostitutes, mainly from Eastern European countries, might enter Germany for the Football (Soccer) World Cup, to be held in Germany in the summer of 2006. Women and church groups were planning a "Red card to forced prostitution" campaign with the aim of alerting World Cup visitors to the existence of forced prostitution. They asked for support from the national football team and the national football organization but were initially rebuffed. [2] [3] In March 2006 the president of the German football federation turned around and agreed to support a campaign named "Final Whistle -- Stop Forced Prostitution". [4] The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), The Nordic Council and Amnesty International have also expressed concern that there will be an increase in the trafficking of women and forced prostitution up to and during the World Cup. [5] [6] [7] [8] On June 30, 2006, the New York Times reported that the expected increase in prostitution activity did not take place.^[6]

Also in March 2006 the unrelated campaign "Responsible John. Prostitution without compulsion and violence" [9] was started by the government of Berlin. [10] It provides a list of signs of forced prostitution and urges prostitutes' customers to call a hotline if they spot one of those signs.

In April 2006, an advertisement for the Pascha brothel in Cologne that featured a several storey image of a semi-naked woman with the flags of FIFA World Cup countries sparked outrage after Muslims were offended by the inclusion of the Saudi Arabian and Iranian flags. The Pascha brothel's owner, Armin Lobscheid, said a group of Muslims had threatened violence over the advert, and blacked out the two flags. However, the Tunisian flag that features the Muslim crescent remained on the advert.

[edit] Politics

The coalition of Social Democrats and the Green Party that ruled until late 2005 attempted to improve the legal situation of prostitutes in the years 2000-2003. These efforts have been criticized as inadequate by prostitutes' organizations such as HYDRA, which lobby for full normality of the occupation and the elimination of all mention of prostitution from the legal code. The conservative parties in the Bundestag, while supporting the goal of giving prostitutes access to the social security and health care system, have opposed the new law because they want to retain the "offending good morals" status.

The churches run several support groups for prostitutes. These generally favor attempts to remove stigmatization and improve the legal situation of prostitutes, but they retain the long term goal of a world without prostitution and encourage all prostitutes to quit.

Alice Schwarzer and her branch of feminism rejects all prostitution as inherently oppressive and abusive; they favor a law like that in Sweden, where the ruling Social Democrats outlawed the buying of sexual services but not their selling.

[edit] Trafficking in women

See also: Trafficking in human beings

The trafficking in women from Eastern Europe is often organized by gangs from that same region. (The BKA, the German equivalent to the FBI, reported in 2003 that 60% of the suspects in trafficking cases were foreigners, with another 8% being foreign born Germans.^[7]) Most of the women know from the start that they are going to work in prostitution even though they often don't know about the working conditions; some others hope for a job as waitress or au-pair; some are simply abducted. Once in Germany, their passports are taken away and they are informed that they now have to work off the cost of the trip. Sometimes they are sold to pimps or bar owners, who then make them work off the purchase price. They work in bars, apartments or as escorts and have to hand over the better part of their earnings. Some women reconcile themselves with this situation, as they still make much more than they could at home; others rebel and are threatened or abused. They are often told that the police have been paid off and will not help them, which is false. They are also threatened with harm to their families at home.

This illegal slave trade is a major focus of police work in Germany, yet it remains prevalent. Women are often unwilling to testify against their oppressors: the only incentive they have is the permission to remain in the country until the end of the trial (with the hope of finding a husband during that time), rather than being deported immediately.

[edit] High profile crimes and scandals

The 1957 murder of prostitute Rosemarie Nitribitt in Frankfurt drew great media attention in postwar Germany. The circumstances of her death have remained largely obscure to date. Police investigations turned up no substantial leads other than a prime suspect who was later acquitted due to reasonable doubt. Moreover, several high-profile, respectable citizens turned out to have been among her customers, a fact on which the media based insinuations that higher social circles were attempting to cover up and obstruct the search for the real murderer. Two movies inspired by the scandal have been made.

There was a murder of six persons in a brothel in Frankfurt am Main in 1994. The Hungarian couple managing the place as well as four Russian prostitutes were strangled with electric cables. The case was resolved soon after: it was a robbery gone bad, carried out by the boyfriend of a woman who had worked there.

In 2003, German CDU politician Michel Friedman, popular TV talk show host and then assistant chairman of the German Jewish community, became embroiled in an investigation of trafficking women. He had been a client of several escort prostitutes from Eastern Europe who testified that he had repeatedly taken and offered cocaine. After receiving a fine for the drug charge, he resigned from all posts.

Also in 2003, well-known artist and art professor Jörg Immendorff was caught in the luxury suite of a Düsseldorf hotel with seven prostitutes (and four more on their way) and some cocaine. He received 11 months on probation and a fine for the drug charges. He attempted to explain his actions by his "orientalism" and his terminal illness.

These cases were only deemed noteworthy because they involved murder and drug trafficking. Whore-mongering by public figures and celebrities is rarely exposed in the public and largely ignored by the media. Name pop bands have performed at the Cologne Pasha brothel's disco.

[edit] References

1. ^ ^{a b} B. Leopold, E. Steffan, N. Paul: Dokumentation zur rechtlichen und sozialen Situation von Prostitutierten in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Schriftenreihe des Bundesministeriums für Frauen und Jugend, Band 15, 1993. (German)
2. ^ Helmut Höge über Zielgruppentäuschung, taz 25 February 2003.
3. ^ Exhibition on Sex Slavery Under the Nazis to Open in Germany. Deutsche Welle, 14 January 2007
4. ^ Horizontales Gewerbe noch lange nicht legal, taz, 21 October 2006
5. ^ Snopes Debunking the claim that "Women in Germany face the loss of unemployment benefits if they decline to accept work in brothels."
6. ^ "World Cup Brings Little Pleasure to German Brothels", New York Times, June 30, 2006.
7. ^ Reports on human trafficking, by the BKA, in German

[edit] Sources and external links

• B. Leopold, E. Steffan, N. Paul: Dokumentation zur rechtlichen und sozialen Situation von Prostitutierten in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Schriftenreihe des Bundesministeriums für Frauen und Jugend, Band 15, 1993. (German)
• HYDRA, support organization for prostitutes, also has the text of the new prostitution law
• Scathing criticism of the new prostitution law, by Doña Carmen, a support group for foreign prostitutes working in Germany (German)
• Feministinnen gegen Prostitution, criticism of the new prostitution law from a feminist perspective
• Bundesverband Sexuelle Dienstleistung e.V., association of brothel operators.
• Freiersein, information site for prostitution customers, run by prostitutes' support organizations. Has a section with "10 rules for fair play" outlining proper behavior of customers.
• Reports on human trafficking, by the BKA, the German equivalent to the FBI, in German
• Discussion forums on prostitution in Germany: 21orover.com (English), Römerforum (German), bw7.com (German), Rheinforum (German), OWLforum (German), Sachsenforum (German) World Sex Guide, International Sex Guide, Bordellcommunity (German), Hurenmagazin (German), Lusthaus.com (German), Verkehrsberichte-Forum(German)
• Madonna For the welfare and rights of prostitutes in Germany]