 Is prostitution a form of slavery and sexual violence, a job like any other,
or just an unavoidable human phenomenon?
A Europe-wide debate has reached Spain, dubbed “Europe’s brothel”, where a
parliamentary commission has been established to study possible approaches
to prostitution after the northeastern region of Catalonia made
controversial plans to regulate it. Prostitution is booming in Spain, where
up to 400,000 women are estimated to be sex workers. A 2003 study said a
quarter of men aged between 18 and 49 years had bought their services.
Spain has about 1,000 roadside brothels known as “clubs”, but prostitutes
also look for clients on the streets, in parks, even parking lots and
industrial areas.
The proliferation of prostitution in recent years has led to a situation
in which we can find it everywhere, said Catalan regional interior
minister Montserrat Tura.
Voluntary prostitution is not a crime in Spain, but pimping and coercion
are.
Spain’s relatively liberal prostitution laws and a late 1990s economic boom
have helped to turn it into one of the top international centres for the
trade, drawing prostitutes and sex tourists, according to press reports.
Nobody knows how much money the trade turns, but the sum amounts to billions
of euros annually.
Because prostitution is not illegal per se, Madrid authorities trying to
reduce it have found no other way than making traffic police harass
motorists who pick up prostitutes in certain neighbourhoods and the Casa de
Campo Park.
Such measures usually just prompt prostitutes to move elsewhere, and
Catalonia now intends to try a novel approach.
The region is making plans to remove prostitutes from the streets to
indoors, turning them into businesswomen running their own premises or
hiring rooms.
The arrangement would increase prostitutes’ independence from pimps and
allow the authorities to watch over the hygiene and other conditions in
brothels, the rationale goes.
I would also like a world without prostitution, said Tura, who has
promoted the plan. But if we insist on an extreme debate about its total
abolition, we will end up doing nothing.
Police in the Catalan capital Barcelona have already started imposing fines
of up to 750 euros (890 dollars) on prostitutes or their clients in an
attempt to chase them from the streets.
Yet the Woman’s Institute, an organ dependent on the central government,
blasted the Catalan plan, saying prostitution was a “degrading” practice
“incompatible with democratic values” and that Catalonia did not have the
authority to regulate it independently.
Feminists and trade unions are divided between the Dutch approach of clearly
legalizing prostitution and the Swedish approach of trying to eliminate it
by penalizing the clients.
Those supporting legalization say prostitutes have the right to do what they
like with their bodies, in the same way as a woman may decide to have an
abortion.
Opponents say prostitution is based on the same kind of disregard for women
as domestic violence. One of the opponents’ main arguments is that around
80% of prostitutes working in Spain are immigrants, many of them illegal,
from Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa.There is little doubt that
many of the foreign prostitutes have been coerced into the trade by
criminals who have lured them to Spain with false promises of other jobs. In
2004, police freed 1,700 women who had been forced to work as prostitutes in
brothels, flats or on the street.
Yet there is also evidence that some immigrant prostitutes practice the
trade voluntarily to multiply their meagre incomes as house servants and to
send money to their families at home. I don’t like this life, I would
prefer to clean the streets, but how much would I then earn? one Madrid
prostitute said.
Prostitutes dislike the Catalan plan, which, they say would diminish their
independence instead of increasing it. On the street, we are free to
choose the client and to agree on the time and price, a Barcelona
prostitute said. But indoors, prostitutes would be “coerced or watched over”
by the owners of the premises, she added.
The problem of prostitution
has not been solved anywhere over thousands
of years, historian Henry Kamen observed. It will not be easy to
reach a consensus, but the serious situation in which thousands of women
find themselves makes it necessary to take decisions soon, the daily El
Pais concluded.
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