World Sex Sells News: 2006: Jan-March

1st March

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Spain seeks solutions to prostitution

Based on a biased article from Khaleej Times

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.