She was not allowed to say no to anything
Der Spiegel reports that decriminalization hasn’t made everything great for sex workers.
Alina ran away from poverty and abuse in Romania when she was 22.
Through a friend’s new boyfriend, she heard about the possibilities available in Germany. She learned that a prostitute could easily earn €900 ($1,170) a month there.
Alina began thinking about the idea. Anything seemed better than Sânandrei. “I thought I’d have my own room, a bathroom and not too many customers,” she says.
So she went to Berlin, to a brothel near the airport elegantly called Airport Muschis (“Airport Pussies”).
The brothel specialized in flat-rate sex. For €100 ($129), a customer could have sex for as long and as often as he wanted.
It all went very quickly, says Alina. There were other Romanians there who knew the man who had brought them there. She was told to hand over her clothes and was given revealing lingerie to wear instead. Only a few hours after her arrival, she was expected to greet her first customers. She says that when she wasn’t nice enough to the clients, the Romanians reduced her wages.
The Berlin customers paid their fee at the entrance. Many took drugs to improve sexual performance and could last all night. A line often formed outside Alina’s room. She says that she eventually stopped counting how many men got into her bed. “I blocked it out,” she says. “There were so many, every day.”
Alina says that she and the other women were required to pay the pimps €800 a week. She shared a bed in a sleeping room with three other women. There was no other furniture. All she saw of Germany was the Esso gas station around the corner, where she was allowed to go to buy cigarettes and snacks, but only in the company of a guard. The rest of the time, says Alina, she was kept locked up in the club.
Prosecutors learned that the women in the club had to offer vaginal, oral and anal sex, and serve several men at the same time in so-called gangbang sessions. The men didn’t always use condoms. “I was not allowed to say no to anything,” says Alina. During menstruation, she would insert sponges into her vagina so that the customers wouldn’t notice.
The pimps didn’t beat her, they simply threatened her family. That was enough.
Alina’s situation is not unusual.
Aid organizations and experts estimate that there are up to 200,000 working prostitutes in the country. According to various studies, including one by the European Network for HIV/STI Prevention and Health Promotion among Migrant Sex Workers (TAMPEP), 65 to 80 percent of the girls and women come from abroad. Most are from Romania and Bulgaria.
The police can do little for women like Alina. The pimps were prepared for raids, says Alina, and they used to boast that they knew police officers. “They knew when a raid was about to happen,” says Alina, which is why she never dared to confide in a police officer.
The pimps told the girls exactly what to tell the police. They should say that they were surfing the web back home in Bulgaria or Romania and discovered that it was possible to make good money by working in a German brothel. Then, they had simply bought themselves a bus ticket and turned up at the club one day, entirely on their own.
They “chose” to do it, see? And they’re fabulously happy with it having “chosen” it.
Uh huh.
Sorry – off topic but you might be interested in this story that the Willamette Week published in the last issue.
http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-25207-gamerfate.html
When you can’t say ‘no’, then your ‘yes’ has no meaning.
These poor girls. On your facebook post, there are people arguing that prostitution will happen ‘anyway’ so it is better to legalize it. I felt so depressed that I logged out. Prostitution will happen ‘anyway’? You mean, men will continue to feel entitled to use a woman’s body like a toilet. And we’re not supposed to protest against it, to try to make the world a little bit better?
I read a book by a sex worker working a legal brothel in Nevada. Conditions there were relatively humane, but even there, where workers theoretically have the right to refuse clients, the brothel owners would give free passes to friends and business associates, and the workers had to accept the holders of those passes or risk being fired. I can’t recall whether the owners compensated them for their time or not.
Shan Dynasty @ #2
“When you can’t say ‘no’, then your ‘yes’ has no meaning.”
Careful now. You’re going to start sounding like Andrea Dworkin, and every one knows that she was anti-sex because she acknowledged that unless you are free to say no to sex, you cannot be considered truly free to say yes.
I agree with you, of course, but it’s surprising how that statement, so not radical in its meaning has been the basis of the “all sex is rape” canard thrown at feminists for the last 40 yrs.
I’m not denying that this is happening, and I’m not disputing that it is bad–really bad. But I’m not sure that it is entirely on point. The problem described in the article isn’t prostitution per-se, the problem is that the German government seems unwilling to enforce the laws against slavery (I’m assuming that slavery is illegal in Germany). And at the airport, no less.
A government is an organization that controls territory. That’s the *definition* of a government. In the early days, the important territory was croplands. Since the industrial revolution, the important territory has been civil and industrial infrastructure. An airport is a first-class example of the kind of territory that a modern government controls.
If the government of Germany isn’t willing to enforce its own laws against slavery at the airport, then…WTF?
Were conditions of trafficked women any better when THEY were subject to arrest? Would they be any less victims if they were laboring in a factory, or a coal-mine?
Decriminalization may have had the effect of providing a more visible ‘cover’ for slavery. But slavery is still the primary issue. And, apparently, so long as ‘sex’ is involved, there is a profound lack of cultural will to take action to protect human rights. That failure of care, of moral responsibility, is the problem that changed laws doesn’t seem to affect.