Germany Rethinks Legalized Prostitution

LUNA, 33, A SERBIAN PROSTITUTE WORKING IN GERMANY

With all the attention Germany's prostitution trade is receiving in light of next month's World Cup, it was a only a matter of time before this profession, legal in Germany, was called into question. Just how many prostitutes have actually registered with the government to receive benefits? And since prostitution was legalized there in 2002, has the country's trafficking record improved?

The answers: hardly any prostitutes have registered with the government, although doing so grants them health and retirement benefits, and even career training; of the estimated 400,000 prostitutes working Germany, only about 300-600 have registered according to a recent article in the Mercury News. And as far as reducing the amount of trafficked persons into Germany, the country was still ranked in the top 10 destination countries or "Very High" by the UN Report on Trafficking in Persons: Global Patterns released last month, causing some politicians to rethink their original support of legalization:

"I was with my party, the Greens, when we pushed for legalization," said Hiltrud Breyer, a German member of the European Parliament. "We really believed it would bring the profession out of the shadows and improve lives. I'm rethinking that position."

Breyer said that when she checked national statistics recently only 300 to 600 taxpayers listed their jobs as prostitute. But union officials say they work with tens of thousands of prostitutes and that they think the government estimate of 400,000 is about right.

It's not just missing tax revenue that's worrisome, Breyer said. Because prostitution is legal, police don't investigate it as aggressively as they once did, and that's allowed forced prostitution to thrive, she thinks.

Additionally, the fact that prostitution is legal also cuts down on brothel raids that would seek and find trafficking victims:

"The idea behind the change in legislation was, I believe, that prostitutes should be able to leave the 'gray zone' of semi-illegality and be registered and have social insurance like other professions," [Anne Fitzgerald, who works with Solidarity With Women in Distress] said. "Reality has since shown that very few prostitutes are officially registered and the police have practically no way of justifying brothel raids, so that now fewer victims of trafficking are actually discovered."