Prostitution in Germany
Drugs, violence, fatal intimidation: Women sell their bodies for as little as €30 in Germany, while others reap the profits of the transaction. DW met one woman who described her experience as a former sex trade worker.
On most nights, she would take ten or twelve, sometimes as many as fourteen men up to her room, where she would endure until three in the morning.
“That’s all I could bear,” Julia told DW, using the name that her clients call her by.
Other women, she said, the ones that worked all night and catered for clients’ more unusual demands would get through the long hours on a cocktail of alcohol and drugs.
DW is unable to verify the woman’s story independently. But it tallies with accounts by social workers and police acquainted with the sex industry. Julia also showed DW pictures from her time as a sex worker. She asked that they be withheld, along with her real name.
First on the street, then in private homes, in brothels and bars in Switzerland, France, Greece and finally in Germany, Julia spent a decade selling her body — until March 10 of this year, a day she’s unlikely to forget: “The client gave me €100 ($116) for the hour, everything normal. And that was it.”
Roughly €4,000 for a room in a brothel
It was her last client, her last day as a sex worker, the last day of so many dominated by the constant worry that she might not be able to make enough money to pay the €130 daily rent for the room in the brothel where she worked and lived. Every evening, regardless of whether she was sick, regardless of whether it was a good night or bad, she had to hand over the money, totaling almost €4,000 every month.
That day was also the last in the endless cycle of long nights and short days, the forced smiles and faked cheerfulness.
When Julia decided to enter the sex industry in her early twenties, she knew it might not be easy, she told DW. “But it was a lot harder than I expected.”
She had opted for sex work “because I wanted a better life for my children.” She had given birth to her first of two children when she was fourteen and left school when she was still in her teens.
An old, slightly grainy picture on her cell phone shows a woman with peroxide blond hair, high heels and gaudy underwear, posing for the camera in a brightly illuminated hallway.
Julia struggled to explain why she kept the photos. “I was young,” she said, almost apologetically.
It’s hard to reconcile the old photos with the woman whom DW met on a hot day in late May in a counseling center for sex workers in Stuttgart, an industrial town in southern Germany. Perched on a couch, her makeup discreet, her plain plaid shirt buttoned up, she spoke eloquently and calmly about her time as a sex worker and her decision to leave the profession.
No welfare, maybe a bus ticket
In the end, Julia realized that despite working most nights, she was unable to put any money aside for herself and her two sons. She told DW about the panic attacks that started creeping up on her almost every day a few months ago. “Sometimes, I have to take Xanax,” she said, referring to an anti-anxiety drug.
Panic attacks, depression and insomnia are usual symptoms of the trade, according to Sabine Constabel. She is the head of Sisters, an organization that aims to help women leave the sex trade. Sisters helps them find a place to live and pays for their expenses until they can stand on their own feet. Women like Julia don’t qualify for welfare payments from the German state, given that they never paid taxes.
“At the most, they’ll get a bus ticket back home,” Constabel said.
Constabel is convinced that sex work is nothing else than rape. It’s a word she keeps on repeating. “The trade commodifies women. They’re nothing more than dirt.”
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