I held the following speech at the conference in celebration of ten years of sex purchase law in Norway on June 15th in Oslo at an event organized by Kvinnegruppa Ottar. You can see a video of the speech here. For me, as an activist coming from Germany, a country were prostitution is very normalized and partially part of the national identity, it is always both educational and encouraging to come together with you.
Today I want to tell you something about the current situation of prostitution in my country in general and about the situation for us as activists in particular. Let me start by telling you that it is a popular misconception that prostitution was legalized in Germany in the year of The truth is: The buying of sex has been legal in Germany for centuries.
There is also a long tradition of the legal keeping of brothels. The first red light districts with their concentration of brothels in one part of a city evolved in the middle of the nineteenth century. While consuming prostitution and profiting out of it remains legal up until today, Germany too has a long tradition of going after the women in the trade.
Until the s prostituted women were forced to frequent mandatory health checks — explicitely to protect the consumers — and up until today there are zoning laws that only allow prostitution in certain areas: Women who are prostituted outside these zones are criminalized with fines, and, if they are not able to pay them, will end up in jail.
So what was the prostitution law of all about? On the one hand it was an attempt to allow women in prostitution to be regular employees and thus get access to employment protection rights, such as unemployment benefits or entitlement to a pension. One could also cynically say, that this possibilty was in reality an attempt to get the pimps to pay money into the social welfare system, given the fact that most court trials against brothel keepers since are centered around tax and social benefit fraud.
