Germany’s experiment in legalising prostitution and taxing their income has failed, and a better approach is needed a group of lawmakers have said.
Laws attempting to regulate prostitution in Germany have reportedly failed abysmally according to opposition politicians in the country, who are now calling for the selling of sex to be once again made illegal.
Prostitution has been largely made legal in the country since the early 2000s, with the selling of sex in organised brothels regulated by local authorities in the hopes of maintaining decent working conditions for women.
However, according to a report by Die Welt, such efforts appear to have largely failed, with government statistics now showing that only a tiny fraction of prostitutes in the country are actually registered with the government, as is mandated by law.
Experts believe that somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 prostitutes are active in Germany, 95 per cent of whom are thought to be women.
Despite such a large figure, data released by the federal government to the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) show that only 23,743 are said to have been registered with authorities at the end of last year. The disparity of figures raises questions over whether sex workers prefer to keep either their profession, or their cash-in-hand earnings, private from the government.
“After many discussions with those affected and on-site visits, I am convinced that anything is better than what we have now,” CDU parliamentarian Dorothee Bär remarked regarding Germany’s decision to legalise the profession to protect women, an approach which many now view as having failed.
Bär went on to say that she is in favour of seeing the so-called “Nordic model” of legalising the selling of sex but keeping its purchase illegal as the best alternative to the current system.
“As a state, we cannot protect women in prostitution, we have to protect them from prostitution,” she explained. “There is only one answer: the paradigm shift in the form of a ban on buying sex, the decriminalization of prostitutes and the criminalization of clients.”
CDU politicians are not the only people unhappy with the status quo, with pro-migrant groups also complaining that the country’s current prostitution system puts foreign arrivals at risk in the country.
Official data appears to indicate that the majority of prostitutes operating in Germany are from abroad, with the plurality of sex workers registered with the German government being from Romania.
Illegal migrants appear to be some of the most vulnerable in terms of being forced into the sex industry, with German police uncovering an alleged sex trafficking operation in 2021.
According to law enforcement in the country, the criminal syndicate reportedly worked to smuggle migrants from Vietnam into Germany, before forcibly putting them to work in nail studios, massage parlours and “brothel-like operations”.