Sanchez says the practice "enslaves" women.

The unregulated prostitution industry was decriminalised in Spain in 1995.

So long as paid sex services don't take place in public places and the sex worker is offering their services of their own free will, no law is broken.

Pimping, or acting as a proxy between a sex worker and a potential client is illegal.

By 2016 the UN estimated Spain's sex industry was worth €3.7bn ($NZ6bn).

Reports about the number of Spanish men paying for sex vary.

A 2009 survey found that up to one in three Spanish men had paid for sex.

However, another report published in 2009 suggested that the figure may be as high as 39 percent. Then, a 2011 UN study cited Spain as the third biggest centre for prostitution in the world. Those ahead of it are Thailand and Puerto Rico.

Also during recent years significant concerns have been growing around the potential for women to be trafficked into sex work.

In 2017, Spanish police identified 13,000 women in anti-trafficking raids. They say at least 80 percent of them were being exploited against their will by a third party.

The sex industry has boomed since decriminalisation. Estimates suggest around 300,000 women work as prostitutes in Spain.

It's two years since Sanchez's party first pledged to outlaw prostitution.

In its 2019 election manifesto it called the industry "one of the cruellest aspects of the feminisation of poverty and one of the worst forms of violence against women".

Seen by some as a move to attract more female voters, two years on from the election, no legislation has yet been tabled.

Supporters of Spain's current system say deregulating the sex industry has brought huge benefits to the women working in the trade and made life safer for them.

Source

• RNZ
• Image:El Pais
  

The streets are empty except for a dozen women and their pimps - women from some of the world's poorest regions including Moldova, Romania, West Africa and Southeast Asia.

Some are still in their teens.

Not far away are numerous massage parlors and saunas offering women and girls for sale.

There is a ‘drive-through' brothel and, in 2016, a local businessman applied to the city authorities for a license to open a "fellatio cafe".

The cafe has yet to open, but the application stated that for 50 Swiss francs (£40), customers would be able to choose a woman from photographs on an iPad menu, before ordering sex with their cappuccino.

This is not Amsterdam or a seedy quarter of one Asia's megacities.

It is Geneva, Switzerland, home to the World Health Organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross and countless other UN bodies and NGOs dedicated to humanitarian causes.

Human trafficking and modern slavery are supposed to be what they are fighting against.

Yet here it is happening at scale right under their noses.

Switzerland is a primary (as opposed to a transit) destination for women being trafficked into the sex trade.

Victims originate mainly from Central and Eastern Europe, but also from Thailand, Nigeria, China, Brazil, Cameroon, the Dominican Republic and Morocco.

Although trafficking is illegal, the fuel for it - prostitution - is not. Until 2013, it was perfectly legal here to pay for sex with 16-year-old girls. Now it's 18 and the trade is booming.

According to the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), an international NGO, around 14,000 women are currently selling sex in Switzerland, with approximately 70 per cent coming outside the famously conservative nation.

Prosecutions are rare but two years ago a woman was convicted of trafficking 80 Thai women into Switzerland who were sent to brothels in Bern, Solothurn, Lucerne, Basel, St. Gallen and Zurich.

Like hundreds, perhaps thousands of others, they were kept under lock and key and forced to service local men to pay off their "travel debt".

One who, aged 20, was taken from her home in Romania into a brothel in Basel and who now volunteers for an NGO in Zurich said she had been regularly beaten.

"The men in Switzerland are much richer and more educated than our men, but [they] are the same with us. They abuse us and think they can because they pay."

The country's willingness to see women trafficked and sold on its streets in broad daylight flies in the face of its reputation as a place of sanctuary.

A retired British police officer who until recently worked as a consultant for an anti-trafficking organisation, knows Geneva well and has led a number of operations to disrupt international trafficking in Europe. Continue reading

• Image: Truckers against trafficking

Feminist abolitionists, who wish to see an end to the sex trade, call it "the oldest oppression" and resist the notion that prostitution is merely "a job like any other".

Now it would appear that the New Zealand immigration service has added "sex work" (as prostitution is increasingly described) to the list of "employment skills" for those wishing to migrate.

According to information on Immigration NZ's (INZ) website, prostitution appears on the "skilled employment" list, but not the "skill shortage" list.

My research on the sex trade has taken me to a number of countries around the world, including New Zealand.

Its sex trade was decriminalised in 2003, and has since been hailed by pro-prostitution campaigners as the gold standard model in regulating prostitution.

The promises from the government - that decriminalisation would result in less violence, regular inspections of brothels and no increase of the sex trade - have not materialised.

The opposite has happened.

Trafficking of women into New Zealand into legal and illegal brothels is a serious problem, and for every licensed brothel there are, on average, four times the number that operate illegally.

Violent attacks on women in the brothels are as common as ever.

"The men feel even more entitled when the law tells them it is OK to buy us," says Sabrinna Valisce, who was prostituted in New Zealand brothels both before and after decriminalisation.

Under legalisation, women are still murdered by pimps and punters.

When prostituted women become "employees", and part of the "labour market", pimps become "managers" and "business entrepreneurs", and the punters are merely clients.

Services helping people to exit are irrelevant because who needs support to get out of a regular job?

Effectively, governments wash their hands of women under legalisation because, according to the mantra, "It is better than working at McDonald's."

As one sex-trade survivor told me, "At least when you work at McDonald's you're not the meat."

The decision to include prostitution as an "employment skill" is a green light for pimps to populate brothels to meet the increased male demand for the prostitution of the most vulnerable women.

The practice of using human bodies as a marketplace has been normalised under the neoliberal economic system.

Supporting the notion that prostitution is "labour" is not a progressive or female-friendly point of view.

I have investigated the breast milk trade in Cambodia, where wealthy American businessmen recruit pregnant women and pay them a pittance for their milk.

I have seen desperately hungry men outside hospital blood banks in India, offering to sell their blood in exchange for food. Girls in the Ukraine sell "virgin" blonde hair for use as extensions in western salons.

It is increasingly common to "rent a womb" from women in the global south to carry a baby on behalf of privileged westerners.

In the Netherlands, which legalised its sex trade in 2000, it is perfectly legal for driving instructors to offer lessons in return for sex, as long as the learner drivers are over the age of 18. Continue reading

• Image: Spiked
• Note: Since first published in NZ Herald, New Zealand Immigration has determined the skill shortage for these jobs no longer exists. However, an archive of the shortage remains.

Antonia Murphy who opened The Bach, in Whangarei, four months ago asked if it was morally better to sell 40-plus hours a week of your time at a tedious job, to earn the same money you can make in three hours doing sex work. Continue reading

Now, a new study in the American Journal of Public Health reveals that even rich, developed countries such as the United Kingdom suffer from staggering rates of human trafficking—and that the trauma inflicted by human traffickers often causes lasting psychological damage to victims.

"Human trafficking has devastating and long-lasting effects on mental health," said coauthor Siân Oram of King's College in London, in a press statement.

"There is an urgent need for evidence on the effectiveness of psychological therapies and treatments to support this highly vulnerable population."

Human trafficking is a deceptively tame word for what amounts to modern slavery—a $150 billion a year criminal industry that forces children into prostitution and immigrants into farm labor with threats of violence, debt bondage and other manipulative tactics.

Of the 21 million victims of human trafficking around the world roughly 68 percent are trapped in forced labor and 26 percent are children. There are an estimated hundreds of thousands of human trafficking victims in the United States.

Plenty of ink has been spilled on the plight of the victims of human trafficking, and how governments can do more to rescue those in bondage and protect at-risk children. But we still know surprisingly little about how to rehabilitate modern-day trafficking victims, especially when it comes to providing psychological treatments.

In an effort to learn more about the psyche of the human trafficking victim, researchers coordinated with post-trafficking support services and hospitals across the UK and managed to interview 150 patients.

They found that nearly 80 percent of women and 40 percent of men interviewed reported high levels of depression, anxiety and PTSD.

They also found that women were most often trafficked for sexual exploitation and domestic servitude (and that more than half of those trafficked for domestic servitude were raped) while men were almost exclusively trafficked for labor exploitation, most often in the agriculture, construction and car washing industries. Continue reading

Sources

• Article by Joshua A. Krisch, a science jounalist from New York, in Vocativ.
• Image: Mimi's Mission

Of course, she didn't think of him as a pimp; he was her boyfriend, her savior, the man who doted on her and gave her the things her parents couldn't or wouldn't provide.

"You know how you're a little girl and you dream of Prince Charming? Well, he was Prince Charming," Crystal said from her home in Watertown, South Dakota. She asked that her real name not be used.

Crystal met this man through her dad's substance abuse program. He was 10 years her senior.

When they started dating, he got Crystal hooked on cocaine and the first time he sold her, it was to make good on a cocaine deal.

"He was out of coke and he asked me if I'd dance for his drug dealer," she said. Crystal did it, and before long, she was also prostituting on the streets, dancing in clubs and working as an escort for politicians and professional athletes in order to feed the couple's habit.

Crystal hated what she was doing, but she said if she told her pimp no, he would beat her. Sometimes he would beat her even when she did what he asked.

Crystal lived this way for four years — traveling across California, her home state, and Nevada — until her pimp went to prison on drug charges. She was 17.

Looking back, Crystal, now a 44-year-old mother of two, is convinced her pimp had everything planned when he first approached her, the vulnerable teenager from a troubled home.

"He offered me lemonade and brownies. He wanted to go out and date me, told me how pretty I was," she said dryly. "He suckered me into it, I guess."

Crystal's story is depressingly common. The United Nations defines human trafficking as the recruitment, transfer, harboring or receipt for persons for an improper purpose — usually forced labor or sexual exploitation — and it happens all the time. Continue reading

Sources

• Global Sisters Report, from an article by Dawn Cherie Araujo, a Global Sisters Report staff writer, based in Kansas City, Missouri.
• Image: Prezi

An initiative of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Travellers, it occurs on the feast of St Josephine Bakhita who was kidnapped by slave traders, sold into slavery five times, experienced daily beatings and was used as a human canvas for 114 intricate patterns drawn on her with a razor.

Human trafficking is the third most profitable "business" after drugs and arms trafficking.

It generates $32 billion per year through the exploitation of an estimated 21 million of our brothers and sisters who are used as slaves.

It takes many forms, but each act attacks the integrity of the person for profit, pleasure or possession.

As Catholics, we are called to affirm with our words and actions that no person may ever be used as a means.

We may think it is beyond our means to do anything about such a large problem, but here are five concrete things you can do to fight human trafficking.

1. Pray
We are all being asked to pray for an end to trafficking this Sunday, and we would do well to pray often for an end to this attack on the human person. Some suggestions include:

• Pray for those who are trafficked, that they will receive strength, find freedom and experience true love;
• Pray for those who exploit others, that they will be captured and converted;
• Pray for those who work against human trafficking, that their efforts may be fruitful; and
• Pray for ourselves, that we may stand in solidarity with all who are exploited.

2. Be vigilant
We should be vigilant for signs of human trafficking.

It is not just a problem in overseas countries, it exists in Australia.

Statistics are unknown, but it is reported that those who are trafficked into Australia are either done so for sexual slavery, forced marriage or forced labour. Continue reading

• James van Schie in Catholic Talk — article used with permission
• Image: Challenge 2000

James van Schie is Manager, Parish Advisory Services, for the Catholic Development Fund in the Archdiocese of Sydney.

A raid is about to take place on a brothel whose inhabitants, the police believe, include women who have been trafficked into Britain from eastern Europe.

The nun is an integral part of the police operation.

It could be a storyline from a film, but there isn't a camera in sight.

This is real life, part of the UK's imaginative and innovative approach that has made it a frontrunner in the battle against human trafficking; and the scene explains why London will this week host the second meeting of the Santa Marta international consortium to stop the trade.

Home secretary Theresa May, Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe and Cardinal Vincent Nichols will join police chiefs, victims' organisations, ambassadors and church leaders from 27 countries for the conference, taking place at Lancaster House on Friday and Saturday.

It is likely to be followed by announcements next weekend of projects aimed both at more effective policing and education campaigns to raise public awareness of trafficking.

On Saturday the Home Office said therecould be as many as 13,000 slavery victims in the UK.

"It's a terrible crime that wrecks people's lives, and it goes on in the midst of ordinary life - on ordinary streets in cities and towns across Britain - yet many people know nothing about it," said Kevin Hyland, newly appointed as the country's anti-slavery commissioner, who will play a leading role at the conference.

"We need to tell people what they need to look out for, the signs that someone might be being coerced into living a life they don't want to lead, so that they can help in the fight against trafficking." Continue reading

Article and Image:

• The Guardian
• See also: articles in The Sydney Morning Herald and Catholic Herald

Freedom from Sexual Exploitation director Elizabeth Subritzky told Parliament's justice and electoral committee the only solution to the damage that prostitution caused, and the violence it created, was to prosecute buyers of sexual services through a reform of prostitution laws.

The Prostitution Reform Act decriminalised brothels, escort agencies, and soliciting when it narrowly passed into law by one vote in 2003. Continue reading

"Some experts believe human trafficking will overtake drug and arms trafficking in a decade, becoming the most lucrative criminal activity in the world," Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, was quoted in media reports.

Sorondo said the pope was heavily invested in a subject he knows well from his years in Latin America and had even invited two experts on human trafficking that he knows from Buenos Aires.

Further meetings are planned in 2014 and 2015.

A Vatican study group said human trafficking is a crime against humanity that should be recognized as such and punished by international or regional courts.

A global slavery index issued last month by the Walk Free Foundation charity noted that nearly 30 million people live in slavery across the globe, many of them men, women and children trafficked by gangs for sex work and unskilled labor.

"International or regional courts ... should be created because human trafficking in an international phenomenon that cannot be properly prosecuted and punished at the national level," said a statement listing 50 recommendations made during the two-day seminar in the Vatican.

The Vatican statement gave no details of the proposal made by the more than 100 experts who attended the seminar.

"The idea is that it should be something along the lines of European courts that go beyond borders," said Sorondo.

Pope Francis has made defending the poor and vulnerable a cornerstone of his papacy. He has made numerous appeals for the protection of refugees.

Sources

AFP/Huffington Post

Reuters

Image: Getty Images/Huffington Post

Sânandrei is a poor village in Romania with run-down houses and muddy paths. Some 80 percent of its younger residents are unemployed, and a family can count itself lucky if it owns a garden to grow potatoes and vegetables.

Alina is standing in front of her parents' house, one of the oldest in Sânandrei, wearing fur boots and jeans. She talks about why she wanted to get away from home four years ago, just after she had turned 22. She talks about her father, who drank and beat his wife, and sometimes abused his daughter, too. Alina had no job and no money.

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. In the summer of 2009, she and her friend got into the boyfriend's car and drove through Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic until they reached the German capital — not the trendy Mitte neighborhood in the heart of the city, but near Schönefeld airport, where the name of the establishment alone said something about the owner: 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. Continue reading

Sources

• Spiegel Online
• Image: Not For Sale

It includes personal accounts from business owners and residents highlighting the challenges they face from prostitution in their suburbs, including turf wars between prostitutes and business owners.

The book sets out the reasons why a bill, which would see prostitution banned from certain areas of Manukau such as Hunter's Corner, is needed.

Continue reading

Other city councils including Christchurch are expected to show interest and may seek to have the same powers applied generally.

An earlier 2005 bill, relating to Manukau City Council, was voted down in 2006 after it emerged from strongly divided select committee hearings.

The 2003 Prostitution Reform Act decriminalised the sex industry in an attempt to make it safer for participants, while also awarding greater control of the trade to local councils.

The Act gave local bodies power to regulate the location of brothels in the interests of the community but gave them no control over where street workers could solicit, no matter how much opposition there was on the part of the local community.

Source

• New Zealand Herald
• Image: Briarpatch

The legislature is currently discussing a bill aimed at distinguishing between genuine massage parlours from other businesses offering illegal services.

James Gillan told senators his call is not an endorsement of prostitution.

He told Radio Australia brothels have slipped under the radar, because many named themselves therapeutic masseuses.

The Church intends to lodge a submission to the enquiry into the Prostitution Act, and says ACT should follow the lead provided by Sweden.

Archdiocesan spokeswoman for young adults Daniela Kesina said prostitution was incompatible with gender equality.

"If we, as a society, reject the idea that women and girls can be bought and sold, and if we believe in gender equality, surely it is not enough just to regulate the sex industry, or strengthen regulations; we must stamp out all exploitation," Ms Kesina said.

"Canberra cannot call itself an equal and dignified society while we allow men to buy casual sex services from women. It is exploitative and unacceptable."

Source:
The Canberra Times