Luba Fein from FiLiA in conversation with Manuela Schon and Elly Arrow

Luba: today I have with me, Manuela Schon and Elly Arrow from Germany. Thank you so much for joining me.  Manuela and Elly are two abolitionists from Germany. Their country is famous for its vast legal sex industry. Many people believe that the German model proves the success of legalisation. You say the sex trade is safer when legalised, however, feminist researchers and activists from Germany have been telling a completely different story for years. It is a shocking story about violence, suffering, rape, cruelty and even murder, under the auspices of legal prostitution. 

Today, you have a chance to listen to Manuela Schon and Elly Arrow and discover the real often hidden story of the legalised German sex trade. And let's start with Manu.

 Hello Manu, could you please tell us what your activism is about? When did you start focusing on the sex trade and what are the main projects you are involved? 

Manu: My activism actually started about in 2013 and I was back then mainly active on the German left party. I was the chairperson of my local unit of the left party. I was also working on the local level and the city council with the parliamentary group. Mainly I was active in anti-fascist work anti-racist work. And that was also doing welfare state counselling because we had this move in 2005 to the workfare state.

Before that we had a very strong welfare state in Germany, but then with the eight Agenda 2010, they have changed the welfare state laws into basically what you know from Britain with the welfare state model, that if you want to get social benefits, that you have to do something for it and that you have to take every work opportunity that is given to you. 

So that was my two main fields like working against racism and working against poverty. And of course I could already see the intersectionality. I could see there was a lot of single mothers that were having problems with not being able to fund themselves. That was actually already a feminist issue. 

I could see that a lot of migrant men and women were coming to my counselling service and also I could see, of course that this poverty issue was a very strong issue that the political left had to deal with. These were my main concerns.

In 2013 there was a new way of discussing prostitution in Germany.

And before that I've already considered myself a feminist, but I never been, I never looked so much into the prostitution issue. Like when I was a young feminist, I would also say stuff like, who am I to tell a woman what to do with her body or something? Like, I never saw prostitution from the perspective of a John, but also was going after this myth of free and self-chosen voluntary sex work or something.

So I thought that would be the political correct way of speaking about prostitution. But in 2013 the German feminist magazine, Emma published an appeal against prostitution. And that was when our local left feminist group started to discuss the issue and it took like one session and we were all like, oh yeah, we have to do something against that.

We were all like in the same boat and agreeing on that prostitution is violence against women and has to go. But back then, it was more like feeling that we were in solidarity with mainly Eastern European women in the German prostitution market. And we couldn't really see that there is no real difference to the so-called white privileged women in prostitution that have chosen sex work. So that came later. 

So the first step was really seeing the fight against prostitution as an anti-racist stance. When we started to talk about this issue, we were really surprised looking back not so much, but back then, we were really surprised to see how the political left was pushing back against this issue and not agreeing with us and even attacking us for it.

So, what we did was starting radical feminist blog, and also we founded an abolitionist network Abolition 2014 for a world against prostitution. I was one of the co-founders of that. And later in 2016, we started a grassroots network within the German left party, Left against Prostitution.

And that was already when I had seen or talked more to prostitution survivors like Huschke Mau internationally listening to prostitution survivors and understanding first that every woman in prostitution is a victim of male violence. And it took more reading feminist classics, like from the second wave for feminism to understand that actually every woman is a victim of the system of prostitution.

So that, that was a development during these years. 

In 2014, we started the sex industry kills project and to sum it all up. I could go on and the don't want to like tire you with that. I now use the Corona pandemic to write a book about prostitution. So that's a very short summary of my activism.

In this process, I really stopped being active in the political left instead of working on this topic. So my sole reason to still be in the structures and the party is to annoy people with taking a good stance on the prostitution topic. 

Luba: Yeah. I understand you and Elly you are very young, right?

But you have already contributed so much to the battle against the sex trade. Many abolitionists in the world know your name very well. Can you please share your motivation behind this abolitionism and what projects you're currently involved in? 

Elly: So I started being interested in the subject of the sex trade a little bit of a longer journey.  I was a teenager. And just coming into contact with the subject of pornography, focused on what impact is it having on young people and our ideas about sexuality? And then there were some girls I knew who were victims of revenge pornography or who were filmed during their rape.

So that was my first relation to the subject, the impact on not the women in the industry, as we think of it, but the women who may be consumers or are around consumers. And I found that very disturbing. And the more I looked into it, it's not just that it can affect the consumer or his, or her image of sexuality and women and masculinity femininity, it's just the way the industry itself works. which is really quite disturbing to find out because it's so huge. 

And most of the world's population with internet access is consuming this material uncritically and we just don't really learn about the fact that it's a really brutal industry that spits out most women after a few months.

I learned a lot from the work of Gail Dines. But I kept looking at, oh, well, there's the porn valley over in California. So far away from home. Of course now porn is actually global and is made everywhere. But, um, that was my thinking for some time. And then it took me, it took me longer to connect the dots, to see, oh, actually there is a booming sex trade outside my doorstep in my own home country, in Germany.

And it's difficult for me to advocate for women far away. Why not do something right here and not just for myself and young girls and young women like myself, but the women who really most of the time don't have a choice but to make a living through the industry and I spent quite a while just reading a lot and talking to women who were either had personal experience in the sex trade or with social workers or educators or scientists.

And I was really lucky to come in touch with a lot of German abolitionists and just absorbed all their information and then thought about like, what skills do I have that I can contribute that I can bring to the table? I thought I could do something digital, something with design.

I do run a YouTube channel. It's not that big, but, that's where I started out and then moved on to the website. so the German version of the invisible men, the project about sex buyers, I think we'll talk about later. So I won't go into detail, but which was inspired directly by the work of prostitution survivor Huschke Mau who gave a fantastic, public presentation on this issue.

And I just thought this information needs to be out there. We're always looking at the woman what's wrong with her, what’s her psyche like, what is her story? That's important of course, but it ends up very often being fairly judgmental. So when people complain about stigma, I do think there's something there and the men just get off scot-free we don't even discuss them. We don't think about it. 

So I've made this whole website that's just on that subject, taking the real words of German sex buyers from internet forums. And then also looking at what statistics do we have. There’s a huge lack of good research in this area, but what do we have that can give us an estimation on what's going on and who is buying instead of just who's selling and then building on that, I've started doing some public speaking and just getting the information out there. This interview is as a result of all that stuff.

Luba: I thank you, Elly. And so this is very interesting. I would like to ask more questions about those projects, but before we discuss the particular projects any deeper. I would like to ask you to explain to our listeners the legal history and the current legal situation in Germany. 

Manu, maybe you could tell us briefly what the legal status was before and after 2002. 

Manu: Yeah, that's not so easy to do that briefly because the history of legal prostitution goes back really, really long. Even here in Germany, a lot of people think that prostitution was legalised in 2002 but actually if you look in the history, there has been legal prostitution, at least going back to the 14th century.

So the first brothels that I found in history books or whatever were in the 14th century. And most of these brothels that were erected back then were actually opened by the state. So, there's a long tradition of the state being involved in the prostitution and the sexual exploitation of women in Germany.

And also we have a long history and that is a huge step now going to the so-called German empire. where we had also, going back and forth closed brothels, open brothels but also a very strong abolitionist movement like the first so-called wave of feminism was very strong in Germany and being really influenced by Josephine Butler in the United Kingdom.

And a lot of women, mostly women, that that's something that just a typical German in this movement. Whereas in Great Britain, the movement about the abolition of prostitution was a movement driven by men and women. In Germany it was more a feminist movement or a movement driven by women, not only, but mainly.

And they were really successful actually like in the German empire, they were like all these brothels and this idea already that still existing today that if man don't have the opportunity to have sex, then they will go and rape women. So this idea of a biological kind of need for prostitution for a man that cannot control themselves was very strong back then already.

The biggest success of the abolitionist movement in Germany was in 1927 when they managed to address the demand in a way that on the one hand, the women were still regulated in their prostitution activity, but they were taken away from the police repression. So they still had to go with the success of the 1927 law.

They still had to go and register and have health checks and everything, which is already bad enough, but not the police was responsible for them anymore. So that was a success taking it away from the state repression.

The other thing was that in 1927, the brothels were closed.

So they were still legal, like street prostitution and private prostitution, but they were successful in taking away the brothel prostitution.

When the National Socialists came into power, one of the things they did was re-inventing the brothels with the same ideas of men, soldiers, forced labourers needing women that they can sexually use because otherwise this and that would happen.

Even after world war two Germany, this whole system of repression against, I mean, we have to say that a lot of prostituted women were persecuted and murdered in the concentration camps as being unsocial. But this whole thing continued after the world war two, because if women were too young or if they were prostituting in the wrong places they were still sent to work houses and there was this one famous example of Rosemarie Nitribitt who has become famous. There was a lot of articles and documentaries about her portraying her as a very successful independent sex worker kind of person, but she had a history of being raped by soldiers, she had a history of being sent to work houses because she was found prostituting when she was still a minor person.

 She was also someone who told everyone she knew that she wanted to leave prostitution. And she tried, she had several attempts of trying different jobs, but that's nothing like in this whole entertainment area where people talk about her, they would never say that. But she's one of these examples of women being sent to work houses because they are promiscuous, prostituting, whatever.

 So when people talk about 2002 law, what they actually mean is not that prostitution was legalised, but that the prostitution market was liberalised.

That means that everything that before had a bit of a limiting power into the market was taken away. And from 2002 onwards actually everything was possible in the German prostitution market. 

There's this market of anything goes. You now had this idea of a flat rate brothels. You pay one price and can have as many women as you want, or that all this marketing of ideas of like pay 10 times for sex and you will get the 11 time for free and like whatever you have and all these other market segments you can find in the prostitution market.

What we also have is, what we could see is that on the one hand they were saying, then we needed the law to make it prostitution more or better for the women in prostitution to allow them to apply for social benefits, like, being real employees, because before that, you could not employ a woman in prostitution because you could only rent out rooms to her, but now that she can be your employee and you have to pay all the social state money for her, if she gets sick, she gets money from the state. If she retires later on, she gets money from the state. So that was the idea. Or if she gets unemployed she gets unemployment money.

 But in fact, almost no women in prostitution used it. There was the statistic of 44 women using this opportunity. And if you look at it, not in a naive way, what was to happen anyway, because like renting out a room for 150 Euro a day is much more profit than paying all this social benefits for the women.

So everyone who had this idea that this could work, didn't really understand how the prostitution market was working because for a pimp or how they say here, a business man running a brothel there was no benefit from employing a woman in prostitution. it's much better to have her as a so-called independent freelancer kind of person that pays the rent every day. And if she cannot make this money, if she's too sick or if she has a bad day and cannot see a John then she would get thrown out and the next woman comes in and pays the 150 Euros for the brothel room.

So that's actually, is what the idea was behind it but it never worked out.

Luba: What happened in 2016? 

Manu: What they then realised with their policies, is that what they created was just a nightmare. I mean, even if they never said that it was clear to them that it could not go on like that. And what has also happened in the meantime was of course the Eastern European expansion of the European Union.

What we could see is with the Freedom of movement that a lot of poor women from the Eastern European states like Romania, Hungary, or Bulgaria, especially ethnic minority women, like from Turkish speaking Bulgarians, or the Romas from Romania or hungry, they were coming in and being extremely exploited here in Germany.

So, in the meantime we had like 90% of prostituted women and a German prostitution market from Eastern European countries. So that was also of course the voices of abolitionists and other people that said this is obviously wrong what's happening here. But the German state, we have to also say earns a lot of tax money from prostitution. These two factors together, prostitution being a normal thing in our society for so many centuries, nobody who has grown up in this country has ever lived in a country where there was no legal prostitution.

That is this one part. What I always say, that prostitution is part of our cultural identity. Nobody can imagine Hamburg, St. Pauli without prostitution. 

They're like just images of red light and prostitution. They are so engraved in our normal way of thinking that, nobody, most people are not questioning that.

So this combined with the fact that the State earns a lot of money with prostitution and does not want to really go after it, led to this attempt of not even talking about the Nordic Model as a possibility for Germany, it was completely ruled out of the debate. But thinking about how to make prostitution to regulate prostitution better.

What they came up with then was to have the prostituted women register themselves which most of the women, of course, did not do because at the same time, as you register as a prostituted woman, you get told to the financial authorities to pay your taxes.

So if, once you're in that you will never get out. So most women will not do that. what we could also see is that we now have not the mandatory health checks, but we now have mandatory health counselling. That means the women do not only have to pay for the registration, they also have to pay for getting a health information and 90% of them don't even have any health insurance.

 So what we hear from the authorities that most of these women say, why are you telling me all this stuff? I cannot even go to a doctor because I don't have health insurance. So I cannot pay for taking care of my health.

And also what we now have is that a prostitution business, which they were all left alone and nobody looked after them at a time between 2002 and 2017, that now also the prostitution businesses have to register and get checked by the State, which also means that if the State has given a permission to this brothel to be run or to this prostitution place, of course the Johns can say, okay, this is checked by the state. I can leave my conscience at the door. if this is a legal business, then I can use it. Of course. 

And what we can see is that a lot of businesses have gone out of business, fewer people make more money. Like there's a kind of monopolisation of the market. Like the bigger brothels, they are still run and the biggest players they can hold themselves on the market.

And like the rather small enterprises they have gone down. So that, that is one of the effects. And now with the Corona pandemic going on, we can see how quickly the State changes from legalisation regulation into a prohibitionist system. Like when the first lockdown came, one of the first things was closing down prostitution and who of course is being fined and most places with a very few exceptions, it's the prostituted women. 

And we have a lot of cases and media telling about prostituted women that cannot pay for these fines they got and had to go into jail because of that.

 So, what we always have been saying that legalisation regulation is closer to prohibition of prostitution that has come to reality in no time with the Corona pandemic.

And now, I mean, it's more than one year into the pandemic and still there is no exit programs for prostituted women in Germany. There is no help. Most of the normal health services around, which are not like targeting prostitution itself, but all the things around that, like, that you don't have to be homeless, that you have a shelter to go to, and, like you get at least some food or stuff like that. They were all closed down due to the pandemic because a lot of help services were not available in the first few months of the pandemic. 

So that's a really cruel situation. for example, in a city like Berlin, they had put up like some ecological toilets for the women, so they could go in there with the Johns and we saw horrible photos, like when they were cleaned after a few, like after an hour or something, it was already full of used condoms and urinated into it and even worse stuff. So it's really cruel and that's something, I mean, first there was one toilet and then the politicians celebrated themselves for putting up two more like this would be a great thing. It's really horrible.

[The situation now shows there's no help for no support for women in prostitution in a legal system. 

Luba: I would just like to ask you once again. Germany is a big state. So in Germany, as far as you know, there are no exit programs funded by the government for sex trade survivors.

Manu: There are counselling service for prostituted women, but most of the social workers in Germany have no view of prostitution and sex work and a lot of prostitution survivors tell us that if they go to this services they have no understanding about what prostitution is about.

Huschke Mau told us that she was told once, yeah, if you don't want to prostitute yourself anymore, why are you going back to the brothel? Like if that's the answer of social workers working in this field, you can see that there is no understanding of the mechanisms of what drives women into prostitution, what holds them in prostitution.

And there's only a handful of real exit programs like with social workers that understand prostitution as violence against women. but they are very much underfunded. Most of them work by donations and they could do much more if they had more money and like real exit programs, like we know from Sweden, like what Talita is doing or also the state services. We don't have that in Germany. 

Luba: We have a state funded rehabilitation services, including, trauma-focused care and social worker’s assistance. And so as far as I know, from Huschke Mau you have this sort of services, but they're funded by private donors right?

Manu: Yes, mostly.

Luba: Okay. Another question I wanted to ask is: what actually happened during the COVID situation, brothels were closed and the women had no means to support themselves what is happening now?

Manu: Germany is a federal state, we have 16 states and they all have their own policies. So in many states, the brothels were closed all through the pandemic until now. In some states prostitution was allowed, but only privately, like in the homes of the prostituted women or in hotels, even though most hotels are closed of course. 

Now with the new shutdown that we having right now, then all prostitution was halted again, but of course, as we know, if women have to make their living with prostitution, they will go on prostituting themselves. And if we look into the John forums, I think Elly can say more about that, there was still reports about Johns using prostitution now at the moment. 

Luba: Yeah. I'm going to ask Elly about this later, but one last question about the political system and social services. You have mentioned the health insurance, as far as I know in Germany, you have governmental health insurance for German citizens, and then what about foreign employees like in prostitution, Eastern European workers in Germany? 

Manu: Yeah, because of the freedom of movement, they allowed to be here and to work here, the system usually works like that if you're an employee of a part of your health insurance is paid by your employer and part, you pay yourself from the money that you're earning from your own. But if you work independently, then you only have the chance to pay private health insurance. And this is really expensive. And if you tell them then that you're on prostitution and it gets even more expensive because they will say it's a very unhealthy employment.

So, you have a very huge contribution to make. And even though we have a mandatory health insurance in Germany, there are still a lot of, not only migrant persons, but also German people that don't have health insurance. And even though these women get told when they register for being in prostitution, that there is an obligation to have health insurance nobody is telling them how to get it. And it's almost impossible to get in health insurance if you are in prostitution and from Eastern Europe. 

Luba: Thank you I understand better now. 

So let's talk about your project Sex Industry Kills. You have mentioned earlier as far as I understand the Sex Industry Kills is a first of its kind to attempt, at least in Germany to expose the cruelty of the legal sex trade.

So what is the project's purpose? When did you start it? was there any event or trigger behind it? please share about this important project with us. 

Manu: I think it was back in 2014, when we started to advocate for the Nordic Model, there was always some people coming up saying, oh no, the Nordic Model puts danger under women in prostitution.

There was this one woman being murdered, even in Sweden. And, what you want will endanger the women and your idea is crap. So, one of our activists came up with, she looked into some newspapers and what she could find on the internet and came up with a list of 22 murders in Germany since 2002, that was the beginning of, it was one person and our network coming up with this list, but it was only like the date, the city, and the name of the woman.

That was a list circulating in our like private Facebook groups, then we had this idea to put this list of this activist on the internet and started like there was these providers that let you make Wiki page. We started like that on a third party provider server and then, me and another activist, we started to look more into that.

We didn't only want to have the name, but also what were the circumstances of this murders and killings? And so we started to find more information about these 22 cases and put more and more information into this page that we had started. And with researching on that we found more and more cases.

So like if, if you read on one murder maybe in this article, there is a reference to another murder in the city, or like maybe it was a serial killer and, you have this one murder, but then you have all of a sudden you have five murders. And so this list grew. But my other activist friend, she said, okay, I know how, as an IT specialist to make our own page.

Now we move it from the third party provider page to our own server and we make something bigger out of it, like have control about our information and stuff like that. So we did that. And then we found cases from other countries. So we started to not only have a German page on the Wiki, but also have some cases in Great Britain and also in the United States of America and then Canada then Australia.

While you are researching, you find more and more cases and this list kept on growing. So by now we have 392 murders for Germany, 73 murder attempts and nine missing women that we have documented. And I think we have more than 40 countries covered on the Wiki page now from all continents, basically.

I don't know how this happened. It wasn't planned like that, but yeah, the lists keep on growing and growing and we try our best to give as much information about the cases as we can. And yeah, it's a lot of work and it’s really hard work, like emotionally hard work to read into all these stories that are so similar to each other. And that are like really sad stories of all these reasons. 

We know why women are in prostitution and how they cannot go out even if they want to leave prostitution. It's always the same patterns that you can find, 

Luba: From where are you getting this data? From the police, from the media?

Manu: Yeah. We started with newspaper articles, but as we kept growing, we wrote to the police departments, we wrote to newspaper archives and tried to find every source that is possible that can give us information. some, like, as I said, federal states like every state has their own police agency.

Some were really helpful. They send us even lists from their databases. Others were like, we don't have any data on prostituted murdered women. So it was really different on who you were talking about. Some newspapers were really, really helpful and let us for free look into their old articles that are not in the internet, sent us stuff, made us copies and stuff like that.

So it's ever continuing. It's just insane. Like you, you think you have seen it all, but it's, I think it's just a tip of the iceberg. I think there's much more than we have found. 

Luba: I know that you have processed some of the data. And so what are your main results? The most important results?

Manu: The most popular cases, like where there was written a lot about are of course similar to the Jack the Ripper case in Great Britain, like serial killers that have murdered a lot of women. but if you look at it more closely, like if you look at the motives of the killers, if you look at who killed the prostituted women, the main motive for killing women in prostitution is Johns killing women in prostitution.

Like mostly they are dissatisfied with the service or they want their money back. They want to use a prostituted woman, and then they want their money back. A lot of women were murdered because they were easy targets for robbery. And so the killing was mainly done to cover up the rubbing of the money because the perpetrators thought that would be easy money to get at the prostituted women.

But even in those cases, most of the time you will find that they have first sexually used the women. I mean, even if they're motive to go there is to get money then it's still that they would sexually abuse the women.  We have some cases of partners or pimps that have killed or murdered to the women, but even then mostly these partners got to know the women because they were Johns.

So what we try to do is only document cases where there was a real connection to prostitution. So it's not like random cases where somehow the victim was a prostituted woman. So we, we rather check if, is there a connection somehow to the prostitution market or the prostitution activity

And what we could also see over the years is that, I would say that's my point of view, that cases get more cruel in that they first in the 1990s, for example, or before that it was more a weapon used to murder the women, like a knife or a gun or something like that. And now it's more, more and more cases of the Johns or the perpetrators murdering with their bare hands or, like really hand on deeds. So that's one thing we found too.

Luba: Yeah. Thank you. You know, I have checked some of the data that you have processed and I think I'm not sure, but I think that the average number of murders in prostitution is about from 15 to 20 cases per year, on average. So, okay, so this is horrible because every murdered the woman was an important person with people who loved her. She was someone.

 We know that women are not just murdered in prostitution. They are also murdered by their husbands or domestic partners, even some of the victims that sex industry mentioned, they were murdered by domestic partners. The sex trade supporters, often claim that prostitution might be dangerous, but by no means worse than marriage.

So we have a 15 to 20 cases of murdered women in prostitution per year. We probably have a much more women, not prostituted women murdered by their husbands or domestic partners. How can we prove otherwise? 

Manu: I would say both. I mean, we know that most femicides being done when the woman leaves her partner.

If she finally says, this is enough. I'm going to leave you. Then that's when most femicides happen when most perpetrators murdered women. And I think murders in the sex trade are also femicides and that they are all driven by male entitlement, driven by the idea of a man thinking that he owns this woman or he owns part of her.

Like if I have paid for her for 30 minutes and she doesn't satisfy my needs, or if she doesn't do what I paid for, or if she disagrees with me. If she, goes in a fight with me, whatever, then it's my right to kill her or to show her where her place in society is. And I think that's the basic connection between these murders.

Yes, there has been murders with domestic partners but still there was always like every case on the Wiki is really somehow connected to the sex trade. It's always been that most of the time that the women had the partner that they met when he was a John or something or a pimp.

Elly: Can I add something? So there's one study we have from the family ministry. Out of date now, but it, strongly suggested that it concurred with the findings of Manu’s study that there's a lot of sex buyer perpetrators and that women in sex trade overall different kinds of violence, not just lethal, there's a high degree of perpetrators who are strangers than the average population.

I think you can just use common sense to understand how dangerous prostitution is. So just to make sure that no one misinterprets this, because obviously we get accused of shaming women or blaming them. But, it is inherently dangerous, for example Women who are on the streets and get into men's cars often men, they don't know, that's what society tells all women not to do. And obviously that's not the culture we want. We want a culture that holds men accountable. It doesn't limit women, but still the woman who gets into the car or the woman who invites the man into her apartment brothel, or goes to his place like in escorting, where she is ordered to his hotel or some strange place, she doesn't know, women in prostitution everyday do the things that all other women know are incredibly dangerous and it's just the way the industry works. 

And we can't regulate out this danger of the fact that you're going to meet, not just any man, but an entitled male stranger, potentially dangerous. That's just how the industry works. 

Luba: I absolutely agree with you. And I also think that while the murders of women in the sex trade might be the most shocking evidence of its cruelty, this is only the tip of the iceberg. I think so. Prostituted women often endure abuse, even if they survive. 

And this year, thanks to you, I had a chance to read a report on the German sex trade written by Helmut Sporer a recently retired senior police officer. So Elly thank you so much for translating this report from German to English, it was ground-breaking.

Can you please share with our listeners, what were the main findings of this report? Did those findings surprise you? What have you discovered there? Please share with us as much as you can. 

Elly: The report was written by Helmut Sporer who has 30 years’ experience working in the fields of human trafficking and prostitution.

And of course we, as feminists were critical of the police, we know that the police can be part of letting women down or participating in violence. But at the same time, we know that someone like him, in his day-to-day work, got to see things that the average citizen never sees that most of Germany just looks away from.

And he describes the reality of his work. and I can only recommend people read it, but to summarise a lot of the stuff to, as abolitionists is not surprising at all. He says it's mostly women, it's poor migrants and there's no regulated employments with rules and rights and contracts, most are in situations of exploitation or distress even if we look at the limited German definition of what exploitation might mean. 

We know there's a lot of criticism of abolitionism and forced prostitution, that's a niche issue and it's very separate and he just very eloquently explains why this is untrue. You cannot separate what you might say is chosen prostitution from un- chosen, it's a complex spectrum and most women will fall on the side of being forced and just in practice, the avenues that the trafficking industry uses is the same as the regular sex trade, same websites, same brothels, same street corners. And so we know that there's a lot of abuse of women and he worked directly with uncovering this in many establishments inside legal brothels.

And we know that the owners can like wash their hands because they're just renting out rooms very often. They can wash their hands of it. So it's not just that we have illegal work hours or crazy fees being charged on women. He can say in his experience, most women in the sex trades, do not want to sell sex, which is abuse, which most people would agree is abuse.

And he also emphasises how this was made very visible during the pandemic. The kind of the rule to understand everything by is, the German mentality is, if the woman has a problem, she'll scream for help. And he says, women can’t speak until they're exploiter is arrested and sentenced, but you can't arrest or sentence him unless the women speak.

So the investigations trying to catch these exploiters, they're long, they're expensive, they usually don't accomplish anything. And then they have to give up and move on to something else. Most end without any conviction, most victims are never identified. They don't receive any kind of protection.

But profiting from a lot of those women who we know are trafficked on those legal websites and brothels is perfectly legal. So business keeps booming. He also says that the German really does not understand all these different ways that they're disempowered, just if you're very poor and you have to see the next buyer that's exploitation, if you don't know your rights, that's exploitation.

And he says there's a significant minority of women actually in the German sex trade who are illiterate. And that's something that people just don't think about I wasn't aware honestly, really until I read this report. But we know as Manu said, the German system is, certainly now after 2016, 2017, very bureaucratic. You have to get a license, there’s taxes, get yourself a good work contract comply with zoning. How are women supposed to meet these standards when their agency is just not what people assume it is. And also he keeps saying they just don't have a movement really, where they can speak for themselves. They're not really represented a lot of the time in the public debate.

 So we just keep regulating tighter and tighter. And a lot of these regulations are put on the women and then when we offer something to them, like during Corona, the politicians, some politicians just said, let's just reopen instead of actually building something meaningful and not having women risk their lives to make some money during Corona.

And then in the later part, he just goes into very great detail about myths around the Nordic Model. so he says he now supports the Model. He really took his time. He spoke to experts and people from Sweden, he actually asked them all these critical questions, which I think people are right to ask.

But there's a lot of myths that just won't die and they just don't fit with the reality on the ground. He says there was an Interpol investigation into the Swedish market and says that human trafficking there is virtually dead. So it does still happen, but it's a lot less. And then one major concern we hear all the time is everything goes underground. And he says, this does not make any sense because prostitution is already mostly underground. It's already in a grey area where there's parts of it, which are illegal. It happens fairly anonymously, often in private apartments or hotels. Nobody really knows it’s going on. It's not visible or regulated or really accounted for. 

Women move from city to city organised crime is often in the background, everyone involved wants to keep it anonymous. And just like you said, most vulnerable women already don't get any support or have real meaningful contact with authorities. That's not a potential future problem. That's our problem right now.

And really, he says people who are concerned that we won't be able to talk to women and offer them support is just as has to be repeated. Again, prostitution cannot work without advertising. So if the buyers can find the ads where the women say I'm such and such, and this is my agents is where I am. So can the social workers, so can the police.

Also he said, I think very succinctly, what is the use of knowing where the women are?  by now we have the legal websites. We know where they are. Okay. But we can't help them unless they cry for help, which we know they won't. So like what's the point of the current system.

He also says, again, legal brothels don't protect anyone.  He was involved in the now infamous Paradise investigation that found that from the very start, this legal mega brothel couldn't operate without human trafficking, but it still continued for many, many years. Like I said, the owners just wash their hands.

Like they didn't know anything bad was going on. And he also talked about the way that these mega pimps really get to be part of a conversation and whitewash their industry. And it's just still, like, they're still getting interviewed. It's quite normal for them to speak up in the media and basically just put out an ad for their brothel or agency.

He said that if we did have the Nordic Model in Germany, his predictions, we would have considerably less prostitution. It would be much harder to profit from trafficking. You couldn't do this, washing your hands and saying it was just some external pimps. I was just renting the rooms that could be more monitoring, which should be focused of course, on supporting women.

He would predict a decrease in the market of up to 80%. So he would say that might be a market of about 50,000 women left. The current problem is that there is just not enough staff to monitor even basic things like condom use, which is really a joke. How do you monitor that? But if we decrease that number, we could support a lot more women, we could hold a lot more of people accountable, even without hugely increasing the staff for this, the social workers and investigators, et cetera. 

Then there's the one more myth is that the buyers will be more brutal because now it's an illegal industry. And he says, again, people don't understand the current situation. It is a buyer's market now. The buyers have extreme power now. There are very low prices, high competition, horrendous fees. Women right now have to do a lot of sexual acts that they wouldn't do if they could actually choose. Lots of unprotected sex right now, violence, we just talked about the murders problem, the problem's happening right now.

People talk about it like it's a potential the future. It's not. 

Just to finish up. He says the key thing about the Nordic Model is in the current law, it actually understands the average woman's situation. It sees the industry in a realistic light and it says, this is the priority, not subjecting them to weird rules about zoning and did you do your taxes, et cetera, prioritise as her safety and instead of really what we have now, which is, assist in the sex buyer’s rights and pimp’s rights.

Luba: Thank you, Elly. I think that Manu has mentioned that after the legal change in 2017, many smaller shady brothels were closed and the industry will become more centralised, like the larger brothel state. 

Can we call it improvement, maybe those large brothels are safer or more transparent than the closed shady brothels?

I would like to ask what we have learned from the report about it. 

Elly: Any crime you can imagine happens in legal brothels up to literal child trafficking. brothels, I think are actually quite representative of the trade. You still will often find the same population exploited there.

Now they might have a license now, like the big brothels might be able to do some things. The Paradise is quite a good example of some things that sound really good on the surface, but there's just really horror underneath. They were boasting about having an in-house gynaecologist. We take such good care of women. We like take care of their health and et cetera. And still 10 years of just blatant profiting, knowingly profiting from human trafficking. 

Another example is the Passion train. Manu knows there has been one murder and two murder attempts in this mega brothel, which might be Germany's most famous.

Oh, there's another brothel, I think in Austria where a woman inside this legal brothel, which you think is monitored, there’s security, this cameras, someone should have noticed something was wrong. She gave birth in the brothel and she went into shock. She was so distressed; she threw her infant out the window.

So if that can happen in a legal brothel, what are the illegal ones like?  I can, I can hardly imagine worse than a woman like her in that situation. If that just passes by the lovely legal employees and operators, then what happens in the shady parts of the industry?

Manu: I also want to add that I have a very good overview about the prostitution businesses here in my city, before the law changed, there has been mainly prostitution apartments, like around 70 businesses. Now there is like nine left, but those that are still left are in the tolerance zones where prostitution is allowed. And those businesses have a permission by the city who was really, really doing a good job looking after it. But you cannot look behind the surface. So they are getting bigger. So if you look at the women's being in the trade before the law changed and now, it's the same women and you read this all this horrible stories of the Johns, what they are doing to them.

And that was just one example that was even before the law changed. There was this really, really horrible prostitution business that was closed down because of our activism. And even in the newspaper, it said it was forced prostitution it was all illegal business and stuff like that. And then two weeks later, the same women are being prostituted two streets away from me.

So, even if they close down the businesses, that doesn't mean the women out of the trade and you can still follow the sex buyer forums on where they end up. And the not so funny thing about that was when there was a newspaper article about this business here around the corner from me, a person from the city administration that was in charge back then was not in charge now. And he said, yeah, we checked on this business, but the women were smiling at us and they were really happy doing what they are doing. And it was the same women who were there like four weeks before the business was closed down because of forced prostitution.

So there's no words for this cognitive dissonance on what people who are checking on this have. They are not so good, informed, they do not see the harm and the dangerous and to violence when they have it in front of them. So what do you expect? By one talk a year and counselling and someone who was checking on the management idea of a brothel. It's not possible.

 Like there is no, no way of with this, even with dysregulations to find out what's going on behind these doors unless you look at what the Johns say about it themselves. I think then you get a real good picture because when they started here in the city to put this new law into place and to have to check on this brothel and give them permission or not, I said to the person in the city administration, please look at this and these and these businesses first, because I think they are the worst and I've never been into this business. As all I saw was the Johns were writing about this business on the internet. And he looked at me and said, how can you know, that's exactly what we found there, like very poor hygienic conditions and stuff like that.

I've never been in there, but I saw it all on the internet. And I said, well, it's all there. You just have to look on the internet and you will find everything that you need to know, but who has the resources to do that actually? it's not possible to believe that there are so many resources to look into all these addresses and all these businesses like the crazy things that we, as activists do. The authorities would never have the resources for that.

Luba: I wanted to ask you Elly. I know that if we speak about Johns’ evidences and the feedbacks and Johns’ forums, I know that you are the pro you have this, website called The Invisible Man. It collects accurate quotes from prostitution customers. So please, could you share more about this project for how many years have you been collecting those words? What can we learn about those invisible men?

Elly: So I've been doing this for about three years and like I said, it was inspired by Huschke Mau and she provided me with like the first 40 or 50 quotes that were in a presentation. And then I thought, oh, people are going to say those were cherry picked as they always do.

So I'll look for more. And now I have about five or six times that much. So hundreds and hundreds of quotes, people are still saying, I cherry pick. But like Manu just said the authorities keep telling us actually the John forums do tell you about the reality. l also wrote about this, that the forums tell you a lot about what's actually going on.

I recommend people look for this in their own countries. Even if prostitution is illegal, there's probably a website somewhere. 

What it does is really, really helped make prostitution less abstract because it's just hard to call it a service or work once you've had to sit down and see. Most people can read maybe three or four and then they're just nauseous.

I do try and not just pick the worst where someone is just absolutely horrifically, hateful, and violent, even some that are just very average are quite disturbing because you can see this culture of just raiding women's bodies. You don't even have to get into the sex act 

 Before that starts he gives us a review of her body, her breasts, and her butt, how tight her vagina was, who would ever tolerate someone talking about them like that? If he was saying this about any service provider like a hairdresser or his girlfriend, everyone would think what a psycho you don't talk about women in that manner. You don't give a grades for body parts. you can see that that women's income is dependent on how, the term would be ‘fuckable’ that the men find them and they're quite excited if she's barely legal and also very important is just the fact that it busts the myth that you just need to tell buyers that this industry is exploitative.

A lot of them know, especially those who keep doing it, who would be most likely to write these reviews, the ones who are very enthusiastic about it, they know in minute detail where the women come from, sometimes they're talking about like the villages somewhere in Romania, Bulgaria, where they know more than like maybe me or Manu sometimes about what's going on.

They know it's not a choice. They know that it's poverty that it's, third party exploitation, organised crime. Sometimes they talk about the pimps on the first name basis, just like, oh, I met this guy again. And yeah, he's really good. He's really got his chicks under control.  So some do conscious active business with pimps and they feel safe to write about it on the internet like ‘nothing's going to happen to me.’

Then some of these, I should say, these forums are legal websites. They're not in the dark-net. Anyone can access them. A lot of them don't even require you to make an account they're just open for the entire public and someone is making money from the advertisement.

You will see: A big, big, huge trigger warning: a lot of the abuse sometimes, I mean the men don't call it rape, but they will describe women who are, well at best just frowning or kind of apathetic, kind of what we would call dissociated. And other times women might even show signs of disgust or anger or sadness or express pain. but he's paid. 

So some men will stop and feel a little bit uneasy, but a lot of them will keep going always in the back of his mind. Well, I paid this amount of money, so, I mean, I'm not responsible for what's going on. They blame someone, usually not themselves, but the brothel owner should pick the girls better or some variation of that.

And I think most centrally they just, like I said, show no fear of consequence. like they're admitting to things that are even under the current legislation, clearly crimes, including things like not using condoms or abusing women who have shown very strong signs of being trafficked. Those are now offenses.

They weren't before 2016, in most parts of the country, but they are now. They're just not scared of anything. and they will even, like we said, continue doing Corona. And I think during Corona, they fall into two camps, some do care, they don't want to catch COVID and it's not worth it, but there's always been a subgroup which is quite dangerous because they don't care about anyone's health, including their own.

They don't care about STIs including ones that could be deadly and they don't care about COVID. And they're the ones who just keep going and who, who push women to lower their prices and just really are taking advantage of this situation and who are kind of laughing at the idea that the 2017 law would really impact them.

They were like, oh, how can you prove that I knew that she was trafficked, you can't ha. 

Very finally they hate the Nordic Model. So they will, they all following our political discussions and they give their opinions and it's very clear. They don't want the Swedish law. They're worried actually a little bit that it might happen.

They're seeing an advanced in that direction and they don't want it. So anyone who says buyer's would love this law, it gives them so much power because the industry is underground and women are scared of authorities because the buyers might get arrested. No buyers saying, please criminalise me that would give me power. They all hate it. So if we need a pro Nordic Model argument, it's really that. 

Luba: Yeah. I cannot tell you that here in Israel, when, we have adopted the Nordic Model, there was not a single John was happy about it.

We here in Israel also had these sex buyers’ forums. And then there was an activist who collected quotes just like you. But a couple of years ago, blocking those forums were deleted from the internet. So now on one hand, those men don't have a accessible channel to discuss their preferences and, their crimes. Probably they do have some less accessible forum, which is not visible to everyone. But on the other hand, you say a, you have a valuable source of information and we lost that source of information. 

So do think that deleting those forums was a wise step? 

Elly: I think that it shouldn't be activists doing this work, but police.

It shouldn't be our job it should be someone who's professionally trained, who if it's too disturbing can actually get support. sometimes others ask me if I need support, thankfully I have a very supportive environment, but if someone does this for their job, then, I mean, we have people going through the internet looking for child pornography.

I think it does go sort of in the same vein. Like I said, it might even sometimes involve minors. I've found reports about minors.  so it should be part of police work as it is in, in Sweden to find out where it is. And they should have the tools to look at the dark-net wherever else it might go, or it might just be a foreign host of the website or something like that.

I think it's still important to get rid of them. I think it's important for a society to say this is completely unacceptable. I think men should feel like criminals. They should feel gross. because I think really most people would look at this would agree. Even some people on our opposition agree that these forums are just vile and they're also tools of power for men.

If they are clever enough and united enough, they can come together and just down vote this woman that has upset them or not delivered or something like that. And so the harder it becomes for men to access these forums, the more we can hopefully start destroying this culture of misogyny that they filled and take away their power.

Luba: Thank you. So, so far during this conversation, I can hear a lot of criticism of the legalised German sex industry. And a couple of times you have mentioned that the better alternative is the Nordic Model, but the sex trade supporters, they have a different claim. They say that the German legislation is suboptimal, but not because the Nordic Model is better, but rather because the ultimate goal is the full decriminalisation of the sex trade, like in New Zealand. Elly, I know that you were working on a comparative review of German and New Zealand law

So, could you tell us, please, what is the difference between the two legal models, whether the New Zealand solution could be a better solution for Germany? 

Elly: It's actually, once you look at it hard to figure out what exactly is the difference. I think it helps to maybe know the definitions of those terms too, to show why they don't neatly apply as they are now calling Germany, legalisation, New Zealand, decriminalisation. Legalisation means implies a fair bit of state interference.

The state says prostitution can happen here, but not over there. There are rules when you can open a brothel. People might apply for a license and decriminalisation means taking away as much prostitution specific law as possible. And just having it governed by general labour and criminal law. In practice, it's, it's really much, much more fuzzy. It's not clearly distinct at all. 

I do have to put in two more sort of, preambles that account for some differences that you can see between the countries. One is, sorry, there's quite a bit to go over before I can go into the detail. Germany has a more decentralised system of governance compared to New Zealand.

So we have a lot of internal variation. Berlin is different from the Bavaria, et cetera. While the New Zealand law actually has a fair bit of regulation. It does actually compare to what we had 2002 in Germany, which is just three paragraphs. And then like have the different municipalities figure out the details.

The New Zealand law has 52 paragraphs and they apply across the country. There's actually quite a lot of rules of what you can and can't do. So you can already ask yourself like how, how many paragraphs is legalisation is state interference, but that raises an eyebrow, but it's difficult to compare because Germany is more patchwork and it's a little bit harder to generalise one German approach.

The second thing that we already addressed is in Germany did tighten their regulations in 2017. So you might say that post 2017, these were different. So my comparison is 2002, and then New Zealand had his law in 2003. So nearly the same time until 2017. I'm just looking at those years okay, because my conclusion is that during those years they were very, very similar now going into the actual matter.

Okay. So what is the same? There are clear similarities in the history of the sex trade. So we know it's quite old in Germany. There's been tolerance for it a long time, always tolerance for the buyer and some level of stigma or regulation of forced medical exams on the seller. And in New Zealand, we know that this trade became systematic and prolific with settler, colonialism, exploiting indigenous women in particular.

So just a long history of wanting to have the industry around, really like pro-industry, but anti the women in it. A lot of long standing tolerance and just, basically all of male elites in both countries could always access a brothel or a woman if they wanted to. It's just not true that prior to 2002, 2003 society just completely frowned upon the industry.

They were okay with men buying and there was always infrastructure for that, both countries now have it as work, the buyer, is a customer and a third party as an employer. And they ignore the continued just very obvious, like if everyone agrees, including the other side, who is in the sex trade in Germany? Overwhelmingly migrant women, especially some Eastern European the Ramani minority in New Zealand. Massive over-representation twice the number of the actual population of Maori women. And there's indications, we don't know this for sure, cause it's actually completely illegal, but a huge number of Asian migrants. And we know that a lot of those women come from violent and disadvantaged backgrounds.

Both laws just ignore that vulnerability and they ignore the disproportionate power of the buyer because usually local, but he has excess income and they ignore the massive fetishisation of women on the basis of body types and race. And the massive profits that often go into the hands of third parties. When we know the state has not succeeded at reigning in their different mechanisms of maximising profits and really pushing the limits of legal management. And we know that organised crime is involved as well. And we know violence in both countries continues. it's hard enough for women who are not in the sex trade to report violence.

We know that prostituted women in both countries find it extremely hard to report still. It's very explicit in the government report from New Zealand. It says most women said the, the PRA the Prostitution Reform Act could do little about the violence that occurred. It didn't change that situation really on the ground.

Even though we always hear that decriminalisation makes women safer the report from the government, that's still concluded that it is a good law says it doesn't. 

So we know that men have near total immunity in both countries and they still murder women. And I did look very specifically at the murders and like we said, there's other ways that other matters of women's safety to the lethal violence is just the tip of the iceberg. So there's more to look at, but still we see New Zealand had - this is also from Sex Industry Kills -  on the basis of that eight murders in New Zealand since 2003 in Sweden, since 1999 we had one by a woman's ex-partner, even though Sweden has twice the population and a higher overall murder rate, I looked that up today, it's higher in Sweden.

I thought maybe just Sweden has a very, very low rate, no, New Zealand's murder rate is lower than Sweden overall for the general population. 

There was a massive outcry when one woman lost her life in Sweden, but those eight women in New Zealand, I don't think anyone's ever heard of them. So I know it was difficult instrumentalising individual stories. I would be hesitant with that, but still, if we're going to talk about murders, then those would absolutely have to be included. 

Both countries promote a lot about employment contracts. We already heard it many times. They don't actually happen on the ground. So women are these independent contractors. They don't actually have the benefits that everyone talks about. There's for most of them sick pay maternity leave, paying into the pension fund. So when something goes wrong, they get older, pregnant or sick. There isn't really a support net. If they don't have a day job. There's a huge lack of specialised state services.

And we already heard about same as Germany, a lot of women report when they go to the social worker, whose job is to support them, they get condoms and coffee and friendly smiles, and STI check-up maybe. But if they want to exit it’s kind of shoulder shrugging. So good luck finding that. 

And really brothel inspections are a joke. Really, they're rare. How can you, like Manu said, like tell who's forced and who isn't. An added problem in New Zealand you can't actually ask for someone's ID unless you're accusing them of committing a crime. So you can't even check if they're over 18, which you can in Germany. so that's just a general thing. I don't know why New Zealand does that. I guess it's just supposed to protect people from state surveillance, but in this case, you're protecting people exploiting minors

Now some differences between the two models. for example, condom use in most of Germany, condoms weren't mandatory. That was only like made a unified national law in 2017. so you can't say Germany's always interfering, telling people to use condoms. New Zealand was telling people you must use condoms and not just the buyer. Also the seller. Now we should add, there's only been, I found only two convictions. I think one buyer and one seller, uh, just fines. So it's barely enforced. but still on paper, New Zealand is more in this matter where Germany does more state interference is no tolerance zones from what it seems, they do exist in New Zealand, but they seem more reined in.

Some cities have decided they won't have it in the city centre or something like that. But Germany, most of Germany is a no-go zone. Is that correct? Manu? I think, I think it is. Yeah. And so New Zealand seems to be a little bit lax, on that matter, you can even build a brothel next to a school. That was a huge scandal, but it's okay you can do it, it's just business. 

And no one in both countries really cares about women and girls who have to grow up next to a brothel, which does happen. And what that means in terms of harassment and safety and just what gets modelled for what you are supposed to be as a woman is no one's addressing that really.

Another way that New Zealand is less regulatory, we have to put a question mark on whether that's always a good thing is: you don't need a license for a small brothel. When there's no third party and its five women or less these are called SOOBs, which is like Small Owner Operated Brothel.

But how do you know they're owner operated when you've never checked them? You're just assuming there are these feminist collectives opening up brothels, but. In every other country, a lot of these apartment brothels are just run my organised crime. And how would, you know, if they aren't, if you're not checking them, you don't know where they are. They're completely off the map. Unless of course you look at ads which I've done. And then I see, oh, this there's a lot of Asian women. And they're talking about having this great range of women from Thailand and China doesn't really sound like a feminist collective sounds to me like any other brothel even could be a trafficking ring. Nobody knows. 

New Zealand has much stricter immigration than Germany. Germany is part of the EU. So in, from the EU under specific conditions can legally sell sex here, but migrant women in New Zealand is zero tolerance. It's very specific in the law. You cannot under any conditions, sell sex or invest in a brothel. And that's supposed to protect from trafficking, but really just treats women like criminals. And I think even though that's the case, we know there's huge numbers of Asian women. I think if they didn't have that law, it would probably be the same as here, like 90%, poor Asian migrants.

And then there would probably be more outraged because it's already starting in New Zealand, just slower than Germany, slower bubbling. There was a report from a New Zealand woman who's been in the sex trade a whole long time. And she said, Kiwi women were having to lower our prices because of this influx of, of migrants. And now we don't want them treated as criminals, but still it's impacting our ability to make money and feed our families. 

So exactly the same as Germany, the prices are going down, migrant women off the radar We don't know how bad things are for them. Exactly the same as Germany. 

So summing up both countries were really low level of regulation.

Germany was too, calling that legalisation massive state interference is not accurate for huge parts of the country. and they show the exact same problems and results. It's just more visible in Germany because the country is bigger. The industry is bigger and there's just less policing of borders by which I'm not saying I'm advocating for it. This is just one of the reasons. 

And overall the obligations that do exist often still target the woman herself. And, but she won't get the benefits of being a worker usually. 

She can't keep up with different kinds of bureaucracy and in New Zealand, if she's a migrant she's out of that system. so neither in Germany nor New Zealand are women actually fully decriminalised.

They still have rules to comply with. And if they don't, they're black market workers, not victims of exploitation. And we see it again, especially during Corona, New Zealand, too went into prohibition and had no real big safety net, a few women just like Germany, a few managed to apply to some safety nets, but most were screwed.

And the pro prostitution people just tell them to do webcam pornography. so the violence and exploitation of vulnerable people continues. And, but the public is fed a constant diet of empowerment stories and only Germany has it really does the myths are starting to crack and starting to fall apart. And New Zealand is taking longer, especially because right now we have this global mega hype around a nearly identical approach.

Manu: I want to share one observation that I made when we started in 2013. And I was talking on a lot of speeches conferences internationally. there was not a lot of criticism about Germany. It was always like people from abroad saying we want what they have in Germany. Like Germany was the role model and the Netherlands.

But I think it's just due to our activism that they changed this strategy. That's, that's my theory on it that they started to talk about, oh no, we don't want what you have in Germany. We want to have what they have in New Zealand. And Elly I'm very thankful for you saying all these things because it was also my theory that the German law between 2002 and 2016 was very similar to that, what they have and you see them.

And I think what we can see in New Zealand now that there is a growing movement as well, and we need to support them. The survivors they're speaking out to counter this myth they are creating that New Zealand as something very completely different from Germany or the Netherlands. I would also agree it’s very similar.

Luba: Thank you for this expansive review Manu and Elly. So seems like we, we are stuck with only one positive solution which is the Nordic Model for Germany. 

So let's speak now about the obstacles.

In the beginning of our interview, Manu mentioned the taxes collected from the sex trade businesses. So I would like to know how much does the sex trade contribute to the German economy in taxes, in income, in tourism? Do you have any estimation?

Manu: There was one number because now they are obliged to portray it in the financial reports on the international level. I think, but to be honest, I cannot recount it, I think it was something like 18 billion Euros a year or something, I'm not so sure if that is the correct number. 

Elly: I remember reading one from a book written by someone who investigated it, but I'm not sure what year it's 14.5 billion a year, I think. Sorry, let me just look that up. I think it's so much money that I cannot really grasp how much it really is. Yeah. 

I have a source for 14.5 billion in Germany. 

Luba: And then do we have any estimation, which is the size of let's compare with size of some other industry or a German economy.

Manu: No, I don't have any benchmark.

Luba: Okay. I will, maybe I will check later the, there must be economic or financial obstacle because this is a very significant income for German economy.

Any other obstacles? What, what else makes the German politicians reluctant to consider the Nordic Model as an alternative for the country? 

Manu: I think people are so used to prostitution that they cannot even imagine a society without prostitution. I think that's the biggest obstacle it's just so normalised.

It is so ingrained in, into our culture that, it's really, really hard to get the people to think about a different vision of a society to live in that, that is my impression that that is the hardest thing to get over. And also of course, like in the English speaking countries, we also have in the German speaking countries.

I was referring to the United Kingdom and United States like this new liberal view, even within the political left spectrum of speaking about prostitution as sex work, unlike, for example, the Scandinavian countries. I think that is one. For my book, I have researched a bit and one theory is that instead of the radical feminist analysis the Marxist socialist feminist analysis was pretty strong in Germany and, this is focused around work. And so therefore this sex work approach is so strong and this idea of, if you see something as work, you can better the work conditions and that's, that's the approach that they are going after and not so much portraying prostitution as violence against women.

And even though Germany had a very strong second wave women's movement, that was more like the socialist, Marxist approach to looking at women's oppression. 

Luba: And you have mentioned your book, I know that you have recently published a book about the sex trade in Germany.

Sadly, I cannot read it because the book is in German, which I don't know, but could you tell us a little bit about the book, what the book is about? What are the main findings? What will the readers learn from it? 

Manu: the story behind this that I had this idea of writing a book about actually the things that I was speaking on at conferences and events for a long time, but it never had the time for it and then the pandemic hit us all. And yeah, for some reason we all had more time than usual. 

I'm not spending most of my time at live rock concerts or traveling, but sitting at home and having a lot of time to spare. So, um, yeah. Idea was like the times now I should now sit down and, I thought it would take me two months or four weeks or some something to write down what I was always speaking about.

And I thought it would be like 150 to 200 pages, but now turned out that I was busy with it for like a year. And the book has a 528 pages. So, yeah, it kind of escalated. 

There's a lot of good books in English already, like covering all these aspects of the sex trade, sex work lobby. how are they funded? What are they put their position about the Nordic approach and how that this developed or about, um, the German history of prostitution. So, or, or the history of prostitution in general? So, um, what my idea was to first of all, sum up everything I was talking about all the time, and then also to put it into a German context.

 There was, books about sex work lobby and other countries we didn't have something similar in Germany. We had some texts on our blogs where we were talking about it, but there was never this really deep analysis about it. And then the other idea was to have kind of a, reader a book where people could, dive into one aspect of this complex phenomenon of prostitution, and then find a lot of references in this little chapter and see what others are writing about it.

Like for me, it was also very important to make the work of other feminists, other activists, visible. So, every chapter is as narrow as it can be. And, it has a lot of references. and I also wanted to do some interviews with, um, international and national experts from different professions or different backgrounds.

So I wanted to have a prostitution survivor. I wanted to have the social work here. I wanted to have a psychologist and a policeman and all these kinds of stuff. So, it was never planned and stuff, but, nowadays, um, it ended up that after every chapter there's an interview. So, somehow it fell into place without me having like a proper thought of concept or something.

It just felt right to do it this way. and yeah, I'm really happy with it. And, I hope it will have a lot of impact. A lot of people, ideas on how to look at prostitution differently. And also it was a main goal to have all this, this broad political spectrum in it, like for me, coming from the political left, it was especially important to show that the Nordic approach, the Swedish approach is, um, a feminist and the left approach.

So when we talk in Germany about prostitution and to fight against prostitution is always said that this Swedish approach would be kind of a conservative prudish thing to do. and for me, therefore, it was really important to have all these voices and showing that it was coming from Social Democrat, Greens and left parties and this Scandinavian states, and also to have, for example, an interview of the vice chair, chairperson of the, Norwegian left party, so that the people in my communities and my networks can see this is a great thing actually to adopt.

And, it, it would be much closer to what we are fighting for in different areas. that then what they think it is so it's nothing conservative. It's nothing, anti-feminist, it's exactly the opposite. we need to adopt it because that's the way to feminists and leftists, naturally should go.

So yeah, that's basically the idea. I don't know. I I've had a lot of questions about an English translation. I wouldn't be opposed of it. If someone came and said, yeah, I want to translate it and let's put it on the English speaking market. But, for me, it was mainly important to have something to cover the German market finally.

  There's a lot of good translations of, for example, Rachael Moran’s book. There are some books already, but they are also very narrowly focusing on a few aspects. So I think that is a very comprehensive overview. And if people want to dig deeper into it, then they have the references to go from there. So that was the idea. 

Luba: I'm waiting for this book to be published in English. I would really love to read it probably in English. It will be less pages because the German words are longer. 

Manu: Someone said it's available as an e-book and kindle and someone said you can have a translation function on that. 

Luba: May, I may have it as an e-book. I would just put it in Google translate. Sometimes I translate German texts. And then I ask Elly whether I'm correct. 

 Okay. So before we finish this conversation, I have a question for both of you, where do you see the German sex trade and legislation 10 years from now?

Elly: I think there is a lot of cause for optimism. It does feel like the conversation is changing. It used to be that the current approach was defended or maybe slight variations of it were defended. And now actually the pro people are sort of on the they're what's the right term. they're the ones that were attacking the Nordic bottle. It is becoming more present, people a few years ago. I think most didn't hadn't had never heard of it. There's still a lot of misunderstandings and myths, but we're still having a different debate.

We have to do a lot less ‘Why is the current situation bad’ and instead a lot more ‘Why could it be better and how?’ So that alone leaves a lot of cause for optimism, but still nothing's guaranteed, could be that we just get more regulations, could be that they hurt the women, even more those regulations unintentionally.

So we still have to really, really keep pushing. but I'm still overall optimistic. And I like to know what Manu thinks?

Manu: I think a big game changer for the debate in Germany was the survivors speaking out. And I hope we soon get to situation because we all know that it's a very emotionally hard thing to do to speak over and over about your, experiences in the sex trade. 

And I I'm ashamed for the society that, people are so un-empathetic that we obviously need these voices, but I hope we can soon have a time where they don't have to speak about the pain that was done to them all the time. And that, I mean, actually everything is there and that really has changed within the last eight years of our activism that now everyone who wants to have a look at the realities and prostitution can find it on our websites on all those networks that have evolved since then.

And I'm always an optimistic person and I'm very sure that Germany will be one of the next countries to adopt a Swedish approach. I'm very, very, very, very optimistic about that because, I mean, like back then there was not one politician that supported our view and now we have politicians in the conservative party and the Social Democrat party and the left party.

So, and even networks within the party, we have that in three parties, we have, grassroots level organisations of the parties that support the Nordic Model. So that has come out, uh, within the last two years or so that, that this development, went on. So I think we will actually from now on everything will become very quicker than what we had until here.

So, I'm pretty sure it won't take us 10 more years to get there. But it's still, like Elly says, it's a long way to go and we need all the help. I always like to repeat what I said already eight years ago: we need international solidarity. We need, other countries and activists shaming our country for what our politicians and our societies allow, to happen.

So I think that's one of the basic ways to success to have a very observant society around us and not giving in and just repeating everything, all these hurtful things over and over until the politicians are so ashamed that they cannot resist to adopt a Swedish approach.

Luba: I really hope that we will see in 10 years, Germany joining the expanding family of Nordic Model countries 

Manu: And the, the former Swedish and passenger PA on the sooner son in my book, I interviewed him. He thinks Scotland will be the next country. 

Luba: I'm very optimistic about Scotland and Germany.

Germany switching to the Nordic Model. It will be really ground-breaking, such a big country with a well-established sex trade. It will be a very impressive change for the world. And then this is all, mostly thanks to German Abolitionists like you. 

So thank you for everything for your amazing work and activism for so many years. And then also for this interview.