SPAIN-RIGHTS: NGOs Oppose ‘Mini-Cities’ for Confining Prostitutes

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Sep 24 1997 (IPS) - Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Spain are opposed to proposals for restricting prostitutes, such as ‘mini-cities’ with private guards and closed circuit TV cameras to monitor them.

Pepa Barahona, spokeswoman for the NGO ‘Medicos del Mundo’ (Doctors of the World), said “no one can repress prostitution, and much less in public spaces.” Under Spanish law, procuring is illegal, but providing services with one’s own body is not.

The city government of Madrid, under the centre-right Popular Party (PP), wants to force male and female sex trade workers away from a busy highway that crosses a large park, ‘Casa de Campo’, on the way to Somosaguas, a satellite town.

The leading opposition Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) agrees with that aim, but differs with some of the proposed measures.

The majority of the prostitutes working the streets of Madrid, like the more than 1,000 who exercise their profession in the Casa de Campo, are foreigners, many of them from Africa, Latin America or eastern Europe.

High-priced prostitutes, women and men who work in luxury hotels or private residencies, identify themselves as “masseuses”, are paid with credit cards and advertise by the hundreds in the country’s leading newpapers – ‘El Pais’, ‘ABC’, ‘El Mundo’.

Foreign sex trade workers are mainly undocumented immigrants. For years they concentrated along the ‘Paseo de la Castellana’, a major avenue cutting across Madrid from North to South. But they were forced out by pressure from local residents, and moved over to ‘Avenida de Mendez Alvaro’.

Once again forced out after serious conflicts with residents, they ended up at the Casa de Campo, an extensive wooded park where the city zoo, an amusement park, fairground installations and four restaurants are located.

Today it is not local residents who are protesting the prostitutes’ choice of working area, but the management of the amusement park.

Of the over 1,000 prostitutes who frequent the Casa de Campo, around 600 receive monthly check-ups in the vehicles that ‘Medicos del Mundo’ sends to the area.

The isolation would not be a new measure in Spain, and in some cities has already been applied. In Barcelona, prostitution has been concentrated in the local ‘Chinatown’ since the 19th century.

In the Middle Ages, men frequently headed out into the empty fields after harvesttime with money in their pockets, because prostitutes were not allow to enter the villages and towns.

In some cities like Salamanca, home to the famous university of the same name, prostitutes were only allowed to enter certain marginal neighbourhoods, but with branches on their heads to distinguish them from the “decent” women – a practice that gave rise to the term ‘ramera’ (whore, from ‘rama’ – branch) still in use today.

In turn-of-the-century Madrid, prostitutes would not be forced to wear branches on their heads or wander the ploughed fields. But they could be restricted to certain areas, and perhaps to ‘mini- cities’ where they would be provided with healthcare – and monitored by TV cameras.

Organisations that defend the rights of prostitutes say the women feel relatively safe from attack in the proximities of the amusement park, where there are security guards and illumination. ‘Medicos del Mundo’ argues that the women have been frequenting the area for three or four years without causing problems.

Pepa Barahona contends that the pressure is motivated by racism, because most of the sex trade workers in Casa de Campo are black.

‘Medicos del Mundo’ provides services to women working as prostitutes, and guides those who wish to leave the trade towards social services that support their reinsertion in society.

With respect to the initiatives for restricting women in ‘mini- cities’, the director of the Association of Attention and Reinsertion of Prostitute Women, Rocio Nieto, stresses that in any case “it should be the prostitutes themselves who decide whether or not that should go ahead.”