RIGHTS-SPAIN: Double Standards for Sex Trade, a Booming Business

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Dec 5 2001 (IPS) - The sex trade is a booming business in Spain, where it involves around 300,000 people – mainly immigrant women – and moves more than 10 billion dollars a year, according to a report presented by police commissioner Manuel Javier Peña. However, activists complain of double moral standards.

Sex trade workers go into business on their own, in “alternes” or escort services, as street walkers working for prostitution rackets, or through paid ads in the newspapers.

The lowest rung is occupied by those who offer their services on the streets or in city squares or parks.

Working in the sex trade on one’s own is legal in Spain, but procuring or soliciting clients for a prostitute is a criminal offence.

In practice, however, the police harass the poorest sex trade workers, who are mainly immigrant women, by repeatedly asking to see their identity documents.

And local residents of areas where prostitutes work the streets hold public demonstrations to protest what they consider a “bad example” for their children, or declining real estate values caused by the presence of the sex trade workers.

In the meantime, page after page of explicit ads are published by newspapers, from the conservative ABC to the influential El Pais and El Mundo, through provincial and local publications across this country of 40 million.

El Pais, for example, publishes around 1,000 such ads every day, while ABC does not hesitate to place classifieds reading “Belén, 20-year-old student with incredible measurements…I’ll do everything you teach me”, or “Vipagency, sensual young ladies, hotels, housecalls, apartments, dinners, trips.”

But some of the ads are misleading.

One of the tricks is to publish telephone numbers that start with the 906 prefix, in which the phone-call is charged to the caller. Readers are invited to phone a woman who writes that “my husband is cuckolding me”, “Jorge, only for women, very discreet”, or “sexy blonde seeks sporadic relationship.”

Those who call the 906 numbers will find their conversations stretched out with questions, offers or jokes, without any actual meeting being agreed on in the end – and a bulky telephone bill to show for the experience.

Peña, police commissioner of La Coruña, the biggest city in Galicia, a province in the northwestern corner of the Iberian peninsula, presented his report at the International Forum on Prostitution, in late November.

The report documents the existence of around 1,000 “alterne” services in Spain, and estimates the number of sex trade workers, mainly women, at 300,000. Half of them are Colombian, 10 percent come from eastern Europe, and six percent are from Nigeria, said Peña.

Commissioner Peña argued at the forum that if the sex trade were regulated, the state could take in significant revenues in the form of taxes.

Women’s groups like Hetaira, which defends sex trade workers, complained that there were double moral standards in Spain, where one hand punishes prostitutes while the other dials the phone numbers offered in ads published in the “relax” section of newspapers.

Concha García, with Hetaira, complained of the refusal to “recognise that what (prostitutes) do is a job, which means they have rights both as individuals and as workers.”

Hetaira and other groups demand that in the Casa de Campo, a huge park in Madrid, lighting be installed as well as roofed areas for when it rains and other services for sex workers who ply their trade there, often on the grass or in the cars of clients.

On the other hand, Ana Migues, the head of Alecrin, a research centre in Galicia that focuses on women’s issues, maintained that “prostitution is sexual slavery, not a job.”

To back her argument, Migues pointed out that the relationship between a sex worker and her client was not a relationship between equals, “but submission of a woman to a man.”

She also stated that “not one single prostitute wants her daughter to follow in her footsteps.”

In Migues’ view, legalising prostitution would amount to endorsing a kind of mercantilism between human beings and one more way of infringing the human rights of women.

Médicos del Mundo-Spain, a non-governmental organisation that has provided health care to and compiled stastics on thousands of sex workers, found that 88 percent were women, eight percent transvestites and transexuals, and four percent men.

The study presented by the group added that one in four people involved in the sex trade had suffered some kind of aggression, while 68 percent presented symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome.