Welcome to Paradise: inside the world of legalised prostitution

Welcome to Paradise: inside the world of legalised prostitution: "Forced prostitution comes in many guises. Some women are kidnapped, others are tricked with the promise of jobs as nannies or waitresses. Others choose to work as prostitutes but have no idea of the conditions that await them. Often, a woman’s pimps or traffickers are people from her own town. They know where her family lives and aren’t afraid of harming them in order to control her. Sometimes it’s the families who pressure girls into prostitution in the first place - unable, or unwilling, to think of another way for a woman to earn a living.

Hermann Müller knows that some of the women working in Pascha have pimps, “but [the pimps] are not allowed to come in the club,” he says. If a woman asks them for help, they put her in touch with the police. “Two weeks ago,” he says running his hands over his close-cropped hair, “a girl said to our manager that some guy wanted to have money from her because he drove her from Romania to Germany. And then he wanted to have money from her every week or something.” Pascha called the authorities and the girl went with them. Müller’s not too sure where.

Hopefully, she wound up somewhere like Solwodi. Lea Ackermann is the “foundress” of Solwodi, a charity with 16 counselling centres and seven shelters in Germany for victims of sex trafficking or forced marriage. She’s travelled the world with her work and exudes warmth, kindness and wisdom. It’s like talking to a Disney grandmother, only one who is telling the most terrible stories.

She tells me about a 17-year-old Russian - let’s call her Klara – whose father had fallen ill. The family was getting desperate for money so when Klara saw a newspaper advert offering temporary work as a prostitute in Germany, “she thought, ‘it will be awful but for three months I can bear it.’ And then she was raped by several men the night she arrived to “get her ready” for prostitution. They took her passport. There was another girl there who wouldn’t do something a customer wanted and they broke a bottle, a glass bottle, and raped her with that. She was cut inside. It was shown to all the others.” Klara was trapped there for four years."



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