Evaluation of the Prostitute Protection Act (ProstSchG)
Up until 2002, prostitution was not banned legally, but considered as immoral. Cities were able to set up restricted areas, in which prostitution is banned. Prostitution was legalized by the establishment of the Prostitution Law (ProstG) in 2002. Sex workers would be able to access pensions and other social benefits, but are also obligated to pay taxes and register their work to authorities. The Prostitute Protection Act (ProstSchG) was established in 2017, after the evaluation of the Prostitution Law (ProstG) from 2002 has shown that additional provisions - especially the protection of sex workers - are necessary. In 2023 an evaluation of the Prostitute Protection Act has started that will probably be released in 2025. The Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony (KFN), who already evaluated the updated human trafficking legislation, was hired to work on the evaluation.
The Prostitute Protection Act wants to ensure that victims of sex trafficking, forced prostitution and minor sex workers are identified and protected, by establishing mandatory registrations and health consultations. The Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony will have to identify why the actual rates for registrations are so low and how successful the law is to uncover coercive structures. The access to social insurance, which prostitution laws were supposed to make possible is still utopian for most women.
A requirement to use condoms and corresponding requirements for brothel owners are able to protect women from violence and health risks. How effective these measures actually are is still unclear. Especially the requirement to use condoms is often violated by the customers, who offer more money to be allowed to not use the condom, or they threaten the sex workers by denigrating them to their pimps or in online portals as a punishment.
The legislation of prostitution assumes that “voluntary” and “self-determined” sex work exists. But this immediately raises the question, how voluntary is defined and how economic constraints (prostitution out of poverty), emotional dependence (prostitution for a “loverboy”) and other physical forces (prostitution out of procurement) are influencing the definition of “voluntary”? The fact that about 90% of sex workers have a history of migration and stem from precarious, often uneducated environments, blurs the true definition of the term “voluntary”. Many women work in prostitution because of a real or perceived lack of alternatives.
There are obviously not enough people who participate in prostitution completely voluntarily. The system of prostitution only functions, because its workers are exploited - workers, who do not see an alternative or are easily emotionally manipulated by outer forces. Violence, coercion and human trafficking are therefore unavoidable in order to repeatedly lead people into prostitution.
The frequent changes of location of people in prostitution, some of whom make a transfer to a new city every 2-3 weeks to serve customers' desire for variety, makes the recording and support from authorities with the connections to support systems even more difficult. Authorities are hardly able to provide information and health consultations to sex workers, because the relevant services and their employees often do not have the necessary training for trauma and culturally-sensitive counseling or a lack of language skills.
These aspects show that the demands on a law of a fundamental nature can hardly be implemented with simple adjustments. One can therefore only look forward to the results of the evaluation and hope that these might lead to a rethinking of prostitution policy in Germany.
