Mega-brothels: Has Germany become 'bordello of Europe'?

 

A group of men in red and white robes stroll through the reception area. Women in high heels sit at the bar in a haze of cigarette smoke, chatting to clients and laughing.

This is Paradise, in Stuttgart, Germany - one of the largest brothels in Europe.
And it's legal.

Built at a cost of more than 6m euros (£4.9m), and opened in 2008, it boasts a restaurant, a cinema, a spa and 31 private rooms for the hundreds of male customers it attracts each day.

Germany legalised prostitution in 2002, creating an industry now thought to be worth 16bn euros a year.

By treating prostitution as a job like any other, the idea was to prise women away from the pimps that often run the sex trade.

Pension schemes
 
Sex workers in Germany can now pay into a pension and demand health insurance.

"You feel safe and you have security. It's not like the street where you don't know what happens with a man," said 22-year-old Hannah, who arrived in Stuttgart after two years working in a brothel in Berlin.

But critics say Germany's liberal approach with its sex laws has spectacularly failed, normalising prostitution and turning the country into what they are now calling the "bordello of Europe.

The number of prostitutes in Germany is thought to have doubled to 400,000 over the last 20 years.

 

 

The market is now dominated by "mega-brothels", which offer sex on an almost industrial scale, often to tourists, many of them bussed in from abroad.

Many of the women working at Paradise Stuttgart are from Eastern European countries such as Romania and Bulgaria.

The feminist Alice Schwarzer has led a campaign for Germany to reverse course on its prostitution laws and copy the approach in Sweden, where it is illegal to buy sexual services but not to sell them.

This means a man caught with a prostitute faces a heavy fine or prosecution, but the woman does not.
That model has slowly been gaining ground across Europe and is now being seriously considered in seven countries, most notably France