Europe’s largest brothel, Club Paradise, has just opened in Spain, where no fewer than 39% of men admit to visiting sex workers.
According to an article in the Independent, Club Paradise has 280 sex workers, making it the biggest brothel in Europe.
A United Nations study reports that 39% of all Spanish men have used a prostitute’s services at least once and a Spanish Health Ministry survey in 2009 put the percentage of one-time prostitute users at 32%.
Prostitution is very popular in Spain, with an estimated 300,000 prostitutes.
Another “club” (brothels are listed as “nightclubs” in the Spanish yellow pages), the Don Jose, is three storeys high, and consists of no fewer than 70 sex workers.
A frequent visitor, “Alvaro”, says that business is booming: “These days in the afternoons and early evenings, you’ll get businessmen who’ve told their wives they’re at meetings.
“Then later on, there are hordes of 18 or 19 year olds, just there to have a laugh and, if they want, have a quick lay as well.”
According to studies carried out for the Spanish Association for the Social Reintegration of Female Prostitutes (Apramp), the clientele for these brothels is changing.
In 1998 the typical client was a 40 year old married male but by 2005 the average age had dropped to 30 – and it appears to be decreasing.
The problem of sexual trafficking seems to be largely ignored.
In 2009 alone, Spain’s Ministry of the Interior detected 17 international crime rings involved in sexual trafficking in Spain.
Between January and April of this year, the authorities identified 493 cases of women sold into sexual slavery.
It seems the larger these brothels become, the more prostitution permeates the mainstream of society as it is deemed more and more socially acceptable.
Even the more serious newspapers carry adverts for prostitutes.
“The kids are going because they see it as a quick way of getting what would take a lot longer to happen if they went to a disco,” Alvaro says.
“You’ve got the money, you choose the woman you want and it’s all over and done with.”
Marta Gonzalez, spokeswomen for the Madrid-based NGO Proyecto Esperanza, which helps women who have been victims of trafficking, says: “There is a clear lack of awareness as to what is going on. Clients don’t realise that many of these women could be victims of trafficking.
“Lots of people would be more wary if the prostitutes were clearly under lock and key or had obviously been subject to physical abuse.
“They don’t realise that all it takes is a death threat to their families back in Nigeria or Brazil, and the woman is already being coerced into prostitution.”
I disagree that many clients in brothels don’t know there is a likelihood they are using a trafficked woman – I lived in Spain for 3 years and the ‘clubs’ are visibly dotted along the highway and everyone knows what they are. There is plenty of articles in the newspaper and on TV about the problems of migration – including forced migration etc.
I think people seem to be unable to differentiate between wilful ignorance and indifference on the part of men – which is why ignorance used to be no defence in the eyes of the law – everyone would use it as an excuse. This seems to be where we now are with gender crimes … It feels a bit like Nazi Germany, with everyone turning away from the thick smoke billowing out of the ‘prison camp’ and not wondering how it is that so many keep going in, but no one comes out.
I agree Vicky – I don’t think the men care whether the women are trafficked or not – even thinking about the prostitutes as real human beings would get in the way of the fantasies that they employ to convince themselves that what they are doing is acceptable. As for thinking any further about whether the women are from – absolutely no way.
I did some training in psychotherapy and wonder whether, with 20 years of grooming by the lads mags, the majority of men see women as animals rather than human – highly evolved animals but animals nevertheless which is why it is so easy to ignore our human rights and our experience of their behaviour, because subconsciously they do not regard us as human because we are not men. Hence the undermining and dismissing of women’s opinions and experiences and the lowering of our visibility in the media apart from as on heat, as a murderer or cheat or as a victim of some hideous crime that normally requires most of our clothes to be ripped off. This continuous mixing of sex and violence must blur the boundaries in most men’s minds until one overtakes the other in the way it did with Pavlov’s dog – first the food prompted the saliva and then it became the bell… I wonder if this is what is at the bottom of the burgeoning level of violence in porn and domestic violence (up 42% in the last year alone, along with reported rape in London around the same leap too)?