ClairefromClare
Give 'em Helen!
Flaccid economies lead to lay-offs in Europe's brothels
- Allan Hall, Berlin
- December 11, 2008
THE red lights are going out across Europe as prostitution falls victim to the credit crunch.
- Credit crunch hits brothels
- Income down one-fifth
- No longer recession-proof
From Amsterdam to Zagreb, bordello owners report a slump in profits that not even offers of free Viagra can restore.
In what was once seen as a recession-proof industry, income is down by an average of 20 per cent at brothels across the continent.
Egbert Krumeich, manager of Artemis, the largest brothel in Berlin, said the recession had helped dent revenue massively last month — for some reason the peak season for Germany's sex trade.
In the Czech Republic, where prostitution operates in a legal grey zone but is largely tolerated, the sex industry is big business, generating $A760 million, much of it from British visitors, according to Mag Consulting, a tourism research company in Prague that studies the sex industry.
Jaromir Beranek, the director of Mag, said that when Germany and Britain, the two countries that send the most tourists to Prague, began to stagnate, sex tourism was affected too.
Brothels have started laying off working girls while the shutters go up on the larger bordellos.
Near the border with Germany, many towns long blighted by a daily influx of sex tourists are pleased at the decline in business. A few years ago, the small Czech town of Dubi was so overrun by prostitution an orphanage was opened to provide refuge for dozens of unwanted babies of prostitutes and their German clients.
Sex could be bought for as little as £3.50 ($7.90). Now 40 brothels in town have shrunk to just four — the others have turned into golf shops or goulash restaurants.
"Two or three years ago, we would get 1000 men coming here for sex on a Friday night, which is a lot for a town of 8000 people," said Mayor Petr Pipal. "The one good thing about the economic crisis is that it has impacted so severely on the sex trade."
Jan-Phillip Buergermann, a brothel owner in Frankfurt, said: "I have offered free Viagra, free porn and cut the rates of the girls by 40 per cent, but business is down 45 per cent — it's really terrible."
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