Convicted sex offenders in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia were granted permission to visit prostitutes in brothels as part of their “therapy”.

The Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe (LWL) confirmed reports from German media that patients of a psychiatry clinic in the penal system of Lippstadt-Eickelborn were allowed to visit brothels, although the prostitutes themselves were not informed of the programme, Kronen Zeitung reports.

The visits were allegedly allowed in order for the sex offenders to gain experience with women and is not the first time such a policy has been implemented in Germany in the recent past.

According to the paper, the Osnabrück penal system in Lower Saxony tried a similar method in 2001, inviting a prostitute to a psychiatric clinic as part of an experiment to allow intellectually impaired sex offenders practice sexual intercourse without violence.

Both the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the party of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the Green Party announced they would be submitting inquiries in Lower Saxony over the revelations.

Asylum Seeker Sentenced After Trying to Pay Prostitute with Photocopied Cash

https://t.co/EqkejDewRu — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) December 1, 2017

Prostitution is a legal practice in Germany but is still largely associated with gang crime and people trafficking.

In October of last year, German police raided gangs suspected of people trafficking in four different states in the Rhineland, Westphalia, Saarland, and Berlin. In North Rhine-Westphalia alone, police say around 10,000 people may be working for Arab clans linked to prostitution and drug trafficking.

Along with people trafficking, prostitution has attracted many asylum seekers in recent years, with Germany seeing a particular problem with underage asylum seekers selling their bodies for cash or for drugs.

In 2017, journalists Natalie Amiri and Anna Tillack spoke to a man in Berlin who claimed that men would engage ins ex acts with asylum seeker children in the asylum home where he stayed for as little as a pack of cigarettes while the asylum home workers would turn the other way.

Arab and Kurdish Crime Clans ‘Systematically Recruiting’ Refugees in Merkel’s Germany https://t.co/iNcQJwU4lK — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) October 16, 2018