These stories are why I feel so conflicted as to how the law should treat prostitution. In an ideal world, sex workers would all be emancipated, consenting, adult entrepreneurs, and their clients would be just that, their clients.

Then I read stories like these, and even in a country where prostituion is not as illegalized as elsewhere -Germany in my case- I know who looks into the working conditions of the women in this trade - no one. Big brothels are increasingly common and replacing smaller brothels actually lead by the sex workers themselves without the insertion of a pimp, and that too is a result of legalization. There's a brothel in Berlin where they offered a flat rate, 50 bucks for an entire night and as "many women as you want" - and women there worked until they fainted from exhaustion. Imagine having to have sex with clients until you faint because your body can't take it anymore! And as this artcle shows, that is by far not one of the worst stories out there.

And what about the "clients" of those who are being trafficked and coerced? When you have sex "with" a woman for a few bucks, and she has bruises, or a tatoo like the above, or is so exhausted she can't walk, what does that make you? In my eyes it makes you a rapist, because no, it doesn't make a moral difference to me wether you coerced or beat up her yourself or if you pay someone else a small fee for it!

It's depressing that all the things that could be done are way too high maintenance in the eyes of our societies, and the infrastructure and legislative work that would have to be done to part sex workers and the slaves of the 21st century, and legalize the former while free the latter, is apparently too expensive and no one's really interested. Legalizing alone didn't help that much here - it harmed, at least in this city, the self employed or safely employed sex workers as well as the trafficked.