Selling sex in Switzerland is easy for the human traffickers
It is 8am and the rain is coming down in sheets. The streets are empty except for a dozen women and their pimps – women from some of the world’s poorest regions including Moldova, Romania, West Africa and south-east Asia. Some are still in their teens. Not far away are massage parlours and saunas offering women and girls for sale. This is not Amsterdam or a seedy quarter of one of Asia’s megacities. It is Geneva, Switzerland, home to the World Health Organisation, the International Committee of the Red Cross and countless United Nations bodies and non-governmental organisations (NGOS) dedicated to humanitarian causes.
Human trafficking is supposed to be what they are fighting against. Yet here it is happening under their noses.
Although trafficking is illegal here, the fuel for it – prostitution – is not. According to the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), an international NGO, around 14,000 women are currently selling sex in Switzerland, with approximately
70 per cent coming from outside the famously conservative nation.
A British retired police officer, who until recently worked as a consultant for an anti-trafficking organisation, knows Geneva well. “The girls are young – maybe no older than 18, 19 – and they are all controlled in one way or another,” he says. “There is a lot of prostitution and women are trafficked in to meet the demand – the brothel owners want fresh faces, and so do the customers.”
A 2015 report by the Swiss Federal Department of Justice and Peace estimates that 125,000 Swiss men – about one in 20 – regularly purchases sex. The market is worth one billion Swiss francs (£770 million) a year.
A contact who, for several years, has worked for one of the major human rights organisations in Geneva, says the practice is common even within the charities and NGOS based there. “The men in my team literally brag about going to prostitutes,” says the source, who asks to remain anonymous. “One of the roles in the team is to raise awareness about trafficking and irregular migration, but these guys go out and abuse them without any thought.”
Taina Bien Aime, a co-director of CATW, says the Swiss government appears indifferent. “Officials hide behind the notion of choice and a woman’s consent to being bought and sold in the Swiss sex trade. But it would not take rigorous investigations to uncover that a disfranchised young Nigerian woman … would have difficulty finding Zurich or Geneva on a map, let alone purchase a one-way ticket to a brothel, or ‘sex box’, without a trafficker or pimp.”
Zurich is home to a notorious “sex performance box” zone, a drivethrough brothel. It was opened in 2013 with a grant of 2,000,000 Swiss Francs (£1.5 million) from the city. Drivers are checked at an entrance gate and then proceed in their cars to a row of 10 wooden sheds, each one with a woman in front. Some seem intoxicated, and many appear frail.
One survey of 193 prostituted women in Zurich found that more than half suffered psychiatric ailments. Alcohol dependency is also common.
The plight of these women is slowly causing some politicians to look again at the country’s liberal laws on prostitution. Ursula Nakamura-stoecklin, an advocate for those women caught up in the Swiss sex trade, says the so called “Nordic model” is proving influential.
Under this model, selling sex remains legal to ensure the women involved are not criminalised, but the act of purchasing sex becomes illegal. It switches the balance of power and makes it more difficult for gangs and pimps to operate. Since its introduction in Sweden in 1999, the incidence of trafficking and violence against women has fallen sharply.
“[Pro-choice] organisations close their eyes to the fact that around 70 per cent of the prostitutes are victims of sex trafficking. I simply cannot understand this blindness,” says Ms Nakamura-stoecklin.