Reports & Summaries
Men who pay for sex in Germany and what they teach us about the failure of legal prostitution
Full Article Title: Men who pay for sex in Germany and what they teach us about the failure of legal prostitution: A 6-country report on the sex trade from the perspective of the socially invisible ‘freiers’.
Open Access: Yes.
Abstract
This research was a 6-country study (Germany, Cambodia, USA, Scotland, UK, India) with 1.5-hour in person interviews of 763 sex buyers, including 96 freiers in Germany [a ‘freier’ is a man who buys sex, or a ‘john’]. In these anonymous interviews, sex buyers provided candid information about prostitution and trafficking that mirrored decades of testimony from exited prostitution survivors. Using the extensive quantitative and qualitative data collected for this research, we want to shed light on some crucial questions about prostitution. Does legal prostitution make prostitution safer? Does legal prostitution reduce violence against women in prostitution? Does legal prostitution reduce sex trafficking? Does legal prostitution reduce organized crime control of the sex trade? Are sex buyers more likely to report trafficking if prostitution is legal? Does legal prostitution prevent or reduce rape?
Relevance
More than one-half of all sex buyers in Germany and other countries view pornography at least once a week or more often. These men reported viewed pornography that involved animals, torture, strangulation, and murder. The more frequent viewers of pornography also reported buying more sex and being more sexually aggressive towards women, including coercing or physically forcing women to have sex, or certainly types of sex, and rape.
Citation
Farley, M., Kleine, I., Neuhaus, K., McDowell, Y., Schulz, S., & Nitschmann, S. (2022). Men who pay for sex in Germany and what they teach us about the failure of legal prostitution: A 6-country report on the sex trade from the perspective of the socially invisible ‘freiers’. Prostitution Research & Education, San Francisco. https://prostitutionresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Sex-buyersEnglish-11-8-2022pdf.pdf
