Turns Men Into Perpetrators

The study on sex buyers by Nicola Döring et al. reads like a study on the risk of infection for people who come into contact with pathogens. However, these men are not coming into contact with pesticides in agriculture but rather with women in prostitution, who are completely ignored in this article (1). The authors of this article have not read up enough on this topic, yet they position themselves against a progressive prostitution policy, namely the so-called “Nordic Model” (2), which criminalizes sex buyers and is long overdue in Germany.

Sex buyers are not men living in isolation: the majority of these men are in relationships and/or are married (3). Sex buyers find themselves in a generalized and systematic lie: they deny the reality of life for women in prostitution, and they do not believe that they can control their sexuality. Buying sex does not solve men’s problems but rather distances them from women and turns them into perpetrators.

There are no “nice” clients. Every client ignores the needs of the prostituted women. She is dehumanized and reduced to a sexual object. This gives the sex buyer access to all forms of unscrupulousness. Sex buyers know about the distress of the women. But they don’t care. Legal purchase of sex provides a catalyst for forced prostitution, pimping, and human trafficking and has made Germany into the brothel of Europe.

The normalization of buying sex increases violence against women in society as a whole, and the risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder is more than twice as high for women in prostitution as for soldiers who go to war (4).