- Title: GERMANY: SOCCER / FOOTBALL - Germany's sex industry gears up for World Cup
- Date: 10th May 2006
- Summary: PAN: OF "WORLD CUP ROOM' / CLOSE UP: AMUSING WORLD CUP FOOTBALL (2 SHOTS)
- Embargoed: 25th May 2006 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Germany
- Country: Germany
- Topics: Sports,Travel / Tourism
- Reuters ID: LVADD178LNL4472MP1TTYEHEJBZC
- Story Text: The combination of riveting World Cup soccer matches and crowds of beer-swilling males means hefty profits for Germany's sex industry, which will deploy an army of prostitutes to satisfy the needs of libidinous fans.
Some one million foreign visitors are expected to flood into Germany to watch the 2006 World Cup from June 9 to July 9 and many in the horizontal economy expect large numbers of male spectators to wind down after a match in the arms of a prostitute or in the red light districts of the 12 host cities.
In Cologne the manager of the 'Pascha' nightclub Armin Lobscheid is expecting to be very busy.
"I expect to have a lot of international guests in Cologne, a lot of whom I hope to welcome at our establishment. We are looking forward to a nice World Cup and a lot of clients," he said.
Lobscheid has created special soccer themed rooms for clients who want to spend the night.
Hamburg's St. Pauli quarter, the country's largest and most famous red light district, is bubbling with optimism that randy soccer fans from around the globe will bring a bumper season.
Nightclub owners in Hamburg expect 30 percent more punters to stroll into their establishment. Police estimates from across the country confirm their hopes.
While red light employers in Hamburg are already busy recruiting fresh talent, the capital Berlin is also gearing up for the sex industry boom times.
Hosting six of the 64 World Cup games, the city saw a new giant brothel laden with tiger prints and plush red curtains open last autumn, just down the road from the World Cup stadium.
Unlike Sweden, where prostitution is a crime, sex workers in Germany can get health insurance, join the services union Verdi and pay into a pension plan. Surveys from outreach groups put the number of those working as full- or part-time prostitutes at around 400,000.
With an increasing proportion of sex workers in Germany being foreigners -- 60 percent in 2005, up from 50 percent in 2001 -- this number is likely to increase during the World Cup.
Around half of the migrant sex workers come from central and eastern Europe like the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.
The expected upsurge in the so called "Bordsteinschwalben" -- a term for street-walkers that literally means "curb swallows" -- has also sparked fears amid Germans that a flood of women will be trafficked in and forced to work as slave prostitutes against their will.
According to the International Labour Organization (ILO) some 15,000 victims of trafficking work in Germany at any given time. ILO researcher Norbert Cyrus estimates that two thirds of them women of whom 90 percent end up in prostitution.
But the number of 40,000 women to be smuggled into the country as World Cup sex slaves, which circulated widely through German media over the past months, is dismissed as grossly exaggerated by experts and outreach groups.
"Of course we have to take into consideration that some of the women who will come here are victims of human trafficking. But I don't think it will be a majority. I don't believe that," said Andrea Hitzke, of Dortmund's Prostitutes' Help Centre "Midnight Mission".
More than 20 campaigns from posters to flyers and cinema spots will be launched across Germany in 2006 to boost awareness on the part of existing and potential sex-industry customers. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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