January 31, 2021

Will Spain abolish sex work?

By Jennifer O’Mahony

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez made a surprise announcement at the Socialist Party’s conference in October: his government wants to criminalise sex work before his government’s mandate ends in 2023. “We will move forward by abolishing the prostitution that enslaves women,” he declared to cheers in the city of Valencia.

Although this shift to abolition was initially proposed in 2018, few had expected Sanchez to hold firm on a policy that lacks support from Unidas Podemos, the far-left party that is the junior member of the Sanchez coalition government, and even divides his own side. Sanchez also requires the support of smaller parties from the Spanish regions to get bills through parliament, and none of them are favourable to full abolition.

Abolition for the Spanish Socialists means criminalising people who pay for sex and those who profit from its proceeds, and offering sex workers alternative employment opportunities.

But parties across the Spanish political spectrum are opposed to this policy for many reasons, considering it variously unworkable, likely to leave former sex workers in an even more precarious position financially, or ideologically opposed to intervening in the market.

Heloísa Marques for Impact x Les Glorieuses

There is a near-universal acknowledgement that the majority of sex workers (more than 80% according to the Interior Ministry) are employed by the sex industry in Spain because they were forced into it upon arriving from another country — mainly from Romania and Latin American nations. But consensus on how, or if, the state should regulate sex work remains absent.

It was Spain’s Socialists themselves who decriminalised sex work in 1995, and one of the unexpected results of that decision was a boom in unregulated brothels. Offences linked to exploitation and human trafficking in sex work remain illegal, but flourish behind nominally legal closed doors.

The lack of legal clarity on selling sex in private venues has turned out to be highly lucrative. Black market tracker Havocscope estimates revenue from the industry to be worth $26.5 billion in Spain, second only to China globally. There is also a significant amount of sex tourism on Spain’s northern border, as French laws on buying and selling sex are much stricter.

Drive down any road out of your average Spanish town and before long you will notice neon signs displaying beacons for “amor” and “chicas” on large buildings without any windows, but with dedicated parking out front. These are bars that also function as brothels, and those who own them cannot take a cut of sex workers’ pay (pimping remains illegal), but instead profit from “renting” rooms used by punters. The last time police did an audit in 2013, they found 1,693 such clubs operating across Spain.

Pilar Álvarez, gender correspondent for the El País newspaper, says that the Socialists consider prostitution to be “incompatible with human rights and gender equality” and will achieve abolition by focusing on prosecuting clients, pimps and third-party profiteers like brothel owners, and by offering women “a way out.”

Sex worker-led organisations oppose the proposed policy, which they say has not been conceived with the participation of sex workers.

“Nobody has asked the women who practice prostitution in Spain about what we want, or how,” said Conxa Borrell, Secretary-General of the OTRAS sex workers’ union.

“We are women of flesh and blood, strong, brave, and left suffering from institutional violence,” Borrell said. “Do they want to be feminist and progressive? Then let them prove that they are and agree to have formal and regular meetings with plans tailored to every need and every sector.”

Spain already has a citizen security law that criminalises clients and sex workers indiscriminately if they are buying or selling sex in a public place where minors could be present. Between 2015 and 2020, 2,060 fines were handed out, according to El País, though it does not break down which group received more penalties.

The main political opposition, the conservative People’s Party (PP), accuses the Socialists of getting ahead of themselves when the party has “not been able to approve a comprehensive plan to combat trafficking in women and girls,” which it wants to be sorted first.

Unidas Podemos, which controls Spain’s Gender and Equality Ministry, declined to include penalising men who buy sex in an upcoming piece of legislation tackling sexual coercion and violence informally known as the “Only Yes Means Yes” law, arguing it ends up hurting sex workers instead. In a concession to its Socialist partners, the party did agree to penalise the brothel owners who profit from sexual exploitation with three years in prison.

Nationalist parties from Catalonia (a Spanish region with a large presence of sex workers) argue this could make things worse for women who would have nowhere else to go, forcing them into more vulnerable situations.

Ciudadanos, a centrist party with a libertarian streak, says any new law must differentiate between “real victims” and men and women who are exercising their right to make a living through selling sex.

There is a renewed focus on sex trafficking, which is being analysed in another new law, but this runs into another legal grey area in Spain where a rigid bureaucracy and legal loopholes allow exploitation to flourish: the treatment of migrants.

NGOs have called on the government to simplify residency and citizenship procedures that condemn many non-Europeans to living and working in Spain illegally for years without access to basic services while earning well below the minimum wage. Even if sex workers were to leave the industry, groups like Médicos del Mundo say, access to work and housing would be extremely difficult for this largely non-Spanish population because of bureaucratic barriers.

Migrant sex workers “arrive in a Europe that is full of talk about human rights, but puts these women in a situation of precarity right from their arrival onto our territory,” Borrell said.

– Jennifer O’Mahony is a journalist and producer based in Madrid.

– Heloísa Marques is a visual artist whose principal mediums are embroidery and collage.