Spanish deputies agreed on Tuesday to consider a bill on prostitution tabled by Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialists in order to, among other things, penalize clients, an issue that divides the left in power.
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In a country where prostitution benefits from a legal vagueness allowing a multitude of brothels to be authorized or tolerated, this text responds to Mr. Sanchez’s promise to “abolish” prostitution.
But it arouses opposition from part of the left, certain feminist movements and associations for the defense of sex workers who advocate the regulation of prostitution and believe that such a law would only favor networks of pimps. .
This bill aims in particular to penalize customers as other European countries such as France, the United Kingdom, Norway and Sweden have already done.
If it is adopted, they could be sentenced to fines of several thousand euros and to prison terms if the prostitute is a minor.
The Socialists also want to toughen the arsenal against pimping, understood as any form of “domination” over a prostitute, with penalties ranging from three to six years in prison, compared to two to five currently, and fines of several thousand dollars. euros.
The fact of providing premises to a prostitute would also become an aggravating circumstance for a pimp, while the lucrative “exploitation” relationship, now criminally necessary, will no longer be so, which will also make it possible to prosecute relatives of prostitutes.
This text also aims to grant prostitutes the status of victims and the rights to assistance that go with it.
Created last year, the first Spanish union of sex workers Otras judged that the text of the socialists was “not abolitionist but prohibitionist” and that “prohibitions created mafias”. “These measures lead us to disappear without any type of help being provided to us,” he added.
Official estimates range from 45,000 to 120,000 prostitutes in Spain. The majority are in an irregular situation.
According to a survey by a public institute dating from 2008, the latest on this subject, almost a third (32.1%) of Spanish men have already resorted to prostitution.
The Socialists initially wanted to introduce these measures via an amendment to the flagship Explicit Sexual Consent Bill, called “only a yes is a yes” and passed first reading by MPs last week.
But faced with the lack of consensus with their radical left partners in Podemos on prostitution, they finally decided to submit a bill solely on this subject.
