A male who identifies as a “woman” appeared in court this week after paying to sexually abuse a 14-year-old girl. The court ultimately acknowledged the girl was a “prostitute” and the buyer hadn’t seen the transaction as unethical.
The trans-identified male, 31, met the girl in June of last year and paid her €100 (approx. $106 USD) for sexual services in a transaction that was brokered by a third party, local news reported. According to court discussions, the victim “had been working as a prostitute since she was 13,” and as the man in question was himself involved in the sex industry, it was claimed that he had merely “used the services of a younger colleague.”
The situation first came to light after it was reported to authorities by a local youth welfare office, which acted as a joint plaintiff on behalf of the child. However, the girl, now 15 years of age, did not want to participate in the trial, and her mother was reportedly uninterested in the case and didn’t offer her testimony. It is unclear how the case came to the attention of authorities.
While the age of consent is 14 in Germany, an individual must be over the age of 18 to enter the sex trade. Thus, the child’s age in this case does not appear to have been the more serious factor, and instead the concern was with the transactional nature of the sexual exchange.
Though the legal counsel agreed that the situation was abnormal, all involved, including the prosecutor, unanimously requested that the man be required to only pay a fine. After he confessed to paying the child for sex, he was handed a fine of €3150 (approx. $3,300 USD), to be paid to the state.
Due to Germany’s extremely strict privacy laws, the identity of the trans-identified male is not known at this time. However, he was recorded as a “woman” for the purposes of the criminal complaint, and was addressed by feminine pronouns in court.
The sex trade in Germany is fully legalized, and its widespread acceptance has led to the country earning the title of the “the brothel of Europe.”
Speaking to Reduxx on the case of the 14-year-old girl, Elly Arrow explained that children are considered “lucrative” for prostitution agencies, and fetch a higher price due to their lower age. Arrow is a German advocate for the abolition of the sex industry, and has been documenting German sex buyers since 2018.
“Legal ‘escort agencies’ repeatedly traffic minors using false papers if authorities show up… which they may well never do as there usually has to be a report to activate them,” Arrow says. “Our age of consent is 14, so strong restriction for the minors will and freedom need to be demonstrated in order to even charge and convict. De facto child rape is legal in Germany starting at age 14 as conviction rates are so incredibly low.”
Arrow expresses “disgust” at the court’s ruling, but explains it is a facet of a wider issue in Germany with the widespread normalization of what is commonly referred to as “sex work,” a legitimized field of employment.
“It is not uncommon to hear survivors say ‘I entered sex work at 14,’ and to react negatively if you suggests that they did not make a choice and that it is neither sex nor labour,” Arrow says, pointing to the utilization of normalizing language by academics, media, and even social workers.
“There are more and more social workers in Germany speaking the ‘sex work’ language and teaching [or] mirroring it to the exploited minors they interact with. The media helps by adopting the same language and narrative. In this example, calling the child a ‘colleague’ of their adult rapist.”
The sex trade in Germany is so massively normalized that there have been confirmed cases of men convicted of sexual violence being granted official permission to visit brothels with the explicit intention of “accumulating experience with women.”
In one program, which the Osnabrück Forensic Psychiatric Center has been running since 2001, women in the sex trade were invited to “aid” convicted rapists in learning about sexual consent.
Official organizations in Germany representing prostitutes have also made a recent push to re-brand the industry as an “essential service” in the same category as nursing and therapy with necessary “healing” powers.
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