How liberal prostitution laws have made Switzerland a hub for sex trafficking

It is 8am and the rain is coming down in sheets. The streets are empty except for a dozen women and their pimps – women from some of the world’s poorest regions including Moldova, Romania, West Africa and Southeast Asia. Some are still in their teens.

Not far away are numerous massage parlors and saunas offering women and girls for sale. There is a ‘drive-through’ brothel and, in 2016, a local businessman applied to the city authorities for a license to open a “fellatio cafe”.

The cafe has yet to open, but the application stated that for 50 Swiss francs (£40), customers would be able to choose a woman from photographs on an iPad menu, before ordering sex with their cappuccino.

This is not Amsterdam or a seedy quarter of one Asia’s megacities. It is Geneva, Switzerland, home to the World Health Organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross and countless other UN bodies and NGOs dedicated to humanitarian causes.

Human trafficking and modern slavery are supposed to be what they are fighting against. Yet here it is happening at scale right under their noses.

Switzerland is a primary (as opposed to a transit) destination for women being trafficked into the sex trade. Victims originate mainly from Central and Eastern Europe, but also from Thailand, Nigeria, China, Brazil, Cameroon, the Dominican Republic and Morocco.

Although trafficking is illegal, the fuel for it - prostitution - is not. Until 2013, it was perfectly legal here to pay for sex with 16-year-old girls. Now it’s 18 and the trade is booming.

According to the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), an international NGO, around 14,000 women are currently selling sex in Switzerland, with approximately 70 per cent coming outside the famously conservative nation.  

Prosecutions are rare but two years ago a woman was convicted of trafficking 80 Thai women into Switzerland who were sent to brothels in Bern, Solothurn, Lucerne, Basel, St. Gallen and Zurich. Like hundreds, perhaps thousands of others, they were kept under lock and key and forced to service local men to pay off their “travel debt”.

One who, aged 20, was taken from her home in Romania into a brothel in Basel and who now volunteers for an NGO in Zurich said she had been regularly beaten. “The men in Switzerland are much richer and more educated than our men, but [they] are the same with us. They abuse us and think they can because they pay.”

The country’s willingness to see women trafficked and sold on its streets in broad daylight flies in the face of its reputation as a place of sanctuary.

A retired British police officer who until recently worked as a consultant for an anti-trafficking organisation, knows Geneva well and has led a number of operations to disrupt international trafficking in Europe. He has worked in what used to be known as “vice” for 30 years.

“The girls are young, maybe no older than 18, 19, and they are all controlled in one way or another”, he said.

“There is a lot of trafficking here because there is a lot of prostitution, and women are trafficked in to meet the demand – the brothel owners want fresh faces, and so do the customers.”

It would be a mistake to think the men paying for sexual services are confined to an underclass. A 2015 report by the Swiss Federal Department of Justice and Peace estimates that 125,000 Swiss men – about one in 20 – regularly purchase sex. The market is worth 1 billion Swiss francs (£770 million) a year.

I meet a contact who, for several years, has worked for one of the major human rights organisations in Geneva. They would lose their job if exposed as a whistleblower and likely be vilified by colleagues and informally blacklisted from other jobs within the sector.

Jay (not their real name) says “Friday night is known as ‘ho’ night” in the office. “The men in my team literally brag about going to prostitutes. One of the roles in the team is to raise awareness about trafficking and irregular migration, but these guys go out and abuse them without any thought.”

Jay recalls once confronting a colleague who was bragging in the office about a night he had enjoyed with an “oversexed Romanian”, asking how he knew that she was not trafficked or pressured into prostitution.

“We don’t have sex with the trafficked ones, just the ones that want to be there,” was the reply. “How do you know whether they are trafficked?” Jay persisted. “We ask them,” he said.

There was another incident when several colleagues visited a brothel en masse. “They were bragging that five of them had sex with one woman in this place, and that she could not speak any English. When they were leaving, the woman was crying. One of the men said, without any self-awareness whatsoever, that she was probably upset because she wanted one of us to take her home.”

The legal definition of prostitution in Geneva is “the act of selling sex.” The buyer is all but invisible, both in legislation and public awareness.

Taina Bien Aime, co-director of CATW, describes the the Swiss government’s indifference to the suffering of trafficked and prostituted women as “abhorrent”.

“Officials hide behind the notion of choice and a woman’s consent to being bought and sold in the Swiss sex trade. But it would not take rigorous investigations to uncover that a disenfranchised young Nigerian woman from Edo state, for example, would have difficulty finding Zurich or Geneva on a map, let alone purchasing a one-way ticket to a brothel or a ‘sex box’ without a trafficker or pimp owning her fate.”

It is not just Geneva that provides a marketplace in Switzerland for trafficked women and girls. In Zurich I stay at a hotel within walking distance of the notorious “sex performance box” zone, a the drive-thru brothel on the outskirts of the city.

Opened in 2013 with a grant of 2,000,000 Swiss Francs (£1.5 million) from the city, it is one of the most depressing – and scary – places I have ever been despite the order and opulence of the city that houses it. Prices are around 50 Swiss francs (£38)  for “hand relief” and full sex is twice that.

A taxi driver takes me to the fenced off area which is about the size of a football pitch. Drivers are checked at an entrance gate and then proceed in their cars to a row of 10 wooden sheds, like British beach huts, each one with one with a woman in front.

Some seem intoxicated, and many appear frail. Prostitution takes a terrible toll on women’s physical and mental health. One survey of 193 prostituted women in Zurich found that more than 50 per cent suffered psychiatric ailments such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders and psychosis. Alcohol dependency is also common.

I watch as customers wave woman into their cars. Once picked-up, they drive further round the compound before pulling into the “boxes” – parking bays which have walls on either side to provide a degree of privacy.

Each one is lit up in red, green or yellow and posters advocating safe sex decorate the walls. They contain nothing but a panic button and a waste bin for customers to dispose of condoms and tissues once they have had sex in their cars.

No one from the organisation which runs the facility is able to speak to me, and I am not allowed to approach either the women or the customers. I am handed the leaflets given to the women who work there including versions in Spanish, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Romanian.

Ella, now living in Spain, worked in the drive through when it first opened five years ago. “One man who bought me said it was like buying a burger from a drive-in, and he thought that was funny but it is like that.”

The plight of trafficked women like Ella is slowly causing some politicians in Switzerland to question its liberal laws on prostitution.

Rather than contain STIs and violence against women, there is growing international evidence to suggest they are as likely to magnify and spread it as the market expands and pimps turn to trafficking to meet demand.

Ursula Nakamura-Stoecklin, a retired medical professional and advocate for women caught in the Swiss sex trade, says the experience of countries like Sweden, France and Northern Ireland which have adopted the so called ‘Nordic model’ for the regulation of prostitution is proving influential.

Under the Nordic model, selling sex remains legal to ensure the women involved are not criminalised but the act of purchasing sex is made illegal. It switches the balance of power to the women and makes it more difficult for gangs and pimps to operate. Since its introduction in Sweden in 1999, the incidence of trafficking and violence against women has fallen sharply.

“The debate about sex-work versus abolition is boiling in Switzerland at the moment,” says Mrs Nakamura-Stoecklin.

“These [pro-prostitution] organisations close their eyes to the fact that around 70 per cent of the prostitutes are victims of sex trafficking.

 “I simply cannot understand this blindness.”

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