Certainly, the openness and extent of prostitution can be a surprise to north Europeans who still cling to the myth of Spain as a prim and proper, old-fashioned, hard line, Catholic country. This notion is swiftly dispelled as you drive at night along any main road out of a large town or city. These are brothels in all but name and house, sometimes, up to a hundred or more prostitutes. Called Clubes de Alterne socialising clubs by the Spanish, their location and nature are openly known and tolerated by the police, authorities and local population.
Confessions of a Call Girl. The clubs, of course, vary hugely and span the whole spectrum of prostitution from its lowest depths to a brothel system that is reasonably fair and transparent within a deeply emotive industry.
At their worst, the Clubes de Alterne are controlled by criminal gangs who have trafficked women from Third World countries on the promise of conventional work. Deprived of their passports and physically intimidated, the women are forced to work as prostitutes, whilst earning their bosses huge sums. Indeed, the International Labour Organisation in calculated that a forced sex worker would earn 67, Euros a year in an industrialised country.
In Spain, there have been calls for prostitution to be legalised and regulated. However in , after three years assessment, the parliamentary commission appointed by the socialist government was unable to come to a conclusion and prostitution was left in a legal limbo, being declared neither fully legal nor illegal. Hooked β the Gateway to Hell in Spain. The arguments for and against the legalisation of prostitution have always been complicated, not least by the universal recognition that prostitution is an industry that is almost impossible to completely stamp out.
There is also the problem of interfering with the rights of consenting adults within a democracy. Indeed, many immigrant women now coming to work in Spain as prostitutes know beforehand exactly what they are coming to do.
