Category Archives: Harm

Letter to UN Women

Consultation seeking views on UN Women approach to sex work, the sex trade and prostitution.

Dr. Ingeborg Kraus, Germany/Karlsruhe, 15.10.2016

 “Scientists for a World Without Prostitution“[1] based in Karlsruhe in Germany, is a group of health experts (medical, psychological and in traumatology) who offer women in prostitution therapeutical and medical assistance. This group authored a manifesto[2] declaring that prostitution is humiliating, degrading and in violation of universal human rights, that it is an act of violence and that it perpetuates this violence in the lives of women. In other words, there is no “good prostitution“. Our group also demands a law placing the responsibility on the men by insisting on a legal approach that penalises the sex buyers, because we are tired of being used to “repair women“ while there is a policy that incites men to “break women“. The manifesto was signed by the best known and most influential trauma psychologists and specialists in Germany. We want to inform on the realities of prostitution and its harmful effects on health, inform on the disastrous effects of a law legalising prostitution, draw attention to the presence and the voice of health experts who are in direct contact with the victims of prostitution: share our clinical experience as well as texts and scientific studies on prostitution. Continue reading

The German model is producing hell on earth!

This presentation was made in Vancouver, Canada on September 20, 2016 for “International Approaches to Prostitution: Sweden, Germany, Canada” to an audience of 200 people in the Orpheum Annex. It was one of five different presentations to different audiences in Edmonton, Vancouver and Ottawa over the span of a week in Canada.

Dr. Kraus’ presentations in Vancouver were sponsored by Aboriginal Women’s Organizing Network; Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution; Formerly Exploited Voices Now Educating; Foy Allison Law; Resist Exploitation, Embrace Dignity; University Women’s Club of Vancouver; Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter.

Thank you for inviting me here to Vancouver. Thank you to all the organizations that have made this possible, especially Suzanne Jay, who invited me and organized everything. Continue reading

Prostitution is Incompatible with Equality Between Men and Women

Psychologist and trauma expert Dr. Ingeborg Kraus’s lecture at the Madrid Conference: “Prostitution is Incompatible with Equality Between Men and Women”

Organized by La Comisión para la investigación de malos tratos a mujeres (The Commission for the Investigation of the Mistreatment of Women) Madrid, 15 October 2015

In Germany, the idea of abolition isn’t taken into consideration because it is believed that “good prostitution” exists. It is clear that child prostitution isn’t tolerated; likewise, so-called “forced” prostitution is considered to be evil. But prostitution between two adults who supposedly consent mutually, why not? Why forbid this decision between two adults?

Continue reading

The Harms of the Sex Trade — A Conversation with the Founder of the Survivor Clinic

Dr. Julia Geynisman is a resident in Obstetrics and Gynecology at New York Presbyterian-Weill Cornell Medical Center. Born in Russia and raised in Chicago, Dr. Geynisman founded the Survivor Clinic in July 2013 to serve women who have survived or are surviving gender violence, including sexual violence and female genital mutilation. The Survivor Clinic is held in the evenings on the Upper East Side of New York City and is free of charge to all patients without insurance. Dr. Geynisman answers a few questions about her groundbreaking clinic and her passion for women’s health, rights and equality.*

‘If You Build It, They Will Come’: The Survivor Clinic Tackles Sex Trafficking in New York City

The World Post, Taina Bien-Aimé, CATW, July 14, 2015 Continue reading

Germany Wins the Title of ‘Bordello of Europe’: Why Doesn’t Angela Merkel Care?

In December 2014, Dr. Ingeborg Kraus, a German psychologist, initiated a petition signed by prominent trauma experts calling on the German government to repeal the 2002 law that decriminalized prostitution. In an interview with CATW’s Executive Director, Taina Bien-Aimé, Dr. Kraus discusses her reasons for starting the petition and the reality of prostitution for women in Germany. She also recently launched a Change.org petition urging Chancellor Angela Merkel to create a legal framework that will outlaw the buying of sex and support survivors. Please join them in their efforts by signing this petition.

The World Post: Germany Wins the Title of ‘Bordello of Europe’: Why Doesn’t Angela Merkel Care?

Interview by: Taina Bien-Aimé, CATW

In 2002, Germany decriminalized prostitution, reportedly due to pressure by the sex trade lobby and a few brothel managers who petitioned the government to develop safety standards and reduce the stigma and violence found in the sex trade. This law effectively rendered the prostitution industry a legitimate business. Today, this experiment is failing. Violence, abuse and trauma have increased for prostituted women in Germany. Some 400,000 women are now in prostitution, the vast majority poor women from abroad, with a linked exponential spike in sex trafficking. Alarmed by this state of affairs, prominent German trauma experts and psychologists signed a petition in December 2014, calling on their government to repeal its decriminalization law as a preventive measure against sexual violence and trauma. Below is an interview with Dr. Ingeborg Kraus, who initiated the petition.

Continue reading

Prostitution and Trafficking in Nine Countries: An Update on Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

At international level Melissa Farley a.o. have published the most relevant results with data from nine different countries (2004). According the study two-thirds of the examined 854 women in prostitution showed symptoms of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), which were comparable with them of healthcare-seeking veterans, women who fled to shelters, rape survivors and refugees who were exposed to state-sanctioned torture. The intensity of trauma-related symptoms depended on the intensity of the activity in prostitution. Women with multiple suitors reported harder physical symptoms. The longer the women were active in prostitution, the more likely they were infected with a sexually transmitted disease.

Click here for the study “Prostitution and Trafficking in Nine Countries: An Update on Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder” by Dr. Melissa Farley.

Continue reading

Trauma Repetition and Revictimization Following Physical and Sexual Abuse

Dr. med. Wolfgang Wöller

The tendency of victims of physical or sexual childhood abuse to become revictimized in later life has well been documented empirically. Moreover, there is a high stability of violent and abusive relationships. The aim of this paper was to summarize perspectives from psychodynamic theory, attachment theory, and posttraumatic stress research to explain revictimization phenomena. The term repetition compulsion has little explanatory valuewithout additional theoretical assumptions.

Continue reading

Tanja Rahms Speech at the International Abolitionist Congress, Paris 2014

After 3 years in prostitution, I almost jumped out a window – from the third floor. That was how prostitution made me feel, – that I had nothing to live for. I had been sexually violated so many times, that there was almost nothing left of me – neither inside, or outside. I was nothing. I was worth nothing. I felt completely useless. I was a machine for other people’s amusement, their sexual desires and their perverse exploitation.

I spent 9 years in therapy, to get where I am today. And even though I persist in telling about the violence experienced in prostitution I still live with the traumas and the re-traumatizing. But we, as survivors have to. We have to keep on telling about the violence, so no one will ever forget or be manipulated into thinking, that prostitution is even close to something you can define as sexwork.

Continue reading