\u201cProstitution is in no way a job like any other. It is degrading, torturous, exploitive. On the side of the prostituted, there is a lot of horror and disgust at play, which they have to repress in order to get through it at all.\u201d So says Michaela Huber, psychologist and head of the German Society for Trauma and Dissociation.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn this system of prostitution, women are systematically put down, used, and degraded into objects.\u201d So says Lutz Besser, head of the Centre for Psychotraumatology and Trauma Therapy of Niedersachsen.<\/p>\n
\u201cProstitution has its roots in the violence that is done to children. And society must not block out or whitewash this violence!\u201d So demands Susanne Leutner, vice-president of the trauma-therapists\u2019 association, EMDRIA.<\/p>\n
Leading German trauma therapists speak out sharply for societal awareness and support the \u201cStop Sex-buying\u201d initiative. The organization, a coalition of citizens and centres of expertise, demands that johns be punished, in line with the Swedish model: \u201cIt is our goal, not to criminalize the prostituted, but to turn the focus on the johns, whose demand creates the market. They are actually responsible for the fact that increasing numbers of young women from the poorest countries in the world are brought to Germany to work in prostitution here.\u201d Because \u201cThe reality of women in prostitution is being glorified or trivialized and ignored \u2014 and the sexual exploitation of women in this manner is being normalized and cemented.\u201d<\/p>\n
This offensive position in the treatment of traumatized persons by specialized therapists is, to put it mildly, a sensation. Among the therapists who have joined the initiative is Prof. G\u00fcnter Seidler, head of psychotraumatology at the University of Heidelberg and a pioneer of German trauma research. \u201cThere are already more than enough psychologically traumatized people. The mental wounds of prostitution are avoidable,\u201d says Seidler, one of the first 90 signatories of the EMMA appeal to do away with prostitution.<\/p>\n
\u201cProstitution is violence, not a profession!\u201d charges Prof. Wolfgang U. Eckart, director of the Institute for History and Ethics in Medicine at Heidelberg, in the journal Trauma and Violence.<\/i> He argues: \u201cLittle is free in prostitution on the whole, and nothing in mediated prostitution. Because the striking asymmetry of power and the potential for violence in the relationship between the mediator and the practitioner generates in this oldest form of the enslavement of women constitutionally dependent relationships, which almost automatically deliver all the fa\u00e7ades and backgrounds for the practice of traumatizing acts of violence of every sort.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr. Ingeborg Kraus is the initiator of the therapists\u2019 protest. The trauma therapist from Karlsruhe has dealt with victims of war rape in Bosnia, and after her return to the German trauma clinics, she realized: \u201cEven here, every other female patient has experienced sexual violence.\u201d At some point, Kraus got fed up with the \u201cconstant task of patching them back together\u201d. She vowed: \u201cI want to work preventively as well!\u201d For her, too, the fight against prostitution is part of that. \u201cIn my long years of psychotherapeutic experience, I have accompanied prostituted women and learned their backgrounds. It thus became clear that prostitution was, in all cases, the continuation of violent experiences in their biographies.\u201d<\/p>\n
Michaela Huber can only confirm that, from her own therapeutic experiences and those of \u201cmany, many colleagues.\u201d \u201cWho even gets the idea to sell their own body? The prerequisite for that is to be alienated from one\u2019s own body.\u201d She continues: \u201cYou have to picture it: One has to let oneself be penetrated, again and again. One has to have practiced it, or one can\u2019t do it. One leaves behind just a shell that can still go through certain motions, certain gestures.\u201d<\/p>\n
This beaming-oneself-away \u2014 dissociation, in specialists\u2019 jargon \u2014 is forcibly learned, early on, by victims of violence. Not coincidentally, studies show that the majority of women (and men) in prostitution have suffered sexual abuse or other traumatic violence, eg. neglect, as children.<\/p>\n
Traumatologist Lutz Besser demands a rethink of the acceptance of prostitution. He fears that \u201cwe are in danger of sliding into an Ice Age of ethics. Morality is one part,\u201d says Besser. \u201cBut ethics also poses the question: What happens to another person if I do something?\u201d This question, however, is one the johns don\u2019t ask. \u201cThe men who go to prostitutes don\u2019t realize that most of the women in this trade are doing so under pressure and duress. A society that legitimates that, demands the stance that prostitution is the most normal thing in the world,\u201d says the therapist. \u201cAnd it is a scandal that we as a society don\u2019t have a clearer position on this!\u201d<\/p>\n
In Berlin, politicians are currently seeking advice. Not only as to how prostitution should be legally regulated; they will also decide how our society stands in regard to it: Whether prostitution should continue to be \u201ca job like any other\u201d \u2014 or whether prostitution goes against human dignity and destroys human beings. The signatory therapists hope that the politicians don\u2019t just consign even more traumatized people to them, but finally take the side of prevention.<\/p>\n
(Source of translation<\/a>.)<\/p>\n The Appeal has been also translated into\u00a0Spanish<\/a> and Italian<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" German psychologists and the scientific case against prostitution \u201cProstitution is in no way a job like any other. It is degrading, torturous, exploitive. On the side of the prostituted, there is a lot of horror and disgust at play, which they have to repress in order to get through it at all.\u201d So says Michaela […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"page-templates\/for-apell.php","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trauma-and-prostitution.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trauma-and-prostitution.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trauma-and-prostitution.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trauma-and-prostitution.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trauma-and-prostitution.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.trauma-and-prostitution.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":135,"href":"https:\/\/www.trauma-and-prostitution.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21\/revisions\/135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trauma-and-prostitution.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}