{"id":229,"date":"2016-11-05T16:10:30","date_gmt":"2016-11-05T14:10:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trauma-and-prostitution.eu\/en\/?p=229"},"modified":"2018-07-12T17:50:13","modified_gmt":"2018-07-12T15:50:13","slug":"trauma-as-the-pre-condition-and-consequence-of-prostitution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.trauma-and-prostitution.eu\/en\/2016\/11\/05\/trauma-as-the-pre-condition-and-consequence-of-prostitution\/","title":{"rendered":"Trauma as Pre-condition and Consequence of Prostitution."},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Ingeborg Kraus , Edmonton\/Canada, 16.09.2016.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thank you for inviting me here to Edmonton, especially to Kate Quinn from CEASE.<\/p>\n

So, as you heard, I come from Germany, a country that traumatized the entire world during the second world war, and here I am today to talk to you about trauma. And concerning the handling of prostitution, Germany is by no means a role model; in fact, it\u2019s hell on earth. And nobody seems to care, especially women. They don\u2019t speak up. They shut up.<\/p>\n

So first of all, I was asking myself: was it a mistake to invite me? An error? Weren’t you paying attention when you invited me?<\/p>\n

When we talk about trauma, we have to understand the dynamics of trauma. And one of them is to keep silent, to shut up about what has been done to someone. When we talk about trauma, we also have to think how trauma and collective trauma affects our community. I will give you a couple of examples:<\/p>\n

Germany, under the Nazis, attacked, deported, killed and put people in concentration camps. And for these crimes, it wasn’t the men, but the German women who had to pay. When the liberating soldiers came into Germany, they raped women on a massive scale. Not only the Russian soldiers in Berlin, no, all over Germany, women were raped. And at home, they very often got beaten up by their husbands. They were not allowed to talk about it, they had to shut up and suppress their pain. This mental process- of denying trauma and repressing pain- has been well-practiced by the Germans and seems to have been passed from one generation to the other. If you don\u2019t overcome a trauma, it will reoccur, as Janet already said 100 years ago. So, I ask myself if this silence towards prostitution has something to do with our history. Women have been raped, and they had to keep silent. Now, their men rape, and they keep silent again.<\/p>\n

Second, we have a long history of patriarchy. To legitimize the domination and exploitation of women and children without feeling guilt, it is necessary to deny the harm.<\/p>\n

When you look at this through the history of psychotraumatology, it actually started with the denial of trauma. Freud, who is the founder of psychoanalysis, treated women (called at that time \u201chysterical women\u201d). He found out that they were all sexually abused in their childhood. When men from the medical chamber from Vienna heard about that, they put pressure on Freud to change his thesis. So, he developed a fantasy theory where he denied reality and said that in fact, all those women dreamt of the abuse, that they wished it, that this was merely wishful thinking. So again: keep silent!<\/p>\n

When Bowelby and Ainsworth found out that children with a disorganized attachment behavior had experienced neglect and \/ or sexual violence, their funding was cut off (Van der Kolk, 2014). When the feminists in the 70s said that women who have experienced domestic violence have the same symptoms as soldiers returning from Vietnam, they were told that rape doesn\u2019t exist in marriage, it\u2019s not trauma. Again: keep silent! Today, when we say that prostitution is violence and causes severe trauma, we hear \u201cno, it\u2019s their choice, it\u2019s a sexual service, it\u2019s a job\u201d. So again: a denial of trauma and the order to shut up. Why? All this to protect a taboo subject: male sexuality and its alleged right to fulfilment without constraints or limits.<\/p>\n

Healing a trauma means to put words to what has been hidden, to uncover lies. And this is what I did: I put words to the silence. If we want to reverse trauma, we have to tell the truth. So, I am not here by chance, but because I have done everything possible to break the silence, which is in my opinion a symptom of a society that has perpetrator introjections. I started with an appeal in my hometown, then I mobilized the German trauma experts to take a position, and I started a worldwide petition in 6 languages addressed to Angela Merkel to abolish prostitution (WordPress.com;Trauma and Prostitution; Punish the buying of sex, Abolish prostitution!; Letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel).<\/p>\n

This is also an important message to you: Don\u2019t keep silent, raise your voice, because if we keep silent, we become part of the perpetrator\u2019s system and we dishonor the victims.<\/p>\n

I will try to explain to you how prostitution is seen from the point of view of psychotraumatology.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You have 2 types of trauma: The latter causes complex trauma.<\/p>\n

\"folie02\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When we look at the epidemiology of trauma, we find that type of trauma determines whether you develop PTSD or not (Flatten, 2004, p. 4). And rape is the highest risk to develop PTSD. So, the first lesson to learn is: you cannot divide your mind from your body so easily.<\/p>\n

\"folie03\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When we look at the prevalence of sexual violence, and thus the worst form of trauma, we must state that it is wide-spread. On a global level: 20% of girls experience sexual violence, 5 to 10% of boys (Global status report on violence prevention, 2014). A national study carried out in 2014 in France finds the same number (Association m\u00e9moire traumatique et victimologie). Children are the most frequent victims of sexual violence. There is a high rate of re-victimization (70% of them will again become victims of sexual violence as adults). The perpetrator comes from the close environment. Those who should care are the aggressors. Those who should be trustworthy abuse.<\/p>\n

\"folie04\"<\/a>Muriel Salmona, a psychiatrist from France, asked me to come to Paris last year to talk about the situation in Germany and we found that we had the same statistics. In Germany, this is the research done by Monika Schr\u00f6ttle and published in 2004. The study was conducted with 10,264 women, aged between 16 and 25.<\/p>\n

\"folie05\"<\/p>\n

Harm that causes complex trauma is a national problem and costs society billions of euros. Van der Kolk, who is the Medical Director of the Trauma Center Research in Brooklin\/Massachussets, says that when soldiers come back from war, the newspapers are full of it, but when women become victims of domestic violence, nobody cares. Muriel Salmona says that we still live in a culture of rape.<\/p>\n

First lesson to learn: This is not about two separate groups in society, i.e. the group of \u201chappy sex workers\u201d on the one hand, and the group of children who experienced abuse on the other. No, this is one and the same group. It is the children who were abandoned by society then and who are again being abandoned by society now. The prostitution system uses these traumatized children for its own ends.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So, what about prostitution? Is prostitution violence? Or a service?<\/p>\n

\"folie06\"<\/p>\n

There has been a huge amount of research trying to figure out if women in prostitution face violence. Here again are the results of the study done by Schr\u00f6ttle in 2004. At that time, the majority of women in prostitution were German (80%) (Schr\u00f6ttle & M\u00fcller, 2004, p. 651-652). By looking at these numbers, you cannot say that it\u2019s a job like any other: 92% experienced sexual harassment, nearly 90% physical violence and mental violence and 59% sexual violence. Today, the figures would be even worse: I would say 100% of everything, because we have only 5% of German women working in prostitution and 95% are from abroad. The conditions have gotten worse.<\/p>\n

Since the introduction of the law in 2002 that made prostitution a job like any other, you see growing perversions among sex buyers in Germany. Practices are becoming more dangerous with an increase in violence against women and a lack of protection for the women. There is a \u201cmenu\u201d circulating on the Internet (Traumm\u00e4nnlein), where buyers can choose what they want from a long \u00e0 la carte list.\u00a0 I will just cite a couple of them:<\/p>\n