Saarbrücken & Prostitution

The opening of a new brothel in Saarbrücken is raising questions about increasing prostitution and sex worker migration in this Southwestern city. Following the legalization of prostitution in 2001 the city has experienced a dramatic increase in the amount of prostitutes and brothels. While the legalization of prostitution in Germany was intended to create better circumstances for sex workers by making it a profession open to taxation and offering health benefits like any other; reality has shown an increase in the number of prostitutes and brothels without a correlating increase in the standard of health and safety for the workers themselves. Not only was there an increase in migrant sex workers who chose to work in Germany in search of a better life, the legalization of prostitution also created a new economic incentive  for human traffickers to smuggle women into Germany and force them into prostitution.  This increase in the number of sex workers, with the majority of the non-native prostitutes coming from Bulgaria and Romania, has caused the price of services to drop dramatically, negating the expected decrease in poverty, disease, violence and drug use rates associated with the practice of prostitution.