It is 8am and the rain is coming down in sheets and bouncing off the pavements. The streets are empty except for a dozen women and their pimps.
I am in Switzerland to investigate the sex trade in this liberal country, famous for its perfectionism, precision and punctuality. The sex trade has been legal in Switzerland since , and its prostitution laws and policies suggest that some forms of slavery are more acceptable than others among its supposedly liberal citizens.
There are regular spot checks by police in the street prostitution areas but I am told they are checking for drug dealers and ignoring the sexual predators looking for women to buy. Geneva is the second largest city in Switzerland but has a population of just , Home to the United Nations, the Red Cross and World Health Organization, Geneva is not just a popular tourist location but also an important hub for business, trade and political visitors.
Well over two million individuals visit the city every year. Many of them are male sex tourists. I have been researching and writing about the global sex trade for 20 years and have visited numerous countries around the world to do so. But nowhere have I encountered such normalisation of prostitution as I saw in Geneva—not even in Germany or the Netherlands. Until , it was perfectly legal for johns here to pay for sex with year-old girls. That year, however, parliament raised the legal age to 18, in line with other Western European countries, after pressure from feminists and child protection advocates.
In , inmates of La Paquerette a social therapy department for prisoners were allowed to visit prostituted women in a local detention centre near Geneva. There are plenty of organisations and individuals in Switzerland that support this laissez-faire approach to prostitution. The largest direct service provider in Geneva, Aspasie, is a Red Umbrella affiliated organisation, which means it supports the decriminalisation of the sex trade and is opposed to the abolitionist approach to tackle demand.
