We use cookies to improve our service for you. You can find more information in our data protection declaration. The German city of Cologne is implementing a successful model championed by liberal neighbors in the Netherlands for providing prostitutes with a safe environment to work in away from the city center. About , men a day visit prostitutes in Germany.
Sex is big business but along with the skin trade comes the underworld connection to drugs and the power struggles between pimps and organized criminal gangs which lead to the spread of violent crime. The criminal aspect of prostitution was one of the overriding factors behind the German government's decision to legalize 'the world's oldest profession' in and regulate the sex industry.
The city of Cologne is now taking steps unprecedented within Germany to continue the modernization and regulation of prostitution with a project that will protect sex workers, minimize the criminal element and move prostitution out of the city center and into a specially designed area on the outskirts. The introduction of the so-called "supervised line" concept in the Cologne suburb of Longerich allows prostitutes from the city center to operate in a protected environment.
The concept and project is the culmination of three years of work by a joint task force made up of members of the Catholic Church's social services for women, the local police and the Public Order, Social and Health Department. There were houses and offices in the area where the prostitutes worked, and there were situations where female residents and workers were wrongly approached. There were also problems with the criminal aspects of prostitution.
The area became littered with used syringes, local residents were harassed and there were almost daily reports of prostitutes being raped. The spiraling violence and amount of complaints led to the Cologne city authorities leading the call for something to be done on a federal level in With the decriminalization of prostitution coming a year later, the authorities began planning ways of making the sex industry safer for workers and clients alike.
