Switzerland: Where buying and selling women is like going for a burger

My long read on legalised sex markets

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. Rue Sismondi, in the heart of the Pâquis district of Geneva, Switzerland, is known for prostitution, drugs and gang violence. It is also home to a number of migrant populations, and often referred to as Geneva’s “global village.”

I am in Switzerland to investigate the sex trade in this liberal country, famous for its perfectionism, precision and punctuality. The Swiss reputation for having a humane asylum system, in which the state recognises the plight of those coming to Switzerland to escape poverty, violence and degradation, flies in the face of the country’s willingness to see women sold on its streets in broad daylight. These are women from desperately poor countries such as Moldova, Romania, West Africa and Southeast Asia. The sex trade has been legal in Switzerland since 1942, and its prostitution laws and policies suggest that some forms of slavery are more acceptable than others among its supposedly liberal citizens.

One of the pimps, a young man wearing low-slung jeans and a baseball cap, greets me with a jolly “Bonjour, Madame!” while waving at a man driving a police car. 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 200,000. 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 2013, it was perfectly legal for johns here to pay for sex with 16-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 2014, inmates of La Paquerette (a social therapy department for prisoners) were allowed to visit prostituted women in a local detention centre near Geneva.

In 2016, businessman Bradley Charvet applied to his local municipality in Geneva for a licence to open a “fellatio café”; Charvet is also involved with the Swiss-based pimping website Facegirl. The café idea has not yet progressed to a venture, but the application stated that for 50 Swiss francs ($50), customers could choose a woman from photographs on an iPad, then order her to give him a blowjob with his cappuccino.

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.

There is nowhere in the world where street prostitution has been legalised. However, in Geneva and Zurich as well as elsewhere in Switzerland, selling sex on the streets is both tolerated and accepted. There are (unofficial) zones in Geneva where pimps know to take the women and where johns know to go to stalk their prey. The off-street sex trade is also prolific, with numerous brothels, massage parlours and saunas offering women for sale. Unless a complaint is made by a member of the public, the police turn a blind eye.

On my arrival in Geneva, I stopped for something to eat in the gay area, which was only a short walk from my hotel in the heart of the red light district. I notice a table of lesbians sitting outside, smoking and laughing. As I finish my meal, they beckon me over to join them for a drink. I tell them what I am doing in the city and ask them what they know about the local prostitution scene. They are involved with an LGBT rights organisation and explained that some of the young gay men in the city are involved in the sex trade. I asked what they thought about legalised prostitution and whether it works in Switzerland. "It used to be OK," says Emma, a civil servant who grew up in the city. "But I understand that those were the days when local women sold sex. Today the problem comes with trafficking. Most of the women are from Romania and other such countries."

Genevieve told me that she thought legalisation was the "only way" to properly handle the sex trade: "Why should it be treated like any other business?" She said that people in Switzerland considered themselves liberal and tolerant. I wondered if they know exactly what they are tolerating.

After spending time in the early hours watching activities in the prostitution area, I head off the next morning to the infamous Venusia brothel, on the outskirts of town, to request an interview with Madame Lisa, who is a regular spokesperson for the benefits of legalised prostitution. The street that houses the brothel is grey, ugly and near a busy road. As I approach the main entrance, two men walk out laughing, with one making a sexual gesture to the woman waving them goodbye.

The brothel owner is not in the building, but I am taken into the reception area and asked to leave my name and contact details. I am told that Lisa will be in touch as soon as she returns. It is not quite midday and already the brothel is busy. Several women walk past me in the reception, some coming to meet johns and others going into the private area behind the reception. It is difficult to tell the age of some of the women but certainly none of them are over the age of 25. Some are significantly younger. Most of the women appear to be North African or Romanian.

Two doors away from Venusia is a smaller brothel. I would have missed it were it not for the john leaving the building, zipping up his jeans. “Au revoir!” shouts the young woman at the door, wearing a corset and impossibly high spiked heels. As she walks back in, I hear her mutter, “Connard.” It means asshole.

I press the intercom as I read the menu on the window. One hundred and thirty Swiss francs ($132) buys full sex with two different women, plus a side order of fellatio. I tell the receptionist I am a reporter investigating legalisation in Switzerland and ask if anyone would be interested in speaking to me. Both she and the women working there decline.

I have been told by a couple that run a Christian support service for prostituted women in Geneva to visit a Thai restaurant in the Paquis district, which is frequented by pimps and the women they sell. "They [the pimps] will talk to you," says my contact. "Especially if they think there's any money in it for them." He was right. When I arrived at the restaurant at lunch time, the place was almost full—mainly with women wearing coats over classic street prostitution attire: hotpants, micro skirts, boob tubes and “hooker boots.” The women appeared to be from a number of ethnicities, including Eastern European and West African. The men were almost all of North African appearance and under the age of 30.

“You want anything, lady?” asks one of the women, her accent strongly Eastern European. “She want something, she can come to me,” says one of the young men, meeting my eye and holding my gaze. “Anything here you like?” he asks me.

Taking advantage of the fact I am suspected of being a potential sex buyer, I move into my cover story. “I am not here for myself but for my son,” I say. “He has been paralysed since he was 15 and can't have sex. He is desperate to have a normal experience with a woman, and I wanted to bring him somewhere where paying for sex is nothing unusual and not illegal."

I say that my son 'Peter' attends a college in Geneva and that I could bring him to meet one of the women at their convenience. I asked how much it would cost. "Depends on what you want,” says the pimp. “A girlfriend? A fuck? Something special? There are different prices for different girls. Does he want a black one? I can get him a black one.” The pimp introduces himself to me as Ali but I figure that's not his real name. I tell him I will come back and see him at the same time tomorrow after talking to my son about it.

Ali stares at me as I walk out of the café. I start to feel very uncomfortable. “Don't go to the street looking for a woman, they all have diseases,” he says as I leave. “Mine are all tested. Every month I take them to the clinic and I pay. If you want you can see their certificates. And these ones have proper documents. Some of the girls don't even have passports.”

I take a walk around Rue Sismondi, the most notorious street for prostitution in the area. It is still raining, although less heavily, and there are at least 15 women standing on corners or walking up and down looking for trade. I see a commuter in a suit wander up to a very young-looking woman, standing under her umbrella and smoking a cigarette. The john removes his wallet as he approaches and points to the alleyway to the left, which is home to a large “gentleman’s club.” I had noticed this venue earlier. There were red velvet chairs in the windows, and posters of women in bikinis lining the walls. It looked like a clip joint; an old-style brothel that sells overpriced alcohol with the pimps regularly extorting money from the sex buyers. Several barely-dressed women are sitting on red velvet thrones with a red light shining behind them. I asked the security man hovering outside the door what kind of a venue it is. He tells me it is for “les hommes à venir se détendre.” It is for the “men to come to relax.”

That night I met a contact who, for several years, has worked for one of the major human rights organisations based in the city. This person would not only lose their job if exposed as a whistleblower, but also be vilified by colleagues and possibly blacklisted from other jobs within the sector. Under strict instruction not to reveal their identity, my contact gives me horrifying details of the prolific sexual exploitation perpetrated by so-called human rights officials within the city.

The whistleblower, who I will call Jay, tells me that “Friday night is known as ho night” within the office of this large organisation. “The men in my team literally brag about going to prostitutes,” says Jay when we meet. “One of the roles in the team is to raise awareness about trafficking and irregular migration, but these guys go out and abuse them without any thought.”

Jay once confronted a colleague who was bragging in the office about a night he had enjoyed with an “oversexed Romanian”, laughing with another male employee that he was terrified his “dick would drop off”.

Jay asked how the man knew that she was not trafficked or pressurised into prostitution. “We don’t have sex with the trafficked ones, just the ones that want to be there,” was the reply. “How do you know whether they are trafficked?” Jay persisted. “We ask them,” said the man.

Before I leave, Jay tells me about the time several colleagues visited a brothel en masse. “They were bragging that five of them had sex with one woman in this place,” says Jay, “and that she could not speak any English. When they were leaving, the woman was crying. One of the men said, without any [self-awareness] whatsoever, that she was probably upset because she wanted one of us to take her home.”

The regular profile of a trafficking victim, says Jay, is a young woman who has been promised a good salary, a work permit and the reimbursement of travel costs by an agent in her home country. The reputation of Switzerland as a democratic country with a good human rights record inspires trust in many women from Eastern Europe.

As I leave, Jay tells me of planning to report these men to a senior manager, adding: “If I lose my job, I will take them to court. But I can’t sit back and let this continue.”

There is very little research on the numbers of men who pay for sex in Switzerland but one 2008 study found that almost one quarter (23 percent) of men between the ages of 17 and 45 have done so at least once. I meet Robert, who owns a small business and is originally from Paris. “I didn’t visit brothels when I lived in France,” says Robert. “But in Geneva, it is acceptable and almost even respectable. The [prostitutes] do things that are not considered nice for wives and girlfriends to do.”

I ask Robert why he pays for sex, aside from being able to demand oral and anal sex from the women, and he tells me something I have heard from johns countless times in numerous countries. “If I take a girl out,” he said, “buy her dinner and do all the flirting and things, but at the end of the evening she tells me she doesn’t want sex, I have wasted my time and a lot of money. So why don’t I just go straight for the sex? That way, she has earned good money and I am happy.”

The legal definition of prostitution in Geneva is “the act of selling sex”. The buyer is invisible, both in legislation and public awareness. Trafficking is increasing but, according to johns such as Jay’s colleagues and Robert, the assumption is that these women somehow find Geneva on a map from their tiny villages in Senegal, Hungary, Dominican Republic, Thailand or the Ukraine, and flock here to work in the sex trade. Switzerland has one of the most stringent immigration and labor laws in the world, but these women, johns seem to think, miraculously manage to get Swiss ‘work’ permits and then choose prostitution over every other possible source of revenue.

Taina Bien Aimee is co-director of the NYC-based, international NGO Coalition against Trafficking in Women, CATW. “The Swiss government’s indifference to the suffering of trafficked and prostituted women is abhorrent,” says Taina, who was raised in Geneva. “Officials hide behind the notion of choice and a woman’s consent to being bought and sold in the Swiss sex trade. But it would not take rigorous investigations to uncover that a disenfranchised young Nigerian woman from Edo State, for example, would have difficulty finding Zurich or Geneva on a map, let alone purchasing a one-way ticket to a brothel or a “sex box” without a trafficker or pimp owning her fate.

Trafficking is a much bigger problem in countries, such as Germany, the Netherlands and New Zealand, that have legalised or “normalised” sex trades than in those which have adopted the Nordic model, in which the sex buyer is criminalised, and the prostituted person is decriminalised and assisted out of prostitution.

Switzerland is a primary destination for sex traffickers in Europe. Victims originate primarily from Central Europe or the Far East. In recent years the numbers have increased. The women (and, in far fewer numbers, men) operate using newspaper advertisements, cell phones and apartments rented by pimps. Some pimps accept credit cards as payment—because after all, this is a legitimate business.

The increase in free movement of persons between Switzerland and the EU in 1999 is often cited as being integral to the increase of prostitution in the country. From what I saw and heard while there, however, it is more likely that because men face no consequences whatsoever for paying for sex, they are more likely to do so. To meet the increasing demand, traffickers import women from poor and war-torn nations.

According to CATW, around 14,000 women are sold into the Swiss sex trade, with approximately 70 percent coming from outside Europe. The report estimates that 350,000 men—about 20 percent of the population—purchase sexual acts. The Swiss sex trade reaps an estimated 3.5 billion Swiss francs ($3.5 billion) in profits per year.

Across Switzerland, brothels raids turn up trafficked women from Brazil and eastern Europe. As with other countries with legal brothels, the illegal side of prostitution does not diminish with legalisation. Instead, it often grows.

Switzerland legalised its sex trade almost 80 years ago – yet another piece of evidence that normalising prostitution helps no-one except pimps and other exploiters. In 2016, a trafficker was convicted of trafficking 80 women from Thailand, who were sent to brothels in the cantons of Bern, Solothurn, Lucerne, Basel, St Gallen and Zurich. The women were kept under lock and key, and forced to service numerous sex buyers to pay off horrendous debts to the pimps who had transported them from their home country.

There are also significant levels of violence committed against the women by pimps and johns. One case in 2017 involved an investment banker who murdered a prostituted woman, stuffed her body in a suitcase, and placed the suitcase in a wine cellar in his cellar. https://www.thelocal.ch/20170728/banker-prison-dolder-grand-murder-prostitute-in-swiss-luxury-hotel

Conversely, there has been only one murder of a prostituted person by a pimp or john in Norway, and none in the other seven countries to date that have criminalised paying for sex.

On the train from Geneva to Zurich, I talk to Anna, a woman in her 20s who attends a university in the capital. She asks me what I am doing in Switzerland. I tell her I am investigating the sex trade. She is instantly attentive, asking, “Does that include sugar baby stuff?”

So-called sugar-baby hook-ups are largely facilitated by the website Seeking Arrangement, which boasts more than ten million users across 139 countries, with substantial numbers of Swiss-based men on its books. Older men—“sugar daddies’—target young, students in need of money—“sugar babies”—as “dates.” Many desperate young women are even auctioning their virginity on the site. It is a classic example of the sanitisation of the sex trade.

“I have three friends who do this,” Anna tells me on the train, looking upset. “They tell me it is not prostitution but all of them have had sex with the men they hook up with.”The men are “much older,” and one friend described her date as “repulsive”. Anna seems worried about the safety of “sugar-dating.” And most shockingly, the university they all attended had “dating websites” on its list of suggested casual jobs for students.

In Zurich, I stay at a hotel within walking distance of the notorious “sex performance box” zone—or, more accurately, the drive thru outdoor brothel on the outskirts of the city, near the main railway line in Sihlquai.

As I check in, the hotel manager tells me that men often stay there to “have a good time” in the prostitution area. “They are not Swiss, maybe some English,” he tells me. “Perhaps you don’t have anything like this at home? Here we are very open about sex in Switzerland. Very liberal.”

I had been hearing about the so-called “sex performance boxes” since they were raised in 2011 as a potential solution to the problems inherent to street prostitution. The following year, just over half (52 percent) of citizens voted in favour of Zurich spending $2 million to set up the zone. The intention was to make street prostitution safer and reduce trafficking and other forms of violence. The boxes opened in 2013 and, so far, there is no evidence that trafficking or violence has been reduced.

I was told it is impossible to visit the drive-through brothels without my own car. Later in the evening, however, as the facilities open, I ask a taxi driver who speaks good English—and who appears to be somewhat of a self-confessed “expert” on prostitution—to drive me there and to ask the security people if I can speak with the women, or be shown around.

As the taxi driver speaks to members of the outreach team at Flora Dora, a government funded NGO that provides condoms and safety tips to the women, I watch cars drive through, counting 22 cars entering—and several leaving—during the 15 minutes we were inside the area.

Some of the women in the outdoor brothel enclosure appear intoxicated, and many are thin and frail in appearance. Prostitution takes a terrible toll on women’s physical and mental health. One survey of 193 prostituted women in Zurich (5 percent of whom were registered with the government) found that more than 50 percent suffered psychiatric ailments such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, eating disorders, and psychosis, as well as alcohol dependency. In comparison, 18 percent of non-prostituted women suffer psychiatric ailments.

Prices are around 50 Swiss francs ($50) for “hand relief,” full sex is $100; and anal is $200.

I watch as the johns drive in to the small, circular park, cruise the women from their cars and then wave to whichever woman takes their fancy. The women are standing outside of door-less, alarmed buildings in which they keep their belongings, and get changed into skimpy outfits from their “day clothes.”

Once the john has chosen a woman, she joins him in his car, and he drives into one of the teak-coloured wooden garages that surround one side of the cordoned off area. Each has space for a single car, and johns on foot or bikes are not allowed in.

Each of the ten boxes are lit up in a different bright colour, such as red, green and yellow. A vending machine, which sells condoms, lubricant, soft drinks, and chocolate bars, sits at the end of the row, next to an ATM. Posters advocating safe sex decorate the walls.

The boxes contain nothing but a panic button and a waste bin for condoms and tissues. There are no surveillance cameras for the johns to worry about. I assumed the lack of security cameras are due to the fact that johns might be scared off if they were being filmed entering and leaving, but I am told by various sources that police and city officials followed advice from those running similar zones in Utrecht and elsewhere, and decided that cameras are inadequate, since the woman will already have been assaulted by the time the footage is viewed, and that an on-site security presence is the best deterrence.

The prostituted women in the enclosure have access to on-site social workers, and police increase patrols around the area to protect the women when they enter and leave. Clearly, the authorities are under no illusion about the dangers inherent to prostitution, even in such a public, monitored space.

I am told that no-one from Flora Dora is able to speak to me and I am not allowed to approach either the women or the johns. I am handed the leaflets that Flora Dora gives to the prostituted women, which provide tips on how to identify violent johns. The materials are in Spanish, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Romanian.

Facilitating the “right” of men to pay for sex is an expensive business. The Swiss government spends $800,000 each year maintaining the booths, which includes security and on-site social services.

The drive-through outdoor brothels were deemed a great success by the Swiss during the summer. But looking at the bins filled with condoms and noticing the clinical organization of the area, all I could think about was what a lot of public money was being spent by the Swiss government in order to make it easier for men to pay for sex with financially desperate women. I wondered how many women could instead be supported out of prostitution with the amount of money spent so far on these facilities.

There are around 3,000 women registered as “prostitutes” in Zurich—a number which continues to increase, although rising competition among the women has led to a sharp drop in “service” prices. The Altstetten district of Zurich (such as Strichplatz Depotweg), and one road where street prostitution was allowed, was closed when the drive-through brothel site was opened, and street prostitution is illegal in most areas of the city. In the same year that the drive-through brothel opened, street prostitutes in Zurich had to start buying nightly permits from a vending machine installed in the area at a cost of 5 francs each ($5). In addition, since 2003, legislation has been put in place to ban "window prostitution."

After my visit to the drive-through brothels, the taxi driver takes me to see one of the city's 300 registered brothels. This one is on Langstrasse (Long Street), the most notorious red-light area in the city. The four-storey building has five brightly-lit windows per floor, through which young women in underwear are visible.

“I get many customers asking me to take them there,” says my driver. “The women are out on the streets all day and night, but the ones from that house [the brothel] come out onto the street around 10pm to meet customers face-to face and then take them inside.” I ask if the police ever patrol the street, and he tells me, “You see them sometimes, but they are just looking for drugs or violence.”

“This is Langstrasse, very dangerous,” says the taxi driver, on seeing a group of men spill out of a sex club, drunk and shouting loudly at passers-by. “At 10 o’clock at night it’s very dangerous.”

I ask if he knows where the women on the streets are from. “They come from Poland, Italy, France and Romania, Morocco. Swiss ladies, not much.”

The taxi driver tells me that there is “definitely more” prostitution on the street, and more visible customers since the sex boxes were opened. “But it is safer for the ladies,” he says. I ask him how he knows it is safer for the women to be in the drive thru enclosure rather than the streets. Who has he heard it from? “I don’t know if anyone told me,” he says, “but it must be.”

I say goodbye to the taxi driver and head off to meet with Ben (not his real name), a British police officer who until recently worked for an anti-trafficking organisation as a consultant. Ben knows a lot about prostitution: he has been involved in policing what used to be known as “vice” for 30 years. He has led a number of operations to detect international pimping operations.

We talk in a busy bar close to Niederhof, the cobbled street known to be one of the main street prostitution zones. “The girls are young,” says Ben, “maybe no older than 18, 19. And they are all controlled in one way or another. The pimps are in the building every day. If they call themselves landlords, it still doesn’t alter the fact that they are living off prostitution.”

Ben continues, “So Niederhof is a street prostitution area which is always busy. Even since the sex boxes. In the street it is dangerous for the girls.”

I see dozens of prostituted women, openly touting for johns on the streets. The installation of the sex boxes has clearly not done what the government promised – remove or drastically reduce street prostitution in other areas of the city.

During my time with Ben, I hear about the growth of temporary pop-up salons in subleased apartments or hotels, and Airbnb brothels. According to Ben, legalisation provides the perfect cover for the illegal trade. The Small Owner-Occupied Brothels (SOOBS) in New Zealand, for instance, do not need a license to operate, so long as no more than four individuals sell sex from the premises at any one time. In Zurich, since July 2017, “mini-salons” with up to two rooms in any one premise are exempt from licensing requirements. These salons are allowed in residential areas where there is currently a ban on licensed brothels.

“Let’s face it,” says Ben as he leaves, “pimps know where they can make lots of money, and it isn’t going to be in Sweden.”

The Don Juan Project in Switzerland was developed and funded by Swiss AIDS Control. It is considered to be a best practice model. The education programme run by Don Juan in a number of Swiss cantons focused on condom-use and “safe sex,” not on dissuading johns to stop paying for sex in the first place, a strategy that has proved to be very successful in Nordic Model countries.

Janice Raymond, in her 2013 book, Not a Choice, Not a Job, wrote about Don Juan’s report of its “success” with its “client re-education” project: “The wording of the Don Juan report is interesting. Of the 800 prostitution users who came into the tent and were found not to use condoms regularly when buying women in prostitution, about two-thirds said they would consider changes in their behaviour. What they weren’t asked to consider was to stop buying women in prostitution.”

But alongside other countries that have legalised thesex markets sex trade, such as the Netherlands, Germany and some states in Australia, the feminist abolitionist movement is beginning to emerge.

I meet Ursula Nakamura-Stoecklin at Zurich train station. Ursula is a retired medical professional and involved in feminist activism in various women’s groups in and around Basel, which is Switzerland's third most populous city, after Zürich and Geneva.

“The debate about sex-work versus abolition is boiling in Switzerland at the moment,” she tells me. “In some women’s groups, we dare not take it up as it may well divide us. In June, the influential coordination of different women’s organisations (centres de liaisons de femmes) Frauenzentrale Zurich (Zurich Women’s Centre) strongly voiced the support of the Nordic Model, which decriminalises those selling sex, whilst criminalising the johns.”

In June this year, this small NGO launched its campaign for a ban on prostitution, and the introduction of the Nordic Model. A video by the group has been circulated throughout Switzerland and beyond. “But still most of the media is against us,” says Nakamura-Stoecklin, “with different organisations that are pro-prostitution, [along with] police, saying it is too expensive to arrest the johns.”

It is difficult to see how much more expensive this strategy would be than the massive expense of maintaining the so-called “sex boxes” – which constitutes merely a fraction of the sex trade across the city.

“These [pro-prostitution] organisations close their eyes to the fact that around 80 percent of the prostitutes are victims of sex trafficking,” says Nakamura-Stoecklin. “I simply cannot understand this blindness. We have one national organisation, FIZ, which does an excellent job helping women to get out of the claws of traffickers. They have a specialised migrant section, which gives the women protection. But this organisation is a strong advocate of prostitution by arguing that in [countries that have adopted the Nordic Model], clandestine crimes against these women have increased.”

It is almost always the same story, says Nakamura-Stoecklin. “We hear it on TV and see it in the newspapers, but still people here think our system works. A poor woman from Moldova or somewhere, she wants to get a better job, be a teacher or something, and was promised a good job in Switzerland. She leaves her family in Moldova and she arrives here, and she lands in a brothel and she cannot get out. Why don’t Swiss people realise what is happening here?”

My trip to Switzerland is coming to an end. The window brothels, sex clubs, strip joints, street procurement, and four-storey brothels, all operating with impunity, with the numbers of women being procured into prostitution growing, and the traffickers, pimps and johns arrogantly going about their business, with little fear of either condemnation or criminalisation. I reflect on how little I knew previously about how prevalent and normalised the sex trade is here, despite my years of intensive research and reporting on the global sex market.

The normalisation of the Swiss sex trade comes down to entrenched and long-term legalisation.

The stereotype is that the Swiss like order, rules and cleanliness. But it is impossible to sanitise prostitution—no government can. The Swiss indifference to harms and violence perpetrated against women in the sex trade comes from a long official history of misogyny and sex discrimination. Swiss women gained the right to vote in federal elections in 1971, and the last canton that granted women the vote on local issues, Appenzell, was in 1991. If a government resists seeing women as full human beings deserving of equal voting rights, it will certainly resist looking at the sex trade as a manifestation of inequality and violence against women.

To tackle its prostitution problems, the Swiss must look at France for its law targeting sex buyers and providing protection for prostituted women. Its other neighbour, Germany, is the worst example to follow, where legalised prostitution continues to generate massive human rights violations for the profit of the state, including dozens of murders of prostituted women since 2002.

What my anonymous contacts, in the worlds of human rights and law enforcement, told me during my trip left me further convinced that legalisation of the sex trade results in an increase in both legal and illegal sex markets, which in turn leads to further normalisation of prostitution and the devaluation of women in Switzerland. Acceptance of the sex trade is a green light to traffickers and other exploiters, and at the same time, encourages a laissez faire attitude among the police.

“I can see why [my colleagues] have ended up convincing themselves it is OK to pay for a foreign prostitute,” Jay, from the human rights organisation in Geneva, told me. “They probably think it is just the same as being served in a restaurant by a Romanian.”

In the meantime, numbers of women trafficked into and throughout Switzerland increase. The spotlight needs to be firmly on this country. So far, Switzerland has elicited the least attention and outrage from the feminist abolitionist movement than anywhere else in the world.

For all that Switzerland presents itself on the international stage as progressive and humanitarian, its disregard of the human rights abuses being perpetrated every day towards prostituted women is nothing short of a disgrace.