by Ulrike Näumann, Heidelberg IWC
“Abolish prostitution” is Huschke Mau’s statement after 10 years of fighting to get out of the field of prostitution.
The first time I learned about human trafficking was during the 2016 FAWCO Symposium “Stand up against Human Trafficking! Be an Everyday Hero!” held in Amsterdam. This experience was like entering a parallel world in my neighborhood. A couple of weeks ago, an invitation on the Facebook page of a feminist friend draw my attention: “Who wants to join me for a lecture by Huschke Mau?”
I always thought that working as a prostitute is a work like every work. Prostitution has been legal in Germany for many decades, if it is practiced voluntarily by persons of legal age. Huschke Mau shares her experience that prostitution is very unlikely to be voluntary.
Huschke Mau is a pseudonymous German activist against prostitution who advocates for the Nordic Model, also known as the Swedish model: According to this, only the clients are prosecuted, but not the prostitutes.
The discussion about the Nordic Model is controversial: does legalizing prostitution increase or decrease human trafficking? The exact number of people who are subjected to this modern kind of slavery can probably only be roughly estimated.
Huschke Mau is a former prostitute and founder of the Ella Network (Netzwerk Ella), an independent advocacy group for women formerly or currently involved in prostitution. She runs a blog on Facebook and writes regularly for magazines and newspapers. She is currently pursuing a PhD at a German university.
I heard Huschke Mau speaking about her recently published book Entmenschlicht – about what it means to be “dehumanized.”1 The lecture was organized by AMALIE, a counselling center for women in prostitution in Mannheim, Germany.
At the age of 17, Huschke Mau escaped from her violent parental home and didn’t know what to do. Penniless and without support, she slipped into prostitution and thus into alcohol and drug addiction. Her first pimp was a police officer. Ten years passed before she was able to free herself from this vicious circle. In the meantime, Huschke Mau has a degree, a doctorate and is calling for a societal exit from prostitution. Her thesis: prostitution always involves sexual violence. Women in prostitution usually have no choice because they are in situations of dependency or distress. Clients, on the other hand, do. No one forces them to buy women. In her book, Huschke Mau explains and describes the prostitution system – how women get into it, why it is so difficult to get out, what traumas they experience there, and what is problematic about our society’s and the media’s view of prostitution. “I think I undressed more with this book than I ever did during my time as a prostitute. I could have just closed that door to the past and never looked back. But I can’t. I just can’t walk past all the cabs driving brothel ads through my city. I can’t not read the newspaper articles about underage girls found in brothel raids. I just can’t ignore that so many women and girls are still in prostitution, that violence is being done to them, day after day.” (Entmenschlicht. Warum wir Prostitution abschaffen müssen by Huschke Mau, Hamburg: Edel Books, 2022 (Dehumanized: Why We Need to Abolish Prostitution by Huschke Mau, currently available only in German).
“We've been talking about ‘me too’ for years, about consent and so on. And in prostitution, of all places, that’s not supposed to apply? The problem is that no consent can be established in prostitution, because the client can never know whether the woman is doing it voluntarily. Because even forced prostitutes smile at their clients. There is only one solution to this: if I as a man can never be sure whether the woman is doing this voluntarily, and if I also know that there is a high risk that the woman is not doing this voluntarily, then I should keep my hands to myself and my pants zipped up.” (Junge Welt, October 19, 2022).
Book cover photo by Ulrike Näumann