- A German sex box: passenger side provides space for escape
They are not really boxes at all but parking spaces with walls on all sides, to screen the sight of people having sex in cars. Already in use in several German cities, they are the latest proposal on the municipal table of Zurich, Switzerland’s biggest city (still small at 380,500 or nearly 2 million inhabitants, depending on what area you count). Selling sex is recognised as a legal economic activity in Switzerland, but, as everywhere, a lot of people don’t want to think about it, and seeing it means thinking about it. Thus in Zurich, where people have been complaining that street sex work is increasing, the city council is considering such boxes. The increase refers to migrants soliciting in the streets and straying outside the areas they are supposed to stay inside. And presumably a lot of these migrants don’t have the right to work in Switzerland at all.
Note on the legality of selling sex in Switzerland: The official line is that only completely independent sex work is permitted (windows that look like this on ordinary houses are common). There are, of course, scads of businesses providing workplaces for workers, but the owners call the workers sub-contractors, which supposedly means the owners are not employers and thus not capable of ‘exploiting’ anyone. Typical city-father lunacy/hypocrisy where commercial sex is concerned.
Other oddities creep into a story about the boxes, which I note in bold. What does one motorist’s ‘pity’ have to do with anything?
by Marta Falconi, 3 September 2010, Swisster
After encouraging results in Germany, Zurich city officials are considering the installation of “sex boxes”, fenced parking areas, where prostitutes and their clients can conduct business away from the public eye. In a city where prostitution is on the rise, the measure could help protect residents and prostitutes alike. The drive-in “sex boxes” resemble makeshift parking spaces, surrounded by three tall metal fences to provide more privacy for prostitutes and their clients.
Already in use in some German cities, such as Cologne and Essen, the “sex boxes” are the latest idea suggested by Zurich city authorities after receiving thousands of complaints over the hordes of scantily clad prostitutes (and their actions) who patrol the main financial hub of Switzerland’s largest city.
Prostitution in Zurich increased by some 20 percent last year, according to some reports, which said that police had recorded more than 3,700 sex workers, mostly operating in the former red-light district in Zurich West, around Langstrasse, known as a busy multicultural melting pot and for occasional petty crime.
The women generally gather on the artery of Sihlquai – a busy road along the river, behind Zurich’s main station – and wait in small groups for drivers to stop at pretty much any time of the day. The district is heavily populated and the area around the Sihlquai is also a common meeting point for students and families.
Reto Casanova, a spokesman for the Zurich police, told Swisster that the situation was “tolerable, but not as we want it”. He said the sex boxes have proved successful in Germany and could be an option for Zurich as well. “We are looking for an acceptable solution for everybody, with the goal of maintaining people’s safety and dignity,” he explained.
Casanova said the ultimate decision on whether to adopt the boxes remains with the city council. However, he added, a police delegation is planning to travel to Germany in the fall to gather more first-hand details about the practice.
In Cologne, social workers have reported encouraging results from the installation of the boxes. “In the past, the street girls were often chased by police. Now the officers are even protecting this legal street sex activity,” Sabine Reichard told Deutsche Press.
Further protection for sex workers is also built into the boxes’ design, which provides a handy alarm for the passenger within easy reach, while the parking set-up allows the prostitute an easy escape but blocks the driver’s door. So far it’s unclear whether using the enclosures will require a “parking” fee .
The rise of prostitution, with most women coming from Eastern European countries, is a worrisome problem for the city and its authorities who try to control the trafficking of women behind it, especially when individuals of 16 can legally sell their services in some parts of the country.
Politician Luc Barthassat has called for the legal age to be raised to 18 and told Swissinfo recently that “Switzerland risks becoming a major sex tourism destination.” Zurich resident, Giuseppe Spina told Swisster he did not understand how big the phenomenon was until he found himself driving along the Sihlquai one recent night.
“It is a different world, somehow connected to ours, but still hidden in obscurity,” he said. “I had a problem with the car and had to stop one metre away from two prostitutes who were waiting there. I couldn’t help but pity them.”
The sex industry in Switzerland is reckoned to rake in almost three billion francs every year.
– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist
A new photo gallery called The Street is here. Sex work and buying sex are not alone in being under siege by moral regulators: More and more activities are subjected to rules if you want to do them in parks, in the street, at fairs, on staircases, in plazas, outside buildings, on buses and trains, along highways. Regulations seek to obliterate messiness and unpredictability in public spaces; civility is a middle-class concept in which walking directly from your house to wherever you are going to earn or spend money is the desired behaviour. Simply expressing oneself outdoors is problematic: hanging out, goofing around. Everything pictured in this gallery has been prohibited somewhere in recent memory and the collection is hardly complete. For blog posts relevant to street concerns see the urban space tag.
