With less than a day to go until the first matches kick off in the Soccer World Cup tournament, shops are heaving with World Cup merchandise: football shirts, whistles and scarves.
And then there are the condoms. It may seem reassuring that football supporters travelling to Germany are being encouraged to be sensible, but there is a pernicious side to the connection between the 2006 World Cup and sex.
Alongside the beer tents and burger bars catering for a massive influx of fans to the tournament host country, entrepreneurs are preparing to sell a product already openly on sale throughout Germany: women.
Germany has legalised its sex industry — Cologne opened the world’s first drive-in brothel in 2001. But with three million foreign football fans about to descend on the 12 cities hosting the tournament, entrepreneurs are laying on special facilities. In Berlin, for example, a 3 000m2 mega-brothel has been built next to the main World Cup venue. It is designed to take as many as 650 customers at any one time. Wooden ”performance boxes”, resembling toilets, have been built, with condoms, showers and parking all laid on.
But where are all the extra women to come from?
In January, the international feminist organisation Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) launched a worldwide campaign to protest against Germany’s promotion and public display of prostitution during the World Cup.
The organisation is worried that about 40 000 women will be ”imported” into Germany from Africa, Asia and central and eastern Europe. (This figure is based on the number of women needed to fill the additional brothels being set up.)
Some of the women currently working in the sex industry elsewhere in Europe will gravitate to Germany to earn extra money. Although not trafficked, many of these women will be pimped by boyfriends and even family members. Some will send money back to their impoverished families, others will be trying to pay off debts or sustain drug habits. But others, campaigners say, will be more directly forced — some even kidnapped and smuggled across borders.
There is evidence that Germany’s pimps are casting their eyes on poverty-stricken countries in their search for women for the Cup. CATW says it has received calls from the mothers of Brazilian teenagers lured by traffickers. ”They are being offered all-expenses-paid trips to go to Germany and ‘support their country’,” says Janice Raymond, co-director of CATW.
For the teams involved, prostitution has inevitably become an issue. The French coach, Raymond Domenech, is appalled by the prospect of thousands of prostitutes being imported for the tournament. ”It is humiliating enough for me that football is linked with alcohol and violence,” he says, ”but this is worse. Human beings are being talked about like cattle, and football is linked with that.”
Lars-Ake Lagrell, president of the Swedish Football Association, is equally adamant. He promises that no Swedish player will use brothels during the World Cup.
There have even been calls for the Swedish team to withdraw from the Cup by Claes Borgstrom, the Swedish government’s equality ombudsman, who says he believes the tournament will encourage more men to visit prostitutes.
Sweden has a strong record on prostitution: the country criminalised the buying of sexual services seven years ago after a long-running campaign by feminists, supported by many of its female MPs (who comprise almost 50% of its Parliament). Since then, trafficking into the country has decreased.
The English Football Association, however, has no intention of even getting into the row over the World Cup sex industry. According to its spokesperson, Adrian Cooper: ”It is not the concern of the FA if fans go to brothels.”
Will McMahon, director of the Crime and Society Foundation, a think-tank that examines the harm caused by antisocial behaviour and crime, says he will not be going to Germany. ”I don’t want to be around women being bought and sold,” he says. ”This is an opportunity for the German government to recognise that there are other European countries that find their policy on prostitution offensive.”
McMahon believes that, whether prostitution is legal or not, the FA should be advising fans to stay away from brothels in Germany. ”The FA should put its cards on the table and condemn the international sex industry as abuse. So far the message to women is: ‘We don’t give a damn about you.”’
”We need to remember we are a football, not a social, body,” argues Cooper.
But there are social causes on which the FA is prepared to take a line. It has a proud history of campaigning against racism both on and off the pitch, and has supported English players on the receiving end of racism in other countries. ”The FA seem to think women’s basic human rights have nothing to do with football,” says Heather Harvey of Amnesty International, which runs an international campaign against the trafficking of women and children.
”Women will only be trafficked because the arrival of thousands of fans creates a market for them.”
Campaigners against the sex industry say this will make little difference to men eager to add sex with prostitutes to their World Cup experience.
Alina is a woman who knows something about the link between sex and sport. She escaped as traffickers tried to bring her into the United Kingdom from Athens in 2002. She had been abducted from her home in Moscow for the Olympic Games. When the games ended, Alina was considered -”second-hand” and sold on to another criminal gang, who transported her to London in the hope that she would make money in a brothel there.
”I was worn out, literally used up and spat out,” she says, talking from a safe house in London. ”During the games I saw hundreds of men … who thought that a good day was watching sport, drinking and having sex. We were just part of the entertainment.” — Â