Sunday 8 April 2012

Spanish unemployment

Cut & Furious: Spain 25% jobless to be sacrificed for euro?

Spain is causing a headache to investors, with pressing concerns it may require international aid to help handle its debts. The government is implementing a big austerity programme there, at a time when almost a quarter of the workforce is unemployed, and recession is knocking on the door once again. And as Jacob Greaves reports from Madrid, the way the authorities are dealing with the crisis, is leaving people raging in anger.








Prostitution in Spain borders on modern-day slave trade
While the economy struggles, the sex industry is booming, writes Suzanne Daley



8 April, 2012

She had expected a job in a hotel. But when Valentina arrived in Spain two months ago from Romania, the man who helped her get here - a man she had considered her boyfriend - made it clear that the job was on the side of the road.

He threatened to beat her and to kill her children if she did not comply. And so she stood near a roundabout recently, her hair in a greasy ponytail, charging $US40 ($38.80) for intercourse, $US27 for oral sex.

''For me, life is finished,'' she said later that evening, tears running down her face. ''I will never forget that I have done this.''

La Jonquera was once a quiet border town where truckers rested and the French came looking for a deal on hand-painted pottery and leather goods. But these days, prostitution is big business here, as it is elsewhere in Spain, where it is essentially legal.

While the rest of Spain's economy may be struggling, experts say prostitution - almost all of it involving the ruthless trafficking of foreign women - is booming, exploding into public view in small towns and big cities. The police recently rescued a 19-year-old Romanian woman from traffickers who had tattooed on her wrist a bar code and the amount she still owed them: more than $US2500.

In the past, most customers were middle-aged men. But the boom here, experts say, is powered in large part by the desires of young men - many of them travelling in packs for the weekend. ''The young used to go to discos,'' said Francina Vila i Valls, Barcelona's counsellor for women and civil rights. ''But now they go to brothels. It's just another form of entertainment to them.''

There is little reliable data on the subject. The United States State Department's 2010 report on trafficking said 200,000 to 400,000 women worked in prostitution in Spain - 90 per cent were trafficked.

But police officials and advocates say whatever the number of victims, it is growing. Thousands of women are forced to work - often for even lower pay now, because of the economic downturn - everywhere from fancy clubs and private apartments to industrial complexes and lonely country roads.

Fuelling the boom in the sex industry in Spain are many factors, experts say, including porous borders in many parts of the world and lax laws. Until 2010, Spain did not even have a law that distinguished trafficking from illegal immigration. And advocates say arrests of traffickers and services for trafficked women remain few.

More importantly, some advocates say, is the growing demand for sex services from younger tourists. Of course, there is a local market. One study cited by a 2009 United Nations report said 39 per cent of Spanish men admitted having visited a prostitute at least once. It is widely accepted here for business meetings to end in dinner and a visit to a brothel.

But more recently, experts say, Spain has also become a go-to destination for sex services. In La Jonquera, tucked behind an all-night gas station, is the newly opened Club Paradise, which, with 101 rooms, is one of the largest brothels in Europe. It caters in large part to young men from France, where many aspects of prostitution are illegal, and perhaps more to the point, buying sex is more expensive.

Thirty years ago, virtually all the prostitutes in Spain were Spanish. Now, almost none are. Advocates and police officials say most of the women are controlled by illegal networks - they are modern-day slaves.

The networks vary enormously, and shift constantly. Some are ''mum and pop'' operations out of eastern Europe, like the one that controls Valentina. Others have far greater reach, such as the Nigerian organisations that first began to surface in Spain in the past decade. Deputy Inspector Xavier Cortes Camacho, head of the regional anti-trafficking unit in Barcelona, said the Nigerian groups moved women through northern Africa to Spain, and then controlled them by threatening to rape or kill their family members back home.

But Mr Cortes said people of maybe a dozen nationalities were involved in the trafficking. Until recently, for instance, the police in Barcelona did not even realise Chinese mafias ran prostitution rings in the city. Then they began noticing more and more advertisements for Chinese, Japanese and Korean women - all of them, it turned out, Chinese - working in a network of about 30 brothels.

The New York Times

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