Inside the world of legalised prostitution in Germany
s.telegraph.co.uk
s.telegraph.co.uk
People who critize this need to understand the options for women from places of abject poverty are not great either.
She's a surgical reg now, happily married for over 10 years with two children so did ok out of it and wasn't harmed in any way and says she quite enjoyed it.
"My wife was a prostitute and she quite enjoyed it! I'm so proud of her. She is a great example to my children."
The fact that she ended up as a doctor is enough to launder this situation? "The ends justify the means" in this situation? WTF!
This isn't the US - there is a different attitude to it all over here in Europe.
Edited to be gender neutral.
But isn't forced prostitution a problem whether we make it legal or illegal? Are there any studies that show whether forced prostitution/trafficking goes up or down with legalisation?
>> "And as for the women who choose it freely but only because they are in the "unfortunate situation" where it seems like the best option"
There are plenty of jobs people do because they are the only option. They are physically difficult, dangerous, and pay much less than prostitution. In the documentaries/articles I've read where this point is made it often comes out that the person could do another job but it pays less and they would rather do prostitution as it pays more. Although I do agree with your point about a basic income. I think that would solve a lot of societies problems. It would also be interesting to then see how many people stay in prostitution when they have no financial reason to do so.
The Netherlands, where prostitution is legal and regulated, is still one of the top destinations of human trafficking:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_the_Netherlands...
Your question is addressed early on in the article linked by this thread. The answer is yes.
Personally I agree on a basic income pegged to a annually updated cost-of-living index to help out those in need. Sure, some people will abuse the system, but I think that overall society would be better off.
Basic income (and in general a good social program) cuts down significantly on this as well but most of the women you are talking about are definitely not from countries with basic income (or at least, not at a level that you could realistically contemplate living of it).
You won't see Dutch women or Danish women or German women as prostitutes in Romania or Bulgaria but there is plenty of evidence that Romanian, Bulgarian and Ukraninian women are in prostitution in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries.
So the economy most definitely is a factor. In a typical scenario girls get lured to the target country with promises of riches in some kind of career and when they arrive their passports are taken away and they are forced into prostitution.
It's also not rare to see the majority of this be facilitated by people from their home countries.
Very sad stuff.
According to the police, sex trafficking is not actually as common as media and ideological motivated organizations want us to believe.
In Germany there is a kind of basic income if you don't have work. The state will pay for rent, health care and food.
Why should some people get to tell other people
what they can or can't do with their own bodies?
The reasons to oppose trafficking, under age prostitution and violence against prostitutes are obvious. And it's obvious why home owners wouldn't want street walkers outside their front doors. Let's set those aside and consider indoor prostitution without slavery or violence.
1. In many places, to collect unemployment benefits you have to be searching for work, and if you're offered work you must accept it. Would you like to see your daughter or mother denied benefits because she turned down a job offer from a brothel?
2. There are a bunch of things we can't consent to. Even if I sign a contract agreeing to be sold into slavery, or agreeing a loan shark can break my legs, or agreeing to work for less than the minimum wage, that part of the contract is invalid. There's precedent for us making it impossible for people to consent to things.
3. If there's someone I wouldn't otherwise have sex with, but I have sex with them to avoid being stabbed, that's obviously rape. If I do the same thing to avoid being starved, is that so different? Oh, admittedly it's more of a grey area, but surely punters could hold themselves to higher standards and avoid things that are even a grey area?
4. Trafficking and violence are giant problems. About 90% of prostitution is one or the other, and legalising prostitution will increase demand leading to more of both. Isn't it better to sacrifice that small fraction of nonviolent prostitution to help clamp down on the much larger amount of violent prostitution? Oh, sure, the 90%/10% ratio might be a bit off, but slavery and violence are really serious, their impact should be given greater weight.
Not saying I agree with all of them, but I can understand why a politician might decide they have other changes to the law they'd like to see first.
Or father, or son. Given that it tends to be mostly male customers, we would presumably see straight men having welfare withdrawn because they refuse to let other men have sex with them for money.
When you look at US laws that attempt to regulate carnal living, they're all over the place. Cigarettes are legal, but not marijuana. Alcohol is okay, but not shromes. We make people wear seat-belts, but don't limit their McDonalds intake. Our age restrictions are crazy too. You can die for your country, but you're too young to have a beer.
Our laws are a mess because they are written based on money, popular opinion & emotion instead of figuring out how to protect without depriving others of their personal liberty. Just like freedom of speech, I might not agree with what you say/do, but I'll fight for your right to say/do it, as long as it doesn't deprive others of their rights. Much like I support Westboro Baptist Church's right to free speech, I support the legalization of prostitution out of principle, even if it's not something I approve of personally. The strength of your principles are usually measured at the extremes.
He didn't say "I can't think of a list of reasons for it to be illegal".
"Sex trafficking statistics are frustratingly incomplete, but a recent report estimated the number of victims in Europe at 270,000."
We accept this form of modern slavery?
"Denmark, which decriminalised prostitution in 1999 – the same year Sweden made the purchase of sex illegal - has four times the number of trafficking victims than its neighbour despite having around half the population."
There's a good argument against legalization.
Legalizing and controlling makes more sense to me.
That's not very strong evidence. It could easily be that the sex industry in Denmark was thriving pre-1999 and floundering in Sweden (with policy choices & trafficking as results).
Better proof would be comparing the growth rates in trafficking between two countries with similar base rates, where one legalized and one didn't.
Intuitively, I hope you can understand why many people think legalization can be a great tool for combatting trafficking. By doing so, you move the sex trade out into the open and away from gangs/criminal syndicates and allow for regulations which can serve public health & anti-slavery purposes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_the_Netherlands...
Sure, there might be better ways of solving this than making prostitution illegal.
If you walk through the red light district of Amsterdam at any given time of day there will be tourists packed wall-to-wall and relatively few locals (they are mostly on the 'supply side').
If every country would legalize prostitution the draw of this would be greatly reduced and Amsterdam would lose some tourist income (I'd be more than happy with that).
Drugs same thing. I don't know any dutch people that consume on a regular basis but almost all the tourists that I know and meet going to Amsterdam can't wait to get stoned.
> We accept this form of modern slavery?
I don't, but prohibiting prostitution is a certain way to ensure that sex-trafficking will remain an issue, due to the huge demand for sex workers.
Much like we can't stop the cartels in Mexico until we decouple them from their hundreds of billions a year in funding from US drug users, we can't attack the problem of human trafficking in earnest until we are willing to remove the demand in markets for illegally obtained people - which requires that we provide those markets some other way to find people.
> "Denmark, which decriminalised prostitution in 1999 – the same year Sweden made the purchase of sex illegal - has four times the number of trafficking victims than its neighbour despite having around half the population."
> There's a good argument against legalization.
This doesn't address the topic under discussion, both because we're missing appropriate stats for those countries pre-change, but also because the change cited isn't the one we're talking about.
Fundamentally, decriminalization is different than legalization, because it leaves control in the hands of black market actors while simply removing some of their penalties for operating (perhaps only at certain tiers).
If you think that's a "good" argument against legalization, I'd say that we should legalize tomorrow.
There's even a directory site, www.melbourne-brothels.com, though it seems to be down at the moment.
Sure, some prices would rise. Basic income needs to be continuously calibrated relative to the cost of basic living. That said, I don't see any good reason to expect that the price of say food would rise beyond people's ability to buy. Western countries already produce way more food than is necessary, so supermarkets end up throwing a lot away. With increased demand there would be increased production of food, clothes, and other essential items.
Market forces would still be in effect, so rent prices would reach a new equilibrium. As long as there are more apartments than people, rents would stay at a level that people could afford (or the empty apartments would lower rents until people could afford to live there). If there are not enough apartments, more would be built in cheap locations to satisfy demand. Sure, basic income wouldn't make everyone able to live in New York, but that's not the goal.
And then you'd have to raise prices again because your "basic income" is not basic anymore to sustain paying for rents, for stuff more than bare minimum. In other words, more debts.
That's a simplified explanation of what would be going on, but it gives a general idea of why it would not work so well in practice, and why it's not sustainable.
By the way in most countries you have a "basic income" already for people who have no resources whatsoever (not for everyone in society) - it's very limited but that's enough to buy food usually. The idea is nothing new.
Some prices would rise, but not enough to offset the benefits of basic income. Our economy has more than enough productivity and wealth to provide everyone with food and shelter. The majority of food production is largely automated and does not require a lot of cheap labor.
Your claim that basic income is not sustainable is unsubstantiated. Basic income is a great way to share the proceeds of automation and increased productivity among the many instead of just among the few.
It's very easy for corporations or rich individuals to move away from places were tax increase too much. More unemployment, is that what you want? Because when such companies/people move, they don't spend their money locally anymore. Yeah, and they are free to move, unless you want to set up a totalitarian regime.
And the claim that taxing the very rich will save the government from its debt is hilarious, seeing that the US government, for example, has dozens of trillions of USD in debts and I have yet to hear about any company who has a trillion of net worth.
Sure, tax evasion is a problem, but the fact is taxes have been on a downward curve for decades now. Wealth and corporate tax evasion is a race to the bottom, and requires international cooperation. Should we just shrug and let inequality grow without bounds? We don't need to restrict people's freedom to move, but the EU and US could for example cooperate on introducing tariffs on companies that base their operations in tax havens. Of course, there is still a lot that could be achieved on a purely national level too.
The US public debt is at 18 trillion USD, whereas total private net worth is at least three times that amount: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_position_of_the_Unite...
Sounds like it should be possible to reduce the public debt to a more manageable level.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/05/u-s-income-i...
Even if you only care about economic growth and not about inequality, there is evidence that economic growth is held back by the current levels of inequality:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/upshot/alarm-on-income-ine...
Where is the evidence for the case that taxes are way too high? Growing public debt will also be a burden on generations to come.
Unless you head has been stuck in the sand, worldwide poverty has decreased significantly since the 1970s and that's become the market has been more opened than before, not because governments have been overspending.
> Even if you only care about economic growth and not about inequality, there is evidence that economic growth is held back by the current levels of inequality
Bullshit. Inequality increase is obviously normal. Someone who starts with more capital will see their absolute income rising faster than someone with lower capital, so obviously "inequality" will rise no matter what. It would be very strange if it went the other way around. Besides, Inequality is bullshit because the level of life for almost everyone on Earth has increased generation after generation, and the poor have been getting less poor than they were, so for almost everyone it is a positive trend. Look at China, if you want an example of how hundred of millions of people benefit from a newly opened market to get out of poverty.
> Where is the evidence for the case that taxes are way too high? Growing public debt will also be a burden on generations to come.
What evidence do you need? When 45% of you gross salary goes back to the government in taxes, that's the only evidence you need.
EDIT/ And, you know, if you want to help the poor, nobody prevents you from giving your savings and income to charity or to whoever you like. You know, you don't need the government to do that for you with added inefficiency and bureaucracy.
Inequality increase might be "normal" in our current political systems, but that doesn't make it desirable or inevitable. A progressive tax on wealth and income could prevent it from getting out of hand. Inequality is not bullshit, because first of all the extreme wealth in the hands of the rich could go a long way to feed and house the hungry and poor, and secondly wealth is power. Wealth can buy political power through lobbying and campaigning, ensuring that policies tend to shift ever in favour of the wealthy. Thus extreme inequality corresponds to extreme imbalances in power, undermining our democratic institutions.
On the first point, "you could approximately double the incomes of those living on less than $1.25 a day worldwide by transferring to them one-third of the consumption growth enjoyed by the world’s richest 1 percent since 1990. Think of it as bringing the consumption levels of the global 1 percent back to where they were around 2003 or 2004, in return for wiping out global absolute poverty. Is that such an unreasonable tradeoff?" - http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-12-09/how-to-end-g...
And while a lot of Chinese have moved from poverty to wage slavery, the economic narrative isn't really that rosy there either: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-04-30/chinas-incom...
You claimed the fact that people had been lifted out of poverty since the 1970s was a sign that the economy was doing well. Why then is a 45 % tax such a problem, assuming the people paying it don't end up below the poverty level? Considering what governments provide in terms of infrastructure, safety, education, social security, and health care, is that so much to ask for? It seems only fair to pay back to society for the opportunities provided for us. Also from a utilitarian stand-point societies with less inequality have less crime and improved well-being (assuming the GDP per capita is not too low of course). Tax is a necessary part of a well functioning society, not a bogeyman. We should just make taxation more fair by not making the middle class pay a disproportionate share - the wealthy often pay a significantly lower tax percentage on their earnings due to income being taxed higher than capital gains.
High tax rates do not prevent economic growth, in fact the opposite seems to be the case: "During the 1950s and early 1960s, the top bracket income tax rate was over 90%--and the economy, middle-class, and stock market boomed." - http://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-tax-rates
Tax rates are at an all-time low, inequality levels are soaring, and economic growth is poor. The gains from the high levels of productivity growth we've seen since the 1970s have been accumulating among a small elite. Doesn't seem very ideal to me.
Similarly median family income was tightly coupled to productivity growth until the mid 1970s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United...
I don't think we're at the point where it's sustainable yet but it's not hard to imagine a future where prices are dirt cheap and some robotics corporation is making $1t in profits every year after automating away every low-skilled job.
But than new factories should open and prices would return to normal.
But I wonder, though, if you give welfare to women, will that lead to financially responsible, but "dull" men having a hard time getting laid? While "fun", but financially reckless men getting most of the women?
I suppose you may have meant a basic income scheme for both men and women, but the issue would still be there. Women get pregnant. Men don't. Thus men tend to be financially more successful than women, since they don't have to spend time being pregnant etc.
The higher the price you're able to command for your services, the more likely you are to have your stuff together, so it's also the most vulnerable sex workers you're pushing underground, too.
Anyway what issue do you have with discount hookers?
One needs to be careful when making judgements about what the causes were for this growth.
One need to keep in mind that Germany has several strong driving forces for change in our society and around us.
* economic collapse in former east europe
* change in political and economic systems
* open borders
* a lot of poor and desperate people in Germany and in neighbor countries.
* Many european countries further in the east are even worse in most ways: no jobs, no perspective, corruption, very little recovery, ...
* Germany had an economic recovery during the last decade and has been able to control the effects of the world-wide financial crisis on its economy.
* the Euro in Germany and west Europe remained stable. In those troubled country in the east, there is no Euro. Some smaller countries now joined the Eurozone.
We had the reunification of east and west germany. 20 million people had a drastic change in life, with their economy collapsing, authorities gone, the political system changed, jobs gone, ... Some recovery happened in the last decade, but that was very tough for many people and dampened by a lot of money from mostly western parts of Germany. All borders to neighbor countries are now wide open. All the east european countries went through even harder economic times. The financial crisis made it even worse. High unemployment in neighbor countries, especially for young people, while unemployment in Germany was going down. Many people moved to west europe for work. Legal or not. Eastern neighbors all joined the EU, which for example now means that people can move freely and work freely in other countries.
Thus it's not easy to compare it with other countries and it is not possible to think about prostitution independent from the other developments. The number of people in prostition is not just depending on the type of law. Germany has rich West Germany and an added East Germany. At its border it has countries with a lot of poor people, formely all communist. This difference in wealth, job opportunities, etc. creates enough opportunities which can be exploited. Thus we would have seen a lot increase in the sex business, whether we would have legalized it or not. Trying to control that with police and laws would have been very very difficult. There are open borders to all sides. Thinking that young women from eastern Europe would not been here, if laws were tougher is naive. We didn't open the borders to create new ones.
I think it was a smart move to prevent people from going underground. Still it makes sense to look if changes to the laws etc. are necessary after more than a decade.
So how come unemployed people from poor neighbor countries can just go Germany and do prostution? It sounds realistic at first hear but thinking about the border officers in Germany, I think you kinda wanna think majority of the prostutes are not Germans.
Not taking a position on GP's thesis that most prostitutes come from poorer countries though.
The Schengen area are has 420 million people. That's like the US + Mexico, but in 26 countries. The US is closing its border to Mexico - Europe has opened up a lot of borders.
But the EU is larger than the Schengen zone. Britain for example is not a part of the Schengen zone, but due to EU law everyone in Britain is free to move to Germany and legally allowed to work here.
Then there are a lot of people in east Europe not in the EU. Many of them under a worse economic and political situation (Ukraine, ...). That motivates a lot of people...
Poland is next to us. No one in Poland needs a visa. There are no real border controls between Poland and us.
The Czech are next to us. No one needs a visa. No real border controls.
France is next to us. No real border controls. Nobody needs a visa. We even have the same currency.
Everybody in the EU (505 million people) can work move and work everywhere (mostly). Nobody needs a visa.
Even from countries where a visa is needed, moving to Germany and staying illegal is relatively easy.
And so on.
Where I live, I have never seen that at all. Even then, if the police does not find anything, Czech and Polish drivers are perfectly fine to drive on German streets. Since they are in the EU, they can freely live and work in Germany - they just need to follow the usual German and EU laws.
That's also not important in this context. Prostitutes from east european countries can easily move into Germany. It also does not matter if they speak German or not. Most speak enough German to be able to work here in their business.
> And while German society is relatively open, you need fluent German language with NO ACCENT to be fully accepted, it is very far from US or UK.
The is no requirement to have no foreign accent to live in Germany. The city where I live has around 13% population which doesn't have a German passport. That's the official numbers. Then add people who are living illegal and people who have passports from more than one country.
2008: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/02/fire-f12.html
1993: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solingen_arson_attack_of_1993
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Germany
And as a minority in Oakland, I feel like home and I know enough horror stories to avoid visiting Germany as long as I don't have a good reason.
And I am SICK of racist stereotypes about Germans. Yes their police does profiling and people from post-soviet get less promoted, but this also applies to East-Germans!
What I was talking about is not racism, but sort of conservatism.
But technicalities aside - I am from Poland. Country which has every reason to hate Germans the most. Yet my opinion of Germans is that they are incredibly polite, worried to be perceived as even a little bit racist, and the part about border crossings is completely made up. Even before the Schoengen zone was opened, if you were stopped at the German border, sure, they could disassemble half of your car - but then they would put everything back together exactly as it was, and they would apologise for taking your time. Compared to the Belorussian, Ukrainian or Russian borders, where you have to be careful to not get shot.
I'm saying this as somebody grew up there. You have to ask the experience of those who actually experience the discrimination, not speaking on behalf of them. Where else in the world we have racists burning houses belong to minorities alive in 2010s? Even last year, a singer couldn't give a concert to the Turkish people there because she couldn't get a visa. If she gets visa, she may not pass the border since all the officers ask you "why are you in Germany?" and if you say you wanna travel they keep asking "travelling where?" "shopping what?" "studying what?" Now even celebs bring newspapers to show the officers to prove that they won't stay too long there!
It's a fact that being a middle eastern or being from a middle eastern influenced country let you face different attitude everywhere in the world. I'm saying this as an atheist guy who had to face it.
www.minorityrights.org/download.php?id=183
http://usefoundation.org/view/869
Some christians seem to have a hard time in Turkey:
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/christians-in-turkey-fearfu...
http://www.speroforum.com/a/YGCTQMTWMQ13/73995-Turkey-Christ...
http://morningstarnews.org/2014/07/hostilities-at-catholic-c...
http://armenpress.am/eng/news/717094/christian-churches-atta...
If you believe there is less racism in the US or that minorities are better off in the US, a visit to Germany could open your eyes.
Immigration from eastern europe makes a lot of people in the UK unhappy.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-24924219
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/british-welcome-o...
So I would say that of the countries whose borders I crossed -- Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands -- Germany was by far the one with the most border controls. In fact, it was the one that had border controls.
(also the German trains had the highest rates of delay and malfunction; I did one six-hour trip to Berlin on a train which had no food available, and another six-hour trip on a different German train where the air conditioning didn't work, on a sunny day over 30C, and missed a connection to a TGV because the ICE was running nearly 30 minutes late)
In every train in Germany, if the crew is changed, they will control your ticket. They say 'Personalwechsel' and control the tickets again.
You don't need a passport, visa, or whatever to buy a ticket and no train crew is controlling your passport. They are also NOT authorized to see your passport. If you don't have a valid ticket, they will ask for your passport for identification purposes. You don't have to show it. They will then call the police, which you then HAVE to show your passport.
The train crew only looks at the passport, if you used it online to buy a ticket, using the passport number as an identification number. So they check the online ticket and look at the passport number. But you can use other ways of checking for a correct online ticket (using your credit card number for example) and you can buy your ticket also offline.
It also does not matter for 505 million EU citizens. The police may control your passport. But that's it.
ALL 505 MILLION EU CITIZENS ARE ALLOWED TO TRAVEL AND WORK IN GERMANY WITHOUT VISUM.
Details: http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=457&langId=en
I was pointing out two separate things which occurred:
1. German train crews relentlessly checking and re-checking and re-re-re-checking train tickets after each major stop, rather than (as with every other country) checking once, noting the passenger's destination, and then not bothering them again. This was not an identification check, it was a ticket check. This is primarily an annoyance, but seemed part of a pattern of much stricter controls imposed by German crews and within Germany in general, as corroborated by...
2. At the first stop inside the German border, police -- that is, officers in uniforms which read POLIZEI -- boarding the train and carrying out a check of every passenger's identification. This was not a ticket check, it was an identification check.
At that border stop I was also asked, by an officer who did not speak sufficient English (and I speak no German, only English and French) and so had to show me printed cards and ask me to point to answers, the purpose of my visit to Germany and the duration of my stay in Germany. This was asked despite my already having legally entered and having remained continuously within the Schengen area (my passport, already displayed by that point, contained the entry stamp, ironically from an airport in Germany), and despite my already having entered Germany twice on that trip.
As a result I am extremely skeptical of the idea that Germany has an "open border" or "no border controls" for intra-Schengen travel. That border stop on a train, coming from another Schengen country into Germany, was actually more in-depth than the examination at my initial entry in Frankfurt airport.
Basically, you ran into a police patrol that happened to be near the border. It could've been a random check for illegal activity (drug trafficking, etc), or they might have been looking for something in particular.
It was not a border control, and the German borders aren't more open or closed just because their police is relatively eager to do patrols. As a counterpoint, I was once stopped by German police on the highway near Hannover - far, far away from any border, and asked the same questions you were asked.
I'm from the Netherlands, and I travel into Germany many times a year, by all kinds of means of transport. I've been stopped near the border (also on a train, much like your story actually) exactly once. You just had bad luck.
Finally, while the Schengen treaty has a lot to say about freedom of movement, there's no section about welcome hugs.
There are exceptions, e.g.:
* Switzerland, although part of Schengen, will sometimes do boarder checks
* The UK, although part of the EU, is not part of Schengen and will require ID for entry and exit
See my other reply about the importance of perception:
That, or you just want to complain on the internet about the bad police men being not nice to you. That's all right, but that's not what this discussion was about.
> German train crews relentlessly checking and re-checking and re-re-re-checking
That's done every time a crew changes. The same crew does exactly check you once, but they go multiple times through the train.
This has nothing to do with immigration or crime. Train crews have no authority of the police.
> At the first stop inside the German border, police -- that is, officers in uniforms which read POLIZEI -- boarding the train and carrying out a check of every passenger's identification. This was not a ticket check, it was an identification check.
That happens randomly or during special tasks. There are also police checks on the road near borders, where they check some cars they find interesting. Sometimes they also do coordinated searches for drugs, stolen cars, ...
Targets are illegal immigrants and criminal activity.
> the purpose of my visit to Germany and the duration of my stay in Germany. This was asked despite my already having legally entered and having remained continuously within the Schengen area (my passport, already displayed by that point, contained the entry stamp, ironically from an airport in Germany), and despite my already having entered Germany twice on that trip.
These are standard questions of every kind of border control. It's just that in the Schengen area the controls between member states are more or less random and not necessarily at the border.
Some people may never see a border control and others might see it more often. But for somebody from Poland entering Germany, the checks are only to have an eye on criminal activity. Other than that polish persons can freely move and work in Germany according to EU law. A lot of them work here. Legal and illegal. Illegal is work, if the work is not official registered, no taxes are paid, etc.
> As a result I am extremely skeptical of the idea that Germany has an "open border" or "no border controls" for intra-Schengen travel.
You can imagine that criminals are much more clever than you when it comes to avoiding the few random controls... they also have people broadcasting any police activity. A patrol on the train? Leave the train and take a private car over the border using a small street somewhere...
So if I'm on a train and it stops at the border, and a uniformed government official comes in and asks to see my passport and then starts asking me immigration questions, the perception is not "this is an uncontrolled border, just got a random check that could have happened anywhere in the country". The perception is not "oh, this officer can't actually deny me entry".
The perception is "this is an immigration check at the border", and the dynamic of the situation flows from there.
The ticket checking by rail crews does seem to be an entirely German thing (again, other countries' rail crews just had a list and marked which seats had been checked, so even if another crew or crew member came through later they didn't need to repeat it), and I suspect there's a larger cultural pattern here tied into things like the German identification-obligation laws (which, to be honest, made me more than a bit uncomfortable when I learned about them -- I have enough trouble with the idea that in my home country courts have ruled I can be subjected to an ID check at any time, learning that it's still a deeply-ingrained thing in a country with Germany's history is off the scale of unsettling for me).
If you travel in a foreign country, you might want to make yourself familiar with the usual regulations.
> The ticket checking by rail crews does seem to be an entirely German thing (again, other countries' rail crews just had a list and marked which seats had been checked, so even if another crew or crew member came through later they didn't need to repeat it),
You can easily see that this does not work.
> identification-obligation
I fail to see a problem with having a passport.
German border officials are usually very professional.
There are 'roving' patrols but these are far too few to make any big difference.
I travel a lot within Europe and the borders above are the only ones where I've seen any border activity at all, let alone was stopped for inspection of my vehicle or passport control in the last decade or more.
Here's the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shv1FAxToHM
IIRC, the reason for changing submission titles is to ensure clarity, and dissuade editorialization, however this submission was changed to a less clear title.
However, in our culture there seems to be a bias that marriage is somehow better than prostitution. I find that odd.
Traditional monogamous marriage seems incredibly boring. The biggest problem with prostitution, I think, is STDs, because each prostitute has sex with so very many men.
I wish there was some sort of solution somewhere between traditional marriage and prostitution.
Maybe the reason why our culture has this bias in favor of monogamous marriage, is that the majority of the population is not easily bored?
Then again, you see the proliferation of divorces and many married people end up having lovers on the side. So I'd say our culture is getting increasingly easy-bored.
I think the main reason for this bias is that marriages in the past were primarily an economic construct, merging the wealth of two families, where the married couple were only the vehicle for binding the contract. This, plus of course the economic benefits of spawning and raising kids. You can see this today in parts of the world where people still do arranged marriages.
Compared to prostitution, this would be like the difference between a cozy corporate job and freelancing in an unstable market. In the first case, you get insurance, health benefits, stable and predictable salary, and you expect to be employed for long time - so you and your family can make long-term plans. In the second case, you don't get any of that, and your main concern is whether you'll earn enough money now to last through an unpredictably-long period of time where there won't be any work for you to do - so you can't plan ahead at all.