In light of the Amnesty International vote happening this week in Dublin to determine whether or not AI will adopt a policy of fighting for the decriminalization of sex work, VICE’s new female-focused channel, Broadly, has released the interesting, challenging, and informative documentary on sex work in Spain above.
Host Jena Friedman travels first to Barcelona to sit in on a prostitution workshop lead by Spain’s highest-paid escort, Paula VIP. Friedman then travels to Madrid, where policy makers are reluctant to discuss the issue of prostitution. She meets with the women behind Spain’s first union for prostitutes in the country (Sealeer Co-operative) and takes a tour of their “approved” sex clubs in Ibiza. Afterwards, Jena heads to La Jonquera, where the number of prostitutes in the area has doubled in 3 years, many of whom are migrant women from Eastern Europe.
Due to their lack of a legal framework to address prostitution at all, Spain currently has about 300,000 women working as prostitutes – the most in Europe. The only law they do have is one outlawing pimps, so these women have to be their own bosses. As with anything, there are both pros and cons to a complete lack of legality, and this documentary explores that with the even-handedness and fearlessness we’ve come to expect from VICE. One thing is for sure, the issue of protecting women in the sex industry is a complicated one, but there’s a lot we can learn from places where attitudes toward sex work and sex workers are different, and those workers are allowed agency.
(via Broadly)
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