In Spain, Women Enslaved by a Boom in Brothel Tourism

Kinh Doanh | kids education |

LA JONQUERA, Spain — She had expected a job in a hotel. But when Valentina arrived here 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.

Marta Ramoneda for The New York Times

A prostitute waits for customers on a road in La Jonquera, on the border with France and Spain on December 11, 2011. More Photos »

By SUZANNE DALEY

Published: April 6, 2012

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Young Men Flocking to Spain for Sex With Trafficked Prostitutes

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La Jonquera attracts young men from France seeking sex. More Photos »

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 $40 for intercourse, $27 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 used to be 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 that 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 $2,500.

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 traveling in packs for the weekend — taking advantage of Europe's cheap and nearly seamless travel.

"The young used to go to discos," said Francina Vila i Valls, Barcelona's councilor 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 State Department's 2010 report on trafficking said that 200,000 to 400,000 women worked in prostitution in Spain. The report said that 90 percent were trafficked.

But police officials and advocates say that 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.

Europe woke up to the problem of trafficked women in the 1990s, as young women from the former Soviet Union began to arrive in large numbers, and it has spent much of the last decade developing legal frameworks to address the issue. But, some advocates say, this decade will test Europe's commitment to enforcing its new laws.

"The structures, by and large, are in place," said Luis CdeBaca, the ambassador who leads the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. "Now it's time to take them out for a drive."

Fueling 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. The State Department's report on trafficking said that according to preliminary information, the Spanish government prosecuted 202 trafficking suspects and convicted 80 in 2010.

More important, 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 that 39 percent 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.

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Rachel Chaundler and Stefania Rousselle contributed reporting.

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As Hundreds of Men Perished, One Ignored a Rumor to Survive

tin tuc | kids education |

Had you been a woman traveling in second class on the Titanic a century ago, your chances of survival were quite favorable — 86 percent were saved. For the men in second class, one of whom was my grandfather Lawrence Beesley, the odds were the reverse — only 14 percent survived, and the rest were drowned in the freezing waters of the Atlantic.

By NICHOLAS WADE

Published: April 9, 2012

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Notions of male chivalry toward the weaker sex have since been cast aside, and it is no longer de rigueur for a man to yield his seat on a bus, or a lifeboat, to someone of the opposite sex. But in the Edwardian era it was a moral code with a force stronger than law. When the order was given on the Titanic for families to be separated and for women to board lifeboats first, no man rushed ahead.

I have often wondered how my grandfather managed to beat the heavy odds against his survival. But I was too young, while he lived, ever to ask such an impertinent question. I have since come up with a possible answer, based on many readings of "The Loss of the Titanic," a book he wrote within a few weeks of his rescue.

My grandfather earned first-class honors in science at Cambridge University and had discovered a new species of algae before he graduated. But instead of pursuing a career in science he chose to become a high school physics teacher in his home town, Wirksworth, in northern England. Perhaps he needed the steadier income — he was already married to his first wife and had a young son, Alec (who was to marry Dodie Smith, the playwright and author of "101 Dalmatians").

He left his next job, as a physics master at Dulwich College in London, to become a Christian Science practitioner. Given that Christian Science values spiritual healing over scientific medicine, this was a surprising departure for him. It was to meet one of his brothers, also a Christian Scientist, in Toronto that my grandfather bought a second-class ticket on the Titanic for £13 (about $60 at the time). He boarded the ship at Southampton on April 10, 1912.

Traveling at high speed through an iceberg field without searchlights, the Titanic brushed past an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. on April 14. An underwater extension of the iceberg sliced through the ship's thin metal skin so smoothly that the passengers noticed no impact. The ship was designed to stay afloat with four of its forward sections flooded, but could not survive the compromise of six. It sank at 2:20 the next morning.

The captain ordered the lifeboats to be readied shortly after midnight. Presumably he knew that there were not enough to save everyone but did not advertise this information. Many passengers were at first unwilling to leave the vast ship, believing it unsinkable, and the first lifeboats left half filled.

My grandfather was standing on the top starboard deck of the boat with a large group of men when a rumor went around that the men were to be taken off on the port side. Almost everyone moved across the ship. Only he and two others stayed where they were.

Shortly after, he heard a cry of "Any more ladies?" from a lifeboat swinging level with the deck below. Leaning over the edge of his deck, he looked down at the boat.

"Any ladies on your deck?" a crew member asked him.

"No," my grandfather replied.

"Then you had better jump."

My grandfather put his feet over the side of the deck, threw his dressing gown ahead of him, and dropped onto the stern of the lifeboat.

Why did he decide not to follow the rest of the men over to the port side? Though he owed his life to that decision, the explanation he gives in his book is not entirely satisfying. "I can personally think of no decision arising from reasoned thought that induced me to remain rather than to cross over," he says.

As if in recognition that some more positive evidence for his non-decision would be helpful, he adds, "I am convinced that what was my salvation was a recognition of the necessity of being quiet and waiting in patience for some opportunity of safety to present itself."

The two passages are puzzling because in the first he says he made no conscious decision, and in the second he describes one. Isn't there perhaps something missing here, some consideration that he declines to make explicit?

He knew the ship was in distress because it had already launched distress rockets. The drastic separation of families, so that women could be given precedence, gave him grounds to suspect that there were too few lifeboats. And if so, what more hazardous place to be than in a crowd of doomed men? By declining to follow everyone else across the ship, my grandfather improved his odds of escape considerably.

Perhaps, in a more reticent age, he hesitated to describe such a cold calculation in print. Perhaps he did not wish to contradict the explanation he had already given to a Christian Science journal — that after ship met iceberg he read and reread the 91st Psalm , a favorite of the religion's founder.

In any event, I owe my existence to the fact that in those few critical moments he had the confidence to think differently from the crowd.

Nicholas Wade is a science writer for The Times.

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