Spanish PM Pledges to Outlaw Prostitution

BoomRadioNG | October 18, 2021

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez pledged on Sunday to criminalize prostitution in the country. Speaking to supporters at the end of his Socialist Party’s three-day congress in Valencia, Mr Sanchez said that the practice “enslaves” women.

Prostitution was decriminalized in Spain in 1995 and in 2016 the UN estimated the country’s sex industry was worth €3.7bn A 2009 survey found that up to 1 in 3 Spanish men had paid for sex.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez
European Parliament from EU; Pietro NAJ-OLEARI, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

In 2019, Sanchez’s party published a pledge in its election manifesto to outlaw prostitution, in what was seen as a move to attract more female voters.

The manifesto called prostitution “one of the cruellest aspects of the feminization of poverty and one of the worst forms of violence against women”. However two years on from the election, no legislation has yet been tabled.

Paul Ayorinde