CNN Berlin's former Tempelhof airport has witnessed some major events in its time -- a Nazi airfield during World War II, it was the site of the Berlin airlift during the Cold War, and most recently an emergency shelter for refugees fleeing Syria. Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what's happening in the world as it unfolds.
Berlin's former Tempelhof airport has been proposed as a site for regulated sex booths, in a bid to protect the city's sex workers. In , it was taken out of service and transformed into a gigantic park, and Berliners can now be seen rollerblading down its former runways on summer evenings.
But the airfield may soon take on less wholesome role, if one local politician gets his way. The mayor of Berlin's central Mitte district has proposed installing "Verichtungsboxen" -- booths where prostitutes can meet clients -- in the airport site, a bid to improve the safety of the city's sex workers. These include drive-in booths, where customers can meet sex workers in their own vehicles. These drive-in booths in the German city of Cologne were introduced in Yet he notes that the Berlin Senate has refused to implement regulatory restrictions "because it fears a deterioration of the overall situation.
He is now proposing a restriction on street prostitution in the district, instead offering sex workers booths in controlled areas in a bid, he says, to improve the lives of "residents and sex workers" alike. The Paris park where Nigerian women are forced into prostitution. He says only a minority of sex workers on the street are receiving health advice and have been registered as sex workers; the number of places where sex workers can engage in sexual acts in private is diminishing; and the visibility of pimps is having a "negative impact on the safety of residents," he says.
She added that while sex workers have always been visible close to her apartment, between Oranienburger Strasse and Hackescher Markt, their visibility seems to have diminished in recent months, and she expressed concern at the proposal to move them to controlled areas away from the center. I felt happy when they were fine on a street corner, rather than pushing them out of sight. The men who went with them were very visible, so it felt like some control.
