Fed up with being the region's number one brothel hot spot, a Bavarian city council is discussing introducing a total ban on prostitution. The only problem: police say the city's many sex workers are too well-behaved to be forced out.
Amberg in Bavaria has the country's highest concentration of brothels, with 60 bordellos in a city of just 43,500 inhabitants, wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung on Friday.
And business is booming, according to solicitor Bernhard Mitko, who told the paper the number of prostitutes in Amberg is up 50 percent in the past 18 months. Now, in an attempt to clean up the city's image, local authorities now want to banish the city's sex workers, or at the very least impose a restricted area.
Florian Fuchs, head of the local Social Democrats (SPD), is sick of Amberg's reputation as “number one brothel spot” in the region and, with the support of the City Council, is pushing for a total ban, wrote the paper.
The move comes after several residents complained of drunken customers ringing the wrong door bell late at night, houses losing value due to their proximity to the brothels, or even of being disturbed by loud noises coming through open windows in summer.
But an outright ban may be difficult to impose, particularly as the police have no such complaints and told the paper that Amberg's prostitutes are well-behaved and discrete. They have also raised concerns that criminalising the sex industry and driving it underground will cause more problems than it solves, wrote the paper.
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