Clamp-down on sex clubs and vice in Sweden

Press, 5 December 1979, Page 24

Clamp-down on sex clubs and vice in Sweden

By CHRIS MORGENSSON in Stockholm A Swedish Government committee investigating social questions has said it will recommend that sex clubs be closed. According to its investigators, the clubs — a tourist attraction — are a front for organised prostitution, and prostitution is attracting increasingly younger girls. In Malmo, Sweden’s third largest city, where there were an estimated 300 prostitutes in 1977, police say they have cleaned up the town. But their critics say they have merely driven the girls off the streets and into the clubs. in Gothenburg, Detective Inspector Claes-Goran Lans says the Malmo clean-up has resulted in an increase in his city’s vice problems. He estimates there are now 200 prostitutes in Gothenburg, plying their trade in the city’s red light district of Vasastan, where traffic jams frequently build up as kerb-crawlers take their time weighing up what is being offered. A disturbing trend in both Gothenburg and in the capital. Stockholm, is the increasing numbers of schoolgirls taking to the streets. Inspector Lans

says: “We do not care too much about the professionals. We do not want to disturb them or their customers, but we want to rescue the young girls from the mess they are going to get themselves into.” In Stockholm since Anril, 13 schoolgirls, all 16 or younger, have been arrested along the city’s notorious Malmskillnadsgatan. The youngest was only 11. Stefan Holmgren, in charge of a social welfare group investigating the problem, says: “We were helped by older prostitutes ringing us up and reporting cases of schoolgirls soliciting because they wanted to eliminate the competition.” Meanwhile sex clubs and sex cinemas mushroom. One of the latest clubs, Love Centre, has gone in for supermarketstyle price-cutting in a bid to win customers. “More sex for your money,” runs one slogan, “pay us a visit and judge for yourself.” The rival Sexorama has countered with something that translates as “coarse petting — petting with things that go beyond your wildest fantasy.” Oddly, most of the lewder films and pornography on sale in Sweden are now from the United States. O.F.N'.S.-copyright.