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SEX

Charges filed over Swedish teen sex ring

A Stockholm-area businessman has been charged for using the internet to pimp Swedish school girls for violent group sex.

Published: 23 March 2009 08:37 CET

In court papers filed by prosecutors in the Solna District Court near Stockholm, the 40-year-old man is said to have arranged “gang bangs” in which one girl was forced to have sex with several men at the same time, reports the Metro newspaper.

The man was arrested in Stockholm in November 2008 and is suspected of pimping nine Swedish school girls since he started the operation in 2006.

“Months after the arrest, we’re still in shock,” the head of the man’s company told Metro.

“He was one of the hardest working managers we had.”

The girls came from the Stockholm area and southern Sweden and their services, were marketed though an internet chat site to customers in Jönköping in central Sweden, as well as Malmö and Stockholm.

Meetings took place in hotel rooms or in clients’ cars and involved everything from oral sex to violent sessions of group sex.

Prosecutor Sara Lindkvist has also charged three of the men who purchased services from the 40-year-old, who remains in custody and has confessed to the operation.

Police are still looking for one more customer suspected in the violent rape of one of the girls during a March 2008 “gang bang”.

During the session, the teenage girl indicated to one of the men that she wished to stop, but he continued, subjecting her to forced sex and other violent sex acts.

“We still hoping for an arrest,” said lead Stockholm police investigator Jonas Trolle to Metro.

The 40-year-old, who was present during and took pictures of the incident, has also been charged as an accomplice to the rape.

PROSTITUTION

Spain’s top court reinstates first sex workers’ union

Spanish sex workers have the right to form their own union, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday, overturning an earlier court decision ordering the dissolution of Spain's first such labour organisation.

Published: 2 June 2021 16:34 CEST
Spain's top court reinstates first sex workers' union
Photo: Oscar del Pozo/AFP

Known as OTRAS (or “the Sex Workers’ Organisation”), the union was discretely set up in August 2018 but was closed three months later by order of the National Court following an appeal by the government of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

But following an appeal, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of OTRAS, saying that its statutes, which had triggered the initial legal challenge, were “in line with the law” and that sex workers “have the fundamental right to freedom of association and the right to form a union”.

In its November 2018 ruling, the National Court had argued that allowing the union to exist amounted to “recognising the act of procurement as lawful”.

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Contacted by AFP, the union did not wish to comment.

When it was founded, OTRAS received the green light from the labour ministry and its statutes were publicly registered in the official gazette the day before the government went into a summer recess.

But three weeks later, the government — which portrays itself as “feminist and in favour of the abolition of prostitution” according to Sanchez’s Twitter feed at the time — started legal moves against it.

In Spain, prostitution is neither legal nor illegal but it is tolerated.

Although it is not recognised as employment, there is a large number of licensed brothels throughout the country.

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