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A prostitute is waiting for customers in her room in a brothel in Frankfurt (archive)
Photo: Andreas Arnold/ dpa
The number of officially registered prostitutes in Germany fell again last year.
According to a statement from the Federal Statistical Office in Wiesbaden, around 23,700 prostitutes were registered with the authorities at the end of 2021.
That was five percent less than in the previous year.
Already in 2020 the number had fallen by 38 percent compared to 2019.
The statistics include registrations based on the Prostitute Protection Act.
Undeclared trades and prostitutes are not included in the statistics.
The reason for the decline is the corona pandemic, in which prostitution was temporarily prohibited or made more difficult.
Before Corona, around 40,400 prostitutes were still registered.
At the end of 2021, 2290 prostitution businesses had an issued or provisional permit, this number remained constant compared to the previous year.
More than three quarters (76 percent) of the registered prostitutes were between 21 and 44 years old.
A fifth (21 percent) were aged 45 or older.
Three percent were between the ages of 18 and 20.
19 percent of the registered prostitutes had German citizenship.
The three most common foreign nationalities were Romanian (36 percent), Bulgarian (eleven percent) and Hungarian (six percent).
mgo/dpa/AFP