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Read more Our news analysis and commentaries provide readers with insight essential to understanding the three Baltic countries and their neighbors. With offices in Tallinn and Vilnius and its headquarters in Riga, The Baltic Times remains the only pan-Baltic English language newspaper offering complete coverage of regional events. Toggle navigation. Estonia becoming a European prostitution-tourism capital By Aleksei Gunter TALLINN - Estonia needs more information campaigns and active involvement on the part of politicians to tackle the social risks caused by prostitution, sociologists from the institute of the Open Estonia Foundation said.
According to the institute's survey released in December, "Prostitution in Estonia: Social and Economic Pressure," Estonia has one of the highest numbers of prostitutes per capita in Europe with 30 per 10, residents, second only to Germany. In all, there are about 4, prostitutes in Estonia and about , in Germany, according to the survey. Such a vast market exists due to sex tourism, and in the Baltic country the largest group of adherents is predominantly made up of Finns, according to the institute.
Currently it is legal to provide and to buy sex services in Estonia, but the mediation of such services is banned. Police investigators often have difficulties proving that a place registered as a private residency or a bar or sauna is actually managing the sale of sex services.
In Tallinn alone there are some 50 brothels, and some of them are known to every resident of the district, though investigators have not been able to shut them all down. In neighboring countries where for the past several decades the state has stepped in to control or eliminate prostitution the situation is different, wrote the survey. There are seven and three prostitutes per 10, residents in Finland and Sweden respectively. Iris Pettai, one of the sociologists who worked on the survey, said Estonia should move toward the Swedish understanding of buying sex services, where it is considered violence against women.
