Brazil News
| BRASILIA – A proposal before the Senate committee to reform the Penal Code provides eliminating criminal penalties for owners of brothels. The legal experts who make up the committee want to end what they call the moral “cynicism” of the current legislation. In practice, they say, the ban on brothels only serves to corrupt police who extort money and services from the owners of the establishments.
Brazil’s Congress (photo: amatra13.org.br)
”The Code will cease to be the moral champion of the 1940s. The ban makes no sense,” said the attorney Luiz Carlos dos Santos Gonçalves, general rapporteur of the committee, who’s goal it is to prepare a draft to be submitted to Congress, told Folha de Sao Paulo.
Under the current law, whoever keeps a house of prostitution is subject to imprisonment from 2 to 5 years plus a fine. Prostitution itself is not illegal in Brazil, nor is it regulated by the government.
If approved by Congress, the change will pave the way for the regulation of the profession. It will permit labor unions to establish a link between the employees and the employer as is the norm in countries such as Germany and Holland.
”It is a historical claim to the movement for prostitutes,” Roberto Dominguez, president of the NGO Davida and legal advisor to the Brazilian Network of Prostitutes, told Folha.
The businessman Oscar Maroni Filho, 61, who was convicted of exploiting prostitutes at a hotel in Sao Paulo, advocates the reforms. “I have suffered much from it. Some of these processes that have occurred, happened because I did not want to pay off the police,” he told Folha.
Under the proposal, which must be sent to the full Senate in late May, workers will have to be working in a brothel of their own accord, willingly, and of course, cannot be less than 18 years old.
If a brothel owner forces a person into prostitution, including cases where there is debt involved, they will be subject to penalties of 5 to 9 years imprisonment. The proposed reform of the Penal Code also stiffens the penalties for sexual exploitation of children under 18.
The penalty for those who exploit the prostitution of children and adolescents will go from 4 to 10 years imprisonment. The penalty affects those who perform the act as well as the owner of the brothel.
Today, according to the rapporteur of the committee, there is virtually no punishment for anyone who has sex with a teenaged prostitute over the age of 14.
With regard to sex with children under 14 years, the current legislation, as amended in this regard in August 2009, already provides many harsh penalties, since the act is considered to be rape of the vulnerable. Since the reform, if a child under 14 is found working in a brothel, the owner will also be prosecuted.
A recent decision of the Superior Court of Justice caused international controversy when it acquitted a man who had intercourse with children under 14 because they were already prostitutes. But that decision was based on the previous legislation as the acts occurred before 2009.
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