LATVIA — Moralists have long warned about the dangers of respectable men straying from the path of monogamous righteousness and chastity. Along with the usual cautions about disease-ridden women, moral degradation, and drug or alcohol dependency, there has also been the explicit or implicit understanding that venues providing erotic entertainment or release are corrupt at their core.Sometimes the moralists are right.
Such has proven to be the case in Latvia, where the British embassy has announced that a series of British men on vacation have found themselves enticed into strip clubs, then beaten and robbed.
According to officials in the Latvian capital of Riga, it is the assurance that free alcohol awaits them that causes victims to step inside the thug set trap. When the men attempt to leave the establishment, corrupt muscle steps in to block their exit, demanding payment for large bills run up while enjoying the club’s largess. In one case, a man told the BBC that he had been compelled to hand over the equivalent of nearly $6,000 after enduring a beating.
Motivation for forking over the cash is compelling, according to one 29-year-old victim. “It’s pretty frightening when you see one of your friends punched in the stomach and another one getting carted off into a room and you don’t know what’s happening to them,” he confided. “And throughout the whole thing,” he continued, “there’s that fear factor of ‘OK, I can roll with the punches, but what’s going on with my friends here?'”
Unsurprisingly, the club owners have a different take on things. According to one such businessman, “A lot of them — they’re bad lads, too. They don’t think about Latvian people. They think if they are foreigners, everything will be for them. No.”
Even the Latvian government has a less than sterling opinion of British tourists, with the Prime Minister calling them “savages” after a flood of them arrived, thanks to cheap flights from Liverpool.
Nonetheless, the officials of Riga have considered the idea of banning all strip clubs from the city center.
