As Paris hosts the Summer Olympics, undocumented Chinese sex worker Hua says increased police patrols are threatening her livelihood.
“I really feel under pressure, I’m constantly scared. Every day, there are police checks,” the 55-year-old said, using a different name so as not to be recognized. “So I go out less and less to work.”
About 40,000 people — the overwhelming majority women — sell or are exploited for sex in France, according to government and charity estimates.
Photo: AFP
Under French law, selling sex is allowed, but it is illegal to exploit someone or pay for sex, placing the criminal responsibility on pimps and clients.
It is more complicated if the sex worker is undocumented.
“I’m so scared that I’ll be arrested that I won’t work in the street during the Olympics,” added the divorcee, who came to France seven years ago hoping to earn a decent wage as a domestic cleaner, and has been diagnosed with breast cancer. “If they arrest me, I’ll be sent back to China and they won’t give me medical care over there.”
Inside an office of the Medecins du Monde (Doctors of the World) charity in the northeastern Paris neighborhood of Belleville, she broke down in tears.
“I don’t understand, what have we ever done to anybody?” said Hua, who added that she sometimes sells her services to nicer clients for just 20 euros (US$21.74) because “they don’t have money, and neither do I.”
In another part of Paris, on a street famous for the sex trade near the city center, Mylene Juste was on the lookout for clients.
She said she was most bothered by new security rules limiting pedestrian and traffic movement around Paris.
“Our regulars won’t be able to make it with all the restrictions in place,” said Juste, 50, a sex worker for 22 years.
“And I don’t think the tourists walking by will be leaping on us. So we’re getting out of here,” she added.
Ahead of the opening ceremony along the Seine River for the fortnight long sports fiesta that took place on Friday, sex workers like Hua and Juste all but disappeared from their usual Paris haunts.
However, with most sex trade online these days, police battling sexual exploitation are also focusing their efforts there.
“Clients go onto a Web site, tick a category, price and time,” a policewoman specializing in the issue said.
It is like ordering food online, “except it’s girls” who are delivered, she said, asking to remain anonymous because of the nature of her job.
Medecins du Monde, which also tries to support sex workers virtually, says it recently saw more than 46,000 ads in a single evening on one popular Web site.
Through the charity’s Jasmine project, since 2019 sex workers have reported tens of thousands of “risky” or “dangerous” clients in a bid to warn others about them.
The buildup to the Games also coincided with a key ruling by the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights issued on Thursday, which said that France’s criminalizing clients of sex workers does not contravene the European Convention on Human Rights.
The ruling disappointed some right groups who say that France’s policy only increases the stigmatization of sex workers.
“Criminalization increases physical attacks, sexual violence and police abuse of people who sell sex, while having no demonstrable effect on the eradication of human trafficking,” said Erin Kilbride, women’s and LGBT rights researcher at Human Rights Watch.
The French authorities are anticipating gangs promoting women from Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay would continue to advertise during the Games.
They speculate that high-end prostitution could be on the rise with all the wealthy visitors expected.
However, they also remain worried about an increase in minors being abused in the past few years, including vulnerable young girls from the state care system.
About 20,000 minors are sexually exploited in France, rights group Acting Against the Prostitution of Children said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
RSS