So it’s no wonder that “Marianne,” talking on her mobile phone from her holiday on the Riviera, is a trifle upset. By nights, she entertains clientele in the Avenue Foch, an elegant quartier of doctors’ and lawyers’ offices in Metz. By day, she’s mustering opposition to Metz’s mayor, who recently passed a bylaw banning anyone involved in prostitution from certain city streets. Feeling “flouted” and “humiliated,” she says the measure criminalizes her profession, which, unlike pimping or soliciting, isn’t illegal in France. In his haste to clean up an unseemly new boom in street prostitutes, many of whom are illegal migrants working for criminal syndicates, the mayor is conflating “traditional forms of prostitution” with new networks of foreigners. “We know when they’re around,” Marianne says of the Eastern European sex workers. “Our profits go down.” Strike another blow against globalization. Not long ago, Europe’s prostitutes tended to be native-born. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, the breakup of Yugoslavia and the advent of a borderless European Union, they’re increasingly from elsewhere. In Rome, as in most major European cities, most prostitutes are foreign-born. In some cities, such as Vienna, the figure approaches 90 percent. Like any industry reeling from the effects of the global economy, the influx of immigrants has shaken up the European sex business. Competition has grown tougher, prices lower and solicitation bolder. “At the end of 1999, Western Europeans began witnessing a new, very visible form of prostitution,” says French feminist author Elisabeth Badinter. Traditionally, she explains, European prostitutes more or less chose their trade, even if for unsavory reasons. Today, prostitution is vastly more coercive, dominated by mafia syndicates trafficking in younger and younger women imported often against their will from Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa.
The crisis–for that is how many experts describe it–has provoked wildly divergent responses from European governments. At one extreme is Germany and the Netherlands, both of which recently legalized prostitution and allow properly registered sex workers to receive pensions and health care. Sweden, by contrast, banned prostitution in 1999, slamming clients–instead of the sex workers themselves–with heavy fines and jail sentences. France, where prostitution recently has been caught up in the controversy over immigration, may opt for a no less draconian middle ground. When Nicolas Sarkozy became Interior minister this spring, he announced that he wanted to deport migrant sex workers, who comprise about 60 percent of the country’s estimated 15,000 prostitutes.
That’s prompted a predictable outcry. Many French accused the move as pandering to the anti-immigrant sentiment of the far right, which across Europe has won startling electoral victories over the past year. “Sarkozy is flying the foreigner flag with this policy,” says Martine Schutz-Samson, director of a sex workers’ outreach program in Lyon. “It’s completely racist.” If so, the Interior minister’s clean-up-the-streets rhetoric has clearly struck a chord with many middle-class French, who are appalled by the recent appearance of foreign prostitutes plying their trade in such quietly affluent neighborhoods as Paris’s 16th arrondissement. Claude Coasguen, the district mayor, tells how prostitutes have set up shop on the streets, at all hours, their pimps watching every move. What’s more, many of the girls seem unusually young, often no more than teenagers.
A number of French cities lately have banned prostitution from their centers. But that often only creates its own problems. In Lyon, Schutz-Samson says that Sarkozy’s deportation plan has driven foreign prostitutes underground–literally. On her rounds earlier this month, she learned they were working out of basements. They may be out of sight, but their working conditions thus become even more dangerous, for themselves and their clients. Mindful of these sorts of dilemmas, some French law-makers want the German and Dutch model: legalization. Francoise de Panafieu, a Parisian member of Parliament, even proposed looking into reopening Paris’s maisons closes, or state-authorized brothels, in an effort to regulate or at least monitor the mushrooming trade. Others advocate the Swedish approach, which punishes clients. In Bordeaux, police have be-gun targeting curb-crawlers. It’s the customers, many prostitutes say, who benefit from the new prostitution. “There’s more choice,” notes Carla Corso of Italy’s Committee for the Civil Rights of Prostitutes. “Many of these new girls come from countries where they haven’t been emancipated. They feel they have to do anything for the customer.”
Clearly, working conditions for the newcomers are tougher. An estimated 90 percent of the 25,000 women who work on the streets in Italy are foreign; local prostitutes tend to work in the relative warmth and safety of indoors. “Most British women wouldn’t do my job,” concedes a woman bouncer at a London strip club. “But foreigners will work hard, and the sex industry relies on them.” In Metz, Marianne and her colleagues charge euro 40 for oral sex and euro 60 for intercourse in a car. The Eastern Europeans charge less than half that. Since the migrant workers began arriving in the late 1990s, Metz’s French sex workers have begun fighting for their turf–“even beating them up if we had to,” says Marianne. “We can’t compete. They’re no older than 15 or 16 and usually really cute.” They’re also a potential public-health risk: “When we stop and sometimes undress them, we don’t find anything on them: no money, no condom, no ID. Just a handbag and a pack of tissues.”
If anything can safely be said about Europe’s prostitution epidemic, it’s that it will almost certainly get worse. As Europe expands toward the east, eliminating borders all the way to Moldova, Belarus and Ukraine, it will become all the easier for poor or misguided young women to travel the length and breadth of the continent. And when it comes to the trans-national problems of trafficking in women, Europe’s lawmakers and homegrown prostitutes agree on another point: the problem requires a common European policy. That said, the mix of sexual morality and immigration may well be too combustible for the EU to handle. “The one thing we know is that mafiosi really know how to exploit the weaknesses of the EU,” says Elisabeth Badinter. Not to mention the weaknesses of men.
With Marie Valla and Tracy McNicoll in Paris, Liat Radcliffe in London and Henrik John Hohl in Berlin
