PARIS: As Paris hosts the 2024 Olympics, illegal Chinese prostitute Hua says increased police patrols are threatening her livelihood.
“I feel really under pressure, I'm constantly afraid. There are police checks every day,” said the 55-year-old, using a different name so as not to be recognized.
“So I go out to work less and less.”
According to government and charitable estimates, around 40,000 people in France, the vast majority of them women, sell or are exploited for sexual purposes.
Under French law, selling sex is permitted, but it is illegal to pimp or pay for sex, which places criminal liability on pimps and clients.
The situation is more complicated if the prostitute is illegal.
“I am so afraid of being arrested that I will not work on the streets during the Olympics,” added the divorcee, who came to France seven years ago hoping to earn a living wage as a house cleaner, and who has been diagnosed with breast cancer.
“If they arrest me, I will be sent back to China and they will no longer provide me with medical care.”
Inside an office of the charity Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World) in the Belleville neighborhood of northeastern Paris, she burst into tears.
“I don’t understand, what have we ever done to anyone?” said the Chinese woman, who says she sometimes sells her services to kinder customers for as little as 20 euros ($21) because “they have no 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 looking for clients.
She said she was particularly concerned about new safety rules restricting pedestrian and traffic movement in Paris.
“Our regulars won’t be able to cope with all the restrictions in place,” said Juste, 50, who has been a prostitute for 22 years.
“And I don't think the tourists who pass by will jump on us. So we're getting out of here,” he added.
Ahead of Friday's opening ceremony along the Seine of the two-week sports festival, prostitutes like Hua and Juste have all but disappeared from their usual Parisian haunts.
But since most of the sex trade today happens online, police fighting sexual exploitation are focusing their efforts there, too.
“Customers go to a website, select a category, a price and a time,” a police officer specializing in the matter told AFP.
It's like ordering food online, “only the girls are delivering it,” she said, asking not to be identified because of the nature of her work.
Medecins du Monde, which also seeks to support sex workers virtually, says it recently saw more than 46,000 ads in a single evening on a popular website.
Through the charity’s Jasmine Project, sex workers have reported tens of thousands of “risky” or “dangerous” clients since 2019 in a bid to warn others.
The build-up to the Games also coincided with a major ruling by the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), issued on Thursday, that France's criminalization of prostitutes' clients does not violate the European Convention on Human Rights.
The ruling has disappointed some right-wing groups, who say French policy only increases the stigmatization of sex workers.
“Criminalization increases physical assaults, sexual violence, and police abuse against those who sell sex, without having any demonstrable effect on eradicating human trafficking,” said Erin Kilbride, women’s and LGBT rights researcher at Human Rights Watch.
French authorities expect that gangs promoting women from Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay will continue to advertise during the Games.
It is speculated that high-class prostitution could be on the rise, with all the wealthy visitors expected.
But they are also concerned about the increase in child abuse in recent years, including among vulnerable girls excluded from the state care system.
According to the human rights association Act Against Child Prostitution, approximately 20,000 minors are sexually exploited in France.
In May, a court jailed five men for paying for sex with a 12-year-old girl, in a rare case where such a case goes to trial.
After running away from home, she was exploited.
