What is
prostitution?
– A mix of
independent prostitutes, exploited women & victims of trafficking!
Prostitution is not a work of choice; it is a survival
strategy for women not having better options in their life.
Looking at the market for prostitution as a whole and
keeping in mind the viewpoint and motivation of those girls and women who
enters into being a “sex worker”, we can identify four very different types*:
The first group consists of attractive, enterprising women, who engage in well-paid
ongoing sex business, they are independent from pimps and are minimizing any
risk from the trade.
Many of these women originally went into prostitution
because of the high earnings it offered, and some think of it as a job like any
other from which they can make a good living. The women in this group are most
likely born in the same country as they work.
The second group consists of women who prostitute them selves occasionally to supplement
their ordinary income – also from a position of independence - their
motivations may be similar to those of the first type, and without being sucked
into the ongoing mechanisms of exploitation.
Many are young women who work as strippers or as
artists in porn videos, trying to find a way into an artistic career and making
occasional use of prostitution.
The women in this group are most likely born in the
same country as they work.
The third type, however, consists of women who have been driven into prostitution by
grave economic pressures and lack of other opportunities. They enter into a
subordinate position and often have to submit to extreme forms of exploitation.
Many are young female immigrants from economically
backward areas of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Africa and
A woman who is engaged in this kind of prostitution,
on the street or in closed premises such as an apartment or a hotel is flanked
by people who claim a high percentage of her earnings.
The part of the market that involves the use of
violent methods and extreme forms of exploitation varies in size according to
place and circumstances, and it is always hard to tell what the proportion of
the total market it constitutes.
In
The fourth and last type consists of the victims of “trafficking”.
They are the women who have been lured by the promise
of false jobs or marriage abroad and thereby forced or blackmailed into
prostitution in various ways, and cheated about the nature or the conditions of
the work.
The trafficked girls and women, the victims, are at
the bottom of the “scale of prostitution”. They are in prostitution because
they are faced with threats of violence, to get killed or to have their
families killed.
The victims of sex trafficking are girls and women who
live in conditions of semi-imprisonment.
The young women, the actual victims of trafficking,
are at the bottom of the scale. The women have been forced into prostitution in
the face of threats to kill them or their family.
Their exploiters pocket all, or nearly all, their
earnings. They are therefore unable to achieve the dream of making enough money
to change their life, either when they return home permanently or when being in
the in the host country.
Trafficking involves a special relationship of
exploitation, the harshest kind, which mainly affects foreign women unable to
defend themselves. The treatment to which the trafficked women are subjected to
often differs considerably from that of other prostitutes.
The four worlds of
prostitution sometimes connect with one
another, and individuals may sometimes move between them.
One woman may manage to escape the mechanisms of
trafficking and become more or less independent.
Another may fall into the debt trap and be handed
over, or sold to other pimps, who then reduce her to pure sex slavery and
pocket the full proceeds of her activity.
Girls working as prostitutes in bars and within escort
bureaus usually have between 1 to 3 customers per day, while the girls working
as prostitutes in brothels or directly from the streets might have as many as 12
to 25 customers a day.
*(Source: “Sex Traffick”, Paola Monzini, 2005).