PARIS: As Paris hosts the 2024 Olympics, undocumented Chinese sex worker Hua says increased police patrols threaten her livelihood.
“I feel really under pressure, I'm constantly scared. Every day, there are police checks,” the 55-year-old said, using a different name to avoid identification.
“So I go out to work less and less.”
Around 40,000 people – the overwhelming majority women – are sold or exploited for sex in France, according to government and charity estimates.
Under French law, sex trafficking is permitted, but exploiting someone or paying for sex is illegal, placing criminal responsibility on brokers and clients.
However, it becomes more complicated if the sex worker is undocumented.
“I'm so scared I'll be arrested for not working on the streets during the Olympics,” added the divorcee, who came to France seven years ago hoping to earn better wages as a domestic cleaner. Diagnosed with breast cancer.
“If they arrest me, I will be sent back to China and they will not give me medical care there.”
Inside the offices of the Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World) charity in the northeast Paris neighborhood of Belleville, she broke down in tears.
“I don't understand, what did we do to anyone?” said the Chinese woman, who sometimes sells her services to good clients for 20 euros ($21) because “they don't have money and neither do I.”
In another part of Paris, near the city center on a street famous for the sex trade, Mylene Juste was looking for clients.
He said he was most concerned about new safety rules restricting pedestrian and traffic movement around Paris.
“Our regulars wouldn'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 walking tourists are jumping on us. That's why we're getting out of here,” he added.
Sex workers like Hua and Juste all but disappeared from their usual Paris haunts, ahead of the opening ceremony on the banks of the Seine River for the fortnight-long sports festival on Friday.
But with so much of the sex trade online these days, police fighting sexual exploitation are also focusing their efforts there.
“Customers go to the website, tick the category, price and time,” a policewoman who specializes in the case told AFP.
It's like ordering food online, “except for the girls” who do the delivery, she said, asking to remain anonymous because of the nature of her job.
Médecins du Monde, which tries 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, since 2019 sex workers have reported thousands of “risky” or “dangerous” clients to alert others.
The production of the games also coincided with a major ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, released on Thursday, which found that France's criminalization of clients of sex workers does not violate the European Convention on Human Rights.
The decision has upset some right-wing groups who say France's policy only increases the stigmatization of sex workers.
Erin Kilbride, a women's and LGBT rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, said, “Criminalization increases physical assaults, sexual violence, and police abuse of people who are sex traffickers, while having little effect on the eradication of human trafficking.”
French authorities are anticipating that gangs promoting women from Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay will continue to advertise at the games.
They speculate that high-end prostitution may be on the rise with all the affluent visitors expecting.
But they are concerned about the rise in abused minors in recent years, including vulnerable young girls from the state care system.
About 20,000 minors have been sexually exploited in France, according to the rights group Acting Against the Prostitution of Children.
In May, a court sentenced five men to prison for sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl, in a rare case of such a case being heard.
After running away from home, she urinated.
