PARIS: As Paris hosts the 2024 Olympics, illegal Chinese sex worker Hua says increased police patrols threaten her livelihood.
I feel really pressured, constantly scared. Police checks are done every day.
So I go out for work less and less.
Around 40,000 people – the vast majority of them women – are sold or exploited for sex in France, according to government and charity estimates.
Under French law, selling sex is legal, but exploiting a person or paying for sex is illegal and criminally liable for brokers and clients.
However, it is more complicated if the sex worker is undocumented.
The divorcee, who came to France seven years ago hoping to earn a decent wage as a house cleaner, added: “I'm too afraid of being arrested to work on the streets during the Olympics.” Breast cancer has been diagnosed.
“If they arrest me, I will be sent back to China, where they will not provide me with medical services.”
Inside the office of the charity Doctors of the World (Doctors of the World) in the Belleville neighborhood of northeastern Paris, tears flowed.
I don't understand, what have we ever done to anyone? “They and I don't have money either,” said the Chinese woman, who said she sometimes sells her services to better-off clients for as little as 20 euros ($21).
In another part of Paris, on a street known for its sex trade near the city center, Millin Just was looking for clients.
He said the new security rules restricting pedestrian traffic and traffic around Paris bother him the most.
“Our regular criminals can't do it with all the restrictions,” said Just, 50, who has been a sex worker for 22 years.
And I don't think tourists passing by will jump on us. So we're getting out of here.”
Ahead of the opening ceremony along the Seine for the two-week-long sports festival on Friday, sex workers like Hoa and Gesture disappeared from their usual haunts in Paris.
But given the online sex trade these days, police fighting sexual exploitation are also focusing their efforts there.
“Customers go to a website, mark the category, price and time,” a policewoman who specializes in the matter told AFP.
It's like ordering food online, he said, “except for the girls,” who declined to be identified because of the nature of his job.
Médecins du Monde, which also tries to offer virtual support to sex workers, says it recently saw more than 46,000 ads in one night on a popular website.
Through the charity's Project Jasmine, since 2019, sex workers have reported tens of thousands of 'dangerous' or 'dangerous' clients to warn others about.
The Games also coincided with a key ruling by the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Thursday that said France's criminalization of clients of sex workers did not breach the European Convention on Human Rights.
The ruling has disappointed some right-wing groups who argue that France's policy will only increase the stigmatization of sex workers.
“Criminalization increases physical assaults, sexual violence, and police abuse of people selling sex, while doing nothing to eradicate human trafficking,” said Erin Kilbride, LGBT and women's rights researcher at Human Rights Watch.
French authorities expect gangs promoting women from Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay to continue advertising during the games.
They speculate that high-end prostitution is on the rise, expecting all the rich visitors.
But they are also concerned about the rise of minors in recent years, including vulnerable young girls from the state care system.
According to the legal group Action Against Child Prostitution, around 20,000 minors are sexually exploited in France.
A court in May jailed five men for paying for sex with a 12-year-old girl, in a rare instance of such a case going to court.
He became a pimp after running away from home.
