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The heavy toll of the 2016 law on prostitution

Hélène Le Bail’s study, made public on Thursday, shows that the decrease in the number of clients forces sex workers to lower their prices and put themselves in danger

By Gaëlle Dupont

The report is scathing: “The prostitution law [which criminalised clients] endangers the people it was supposed to protect,” concludes Hélène Le Bail, a researcher at CNRS and the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales (CERI - International Study and Research Centre). Since the law was voted on on the 13th of April 3016, she has carried out a thorough investigation into sex workers on behalf of a dozen organisations, published on Thursday the 12th of April.

These organisations - among them Médecins du monde, les Amis du bus des femmes, le planning familial [Family Planning], le Syndicat des travailleurs du sexe (Strass) [a sex workers’ rights organisation] – were always opposed to the law, especially to the criminalisation of clients, fearing its consequences.

“We investigated hypotheses on the negative impact of the law on the health and safety of people,” reports Le Bail, herself a volunteer with Médecins du monde. “These hypotheses were sadly confirmed. The real situation is even worse.”

In total, 70 individual interviews were carried out, 38 additional people were interviewed through targeted meetings. A quantitative investigation allowed the opinions of 583 sex workers to be collected and 25 organisations were interviewed. Not a representative sample, but a significant one, especially for a population which is difficult to contact.

Fewer clients

One of the principal findings of the report is that clients, targeted by a fine of up to 1,500€, are less numerous - this despite the small number of verbalisations [similar to a police report?], as slightly more than 2000 clients have been punished. This was the objective of the law: to fight prostitution by discouraging the demand.

However, the effect is less pronounced on sex work that is advertised online. Furthermore, the decrease in street-based clients is accompanied by a significant decline in the already-precarious living conditions of sex workers (of whom 85% are women): lower incomes, difficulties with housing, buying food, and so on, according to the study.

These problems are confirmed in the reported accounts, like that of Yacine*, an Algerian travesti [typically translated as transvestite although the identity can be more complex]: “He asks me “how much is it?” I tell him it’s 30 euros. He says, “Ah, no, I only have ten.” Previously I wouldn’t have accepted this. Even my friends wouldn’t take 10 euros. But now I’ll accept it.” Or that of Grace, a Nigerian woman: “It’s different because they know there aren’t many clients. They take a risk by coming to see me, so they want me to lower the price.”

Thus some sex workers work longer hours, and demands for bareback services are more common and more frequently accepted in order to attempt to counteract the loss of income for street-based workers.

A lack of money, “we take the risk anyway”

“Good clients”, who accepted the rules established from the beginning, are becoming rarer. “We don’t have any money, so if we run into bad clients, we take the risk anyway,” Min, à Chinese woman, reports. Marie, a Frenchwoman, has thought about “possibly accepting clients from [her] blacklist once again.” In order to reassure their clients, the sex workers interviewed in this study wait in more isolated, darker places, which increases the risk of violence. The repeal of soliciting as an offence, which was part of the law, has not improved the situation. Many sex workers remain wary of the police, either because they have no papers (the large majority are foreigners), or because the municipalities where they work make anti prostitution arrests.

The last part of the law, pertaining to exiting sex work, which allows a person to receive compensation and a temporary residence permit if they quit work, took a long time to be implemented. Currently, it does not appear to be very attractive for the majority of those interviewed, notably due to the small amount of compensation (330€/month [for reference, the poverty line in France is set at around 1000€/month according to the information I was able to find: https://www.thelocal.fr/20171109/revealed-the-truth-about-poverty-in-france-in-2017 ]). Only fifty or so applications have been filled out, some of which were refused because of unwillingness to offer residency permits.

Organisation which support the law (Mouvement du nid, collectif Abolition 2012) continue to defend the principle and have planned protests for Thursday to support “its complete and entire application.”

*All first names in this article have been changed.

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Currently, the police are mounting a harassment campaign in Belleville, an area where many Chinese women work as sex workers. This includes parking a police van in the area so that women can’t work, but also includes harassment of individual sex workers. STRASS and les Roses d’Acier are compiling accounts of police harassment: Statement: Yiyi “Sunday night, May the 22nd, 10 pm. I was in Belleville, near the Boulevard de la Villette, I was walking along and a police officer arrived and asked me for my papers. I gave them to him, and he took out his phone to take a photo of me, but I did not want him to take a photo of me, so he grabbed me by sleeve and stopped me from leaving. He let go of me and tore up my papers. I started walking home again, but I had barely gone a few metres before he called after me, he caught up to me again and blocked my passage, and asked me again for my papers. My French is not good so it was not easy to express myself, he told me to open my bag and took out the wallet that was inside it. He gave it back to me and when I was putting it back in the bag he took a photo of me. There were several people who witnessed this, and finally a Frenchman interrupted him. At that point, the police officer let me go. If the man hadn’t intervened, he would have continued to harass me, I think.” Statement : Xiaohua “Around 5pm on the 23rd of May, I was leaving the metro station in Belleville when I saw police officers. I walked towards Couronnes, and I saw that they were following me. I took a side street and hid there for half an hour. I came out, and I saw them behind the glass door on the ground floor of an apartment building. I walked, and they stopped me. There were four men. They said to me, “Papers, Madame,” and I gave them to them. They took a photo, one took me by the chin to hold my face up and took a photo with his phone. I wanted to go back towards Belleville, they stopped me, pointed me in the direction of Couronnes and said to me, “That way.” I hardly dare go out now. The second time that I was arrested by the police. It was three days later, the 26th, around 5-6pm as well. I saw him near the Paris Store. I live right beside it. I typed in the first code to get into the building, and when I was typing in the second, the police officer entered the vestibule, then another after him, and then two more. Finally, there were four of them, and one asked me if I lived upstairs. Another asked me for my papers. They signalled to me that I should take them upstairs. I brought them up. It’s a dormitory of three little rooms, where six of us live. One asked me, “For work?” I replied, “No, no, sleep,” they kept asking me questions but I didn’t understand. They looked at the toilet and the kitchen, then two left and two stayed behind. One took my papers and he wrote in his notebook for a long while, but I do not know what he wrote, then he gave them back to me. I only went back down at 11pm, there was no one in the street anymore. I think I am going to make many photocopies of my papers now! In any case, no matter what we do, we are arrested; they are stopping us completely from moving around!” Statement : Lili "The 23rd of May, 5pm. I came down from my place and three police officers were downstairs on the staircase. One of the police officers approached me. The only thing I understood was “papers”. I held it out to him; he grabbed the booklet roughly and photographed each of the papers inside and then gave it back to me. I wanted to leave, he held me back; he grabbed me by the chin, lifted it up, and took a photo on his phone. Then I was able to leave.” [any errors of translation are my fault]

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98% of sex workers oppose criminalising clients : politicians are deaf to their pleas

(Thierry Schaffauser, writing in the Nouvel Observateur)

A new study [by Nick Mai at the Université d’Aix-Marseille] has recently confirmed what we already know: a huge majority of sex workers, 98% to be precise, opposes the penalisation of clients. 

Our self-designated protectors must explain themselves

This opposition should have been obvious, but all the sex workers who protested or spoke out against client criminalisation were accused of only representing a privileged minority.

However, the study shows that this view is shared by all sex workers, whatever their nationality, the way that they work, including those who did not choose to work in this industry, because they believe that it would put them in more danger.

Now that this fact is confirmed by a scientific study, it should be clear to that those who work in favour of client criminalisation that they are not working for us but against us. They will have to justify the reasons that push them to work against the views of the most affected, and will no longer be able to claim to be our self-designated protectors. They will have to explain why they know better than we do what is good for us.

7% of those interviewed were victims of trafficking

Another discovery that initially went unnoticed is also important. For the first time, a scientific study has produced an estimate of the number of sex workers who are victims of human trafficking in France. According to the researcher Nick Mai of the Université d’Aix-Marseille, who spoke to 500 men, women, and transgender people working in the French sex industry, 7% of those spoken to are potentially trafficking victims (the figure is 11% for migrant workers).

This number is quite close to the estimates already known for the United Kingdom (7.8%), Denmark (4%), the Netherlands (8-10%) [1] and New Zealand (3.9%). On the other hand, it is a long way from the 90% claimed with no evidence for years by Socialist members of parliament, the government, and prohibitionist activists.

The question must be asked: have these people who have lied for years done it out of ignorance of the subject, or simply in order to more easily manipulate public opinion?

Criminalisation has consequences for our lives

In either case, their credibility is seriously undermined. Not only do they have no legitimate claim to speak in our name, but they are distorting our realities with the goal of promoting a criminalisation which we do not want.

This wouldn’t be so bad if criminalisation didn’t have disastrous consequences on our lives. But that is the case. The risks of isolation, exploitation, of violence and stigmatisation are denounced in report after report. 

All the organisations fighting against AIDS, for public health, the World Health Organisation, the United Nations Development Programme, UNAIDS, the National AIDS Council, the Commission Nationale Consultative sur les Droits de l’Homme (National Human Rights Consulting Commission), Médecins du Monde, Family Planning, and many more, have raised concerns about the health risks associated with client criminalisation, which have also been documented in several studies published this summer in The Lancet [2].

It is high time that politicians listened to sex workers, and relied on the existing scientific studies rather than ideological prejudices before legislating our lives.

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[1] Rapport Regioplan, et Hendrik Wagenaar, Université de Sheffield

[2] The Lancet, HIV and Sex workers, July 2014, P66 "Human rights violations against sex workers: burden and effect on HIV". Decker, Crago, Chu, Sherman, Seshu, Buthelezi, Dhaliwal, Beyrer.