Romanian prostitutes flee to Western EU to escape tough laws
Prostitutes try to attract the attentions of lorry drivers in Romania
Hooked on heroin and with a small child to support, Ana-Marie decided to sell the only asset she had. She became part of an exodus of desperate women from Romania that led the country to be named this week as Europe’s main exporter of prostitutes.
Ana-Marie, 32, was persuaded by a client to follow him to Paris, where she worked in bars and clubs earning more in a month than she would in a year on the streets of Bucharest.
Cases such as hers have caused an acrimonious debate in Romania over a grim side-effect of the former communist country’s entry into the European Union and the start of visa-free travel in 2007.
A survey by Tempep, an EU-funded network of sex industry health agencies, found that one in eight foreign prostitutes in Europe was Romanian, replacing Russians as the main nationality since the previous assessment in 2006.
Speaking from Bucharest, where she recently returned, Ana-Marie said: “The fine for prostitution in Romania is €120 \[£105\] and I would get one almost every night standing on the street. I had no chance of paying the fines and paying the rent and feeding my child. I would have ended up in prison ... In France I can get free condoms and methadone, I can also complain to the police if something happens instead of being harassed by them.”
This week Evenimentul zilei, a Bucharest newspaper, under the headline “Romania top exporter of prostitution”, wrote: “Barely three years after its accession to the EU, the country can lay claim to yet another lofty distinction.”
The newspaper called for a fresh debate on calls for prostitution to be legalised, in line with a proposal by a presidential commission four months ago.
That was blocked by an alliance of civic and religious groups including the powerful Romanian Orthodox Church.
The result of Europe’s strictest anti-prostitution laws, according to sex workers, is that prostitutes are regularly sent to prison while their clients are hardly punished.
The report assessed that about two fifths of Britain’s estimated 80,000 prostitutes were migrants, most commonly from Lithuania, Thailand and Poland. The proportion of foreign prostitutes was highest in London at 70-80 per cent. Few British women had worked as prostitutes abroad — about 5 per cent — with the most common destinations given as Spain, Ireland and Australia.
