With increased aggression from clients, police repression and a sudden decrease in their livelihoods, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is impacting this already-vulnerable group of women.
Tag: prostitution
Tourism has become big business in Medellín, Colombia, but it also be fueled the city’s worst sociocultural traits and encouraging drugs and abusive sex work. With new laws and bans being put in place, is change afoot in “the City of Eternal Spring”?
June 26 – July 2, 2023
Venezuela’s Aragua Train, which began smuggling women into jails a decade ago, has become an international forced prostitution and people-smuggling operation. A special investigation by Colombia’s El Espectador*.
Hong Kong only decriminalized homosexuality in 1991, but there had long been an underground LGBTQ+ culture, including male sex workers. They have learned to survive in difficult conditions, but their experiences are far from how they’re portrayed in films.
Some feminists celebrate women who sell sex, claiming they are the pinnacle of self-determined empowerment. If that were true, millions of men would be queueing up to go in the game. Those who defend sex work are missing the point.
As coronavirus shut down businesses around the world, red-light districts from Amsterdam to Bangkok to Frankfurt turned off their lights. But many continued to work illegally, risking infection and potential legal consequences in order to support themselves. As one Dutch sex worker told Die Welt, “The confinement does not mean that people stopped wanting sex.” […]
Thousands of Romanian girls are tricked and coerced into working the Italian streets, which are controlled by brutal Albanian mafia clans.
Like so many people from gang-plagued Central America, Brayan sought safety by leaving home, even if it mean leaving his beloved mother behind.
GENEVA — It may sound like hocus-pocus, but with the growing influx of African migrants, social services in Switzerland are having to tackle a new and perplexing problem: witchcraft. The phenomenon specifically involves African women — mostly prostitutes from Nigeria — who were “bewitched” before leaving home and suffer serious psychological consequences as a result. […]
From China to Colombia, the use of sexual favors and vulnerability to blackmail is key to widespread corruption of public officials.
Chased from their homes and communities, many transgender women in Colombia seek refuge in a four-block area in Santa Fe, in downtown Bogotá.
Other cities ban prostitution from residential areas with schools and playgrounds. Not Berlin. Here, it’s just part of the city’s “poor, but sexy” image.
Registration officials in Iran supect there has been an increase of late in the number of informal and “unregistered” relationships. People are experimenting more with Western-style affairs of the heart, in other words — “shacking up” rather than rushing into marriage. And they’re not even going through the bother of entering a “temporary marriage,” a […]
In the Paris neighborhood of Belleville, home to a thriving Chinatown, prostitutes with no other prospects work to support families here or in China. And now, new dangers loom.
Tourism, mining and oil in this southernmost region of South America are financing a flourishing, multinational sex trade.
STOCKHOLM — If you’re not careful, the so-called “sharing economy” can turn your home into a temporary brothel. Swedish police report a growing number of pimps and prostitutes in Stockholm using long-term rentals on the home-sharing website Airbnb without the owner’s knowledge.”We estimate that there are currently about 200 apartments in Stockholm that are used […]
-OpEd- BEIJING — When Macau authorities recently uncovered a prostitution ring, the most shocking aspect of the case was that its alleged mastermind was a 16-year-old boy. Needless to say, the teenager in Macau, one of two special Chinese administrative regions, represents an extreme example of the more diffused problem of the millions of minors […]
A child goes missing in India every eight minutes. After India’s Supreme Court censured police for failing to act, authorities launched an operation to bring children home. But it’s still too little, too late.
Driven by economic necessity or pushed into prostitution after traumatic abuse, sex workers in Egypt lay bare grim realities in a conservative country with little empathy for their plight.
-OpEd- BEIJING — There has been a recent spate of Chinese celebrities, including Jaycee Chan, son of the Hong Kong martial arts film star Jackie Chan, detained on drug charges. Others in the entertainment business have been accused or frequenting prostitutes. Last week, China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) issued a formal […]
JAKARTA — In a suburban part of Jakarta, we’re walking down a dirt road up to a very small pink house at the end of an alley. There are chickens running around, and children playing. It’s here that Indonesia’s first retirement home for transsexual and transgender people — known as waria in Indonesia — is being built. In the doorway, two elderly transgenders whose teeth are missing call out “good morning.” Inside, Yulianus Rettoblaut peers into a mirror while a friend goes about the daily ritual of applying her heavy makeup — thick white foundation, fake eyelashes, bright red lipstick […]
Looking for family members who have emigrated to Europe, or in search of better opportunities, Congolese girls instead find themselves prey at the hands of human traffickers.
LA JOYA — Juan Castro is trying to keep it together as he tells me this story, but the tears well up in his eyes. “There was this 11-year-old girl from Guatemala who had been raped. I had to ask her how, where, by whom, why and every single detail that could help build her […]
SAARBRÜCKEN — If you’re looking for the biggest whorehouse in the state of Saarland, you’ll probably end up first at a dog training school. There aren’t any signs yet pointing the way to the brothel — or, as it calls itself, the “wellness oasis” — so the GPS will take you right past its unobtrusive […]
A new French law targeting clients of prostitutes has focused attention on the changing call-girl business. Here’s another world, of ‘escort boys,’ with both male and female customers.
HAVANA — Though propaganda from the Cuban regime claims otherwise, the everyday reality for Cuban women does not involve fighting economic aggression from the United States. Instead, they struggle to provide basic necessities such as food and clothes for their families — and occasional luxuries such as cosmetics — sometimes having to pay with their […]
PARIS — As French lawmakers consider new legislation that would make it a crime to pay for sex, it’s becoming clear that we tend to know very little about the clientele of prostitutes. Based on the few reports that have been published on the subject, between 12% and 18% of men (and less than 1% […]
MOSCOW – Over the past couple of months, experts on international crime have started raising the alarm: criminal activity is crossing borders like never before. The response from law enforcement must therefore be no less transnational. The European Parliament has recently launched a Special Commission on Organized Crime, Corruption and Money Laundering (CRIM) that is […]
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Confessions Of A Modern Male Prostitute
Ralf Winkes has tried his hand at a number of different careers: waiter, taxi driver, stock broker. But the 44-year-old German may have finally found his calling…
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Berlusconi, The End Is Near
-Analysis- ROME – Silvio Berlusconi’s sentence to seven years in prison and a life ban from public office signals the end of his political adventures. More generally, it also marks the end of Italy’s so-called “Second Republic”: the political era that began in 1992 of which the ex-prime minister has been the ubiquitous figure, just […]
A new documentary on German television uncovers the notable tax revenue and nationwide implications of being the “biggest whorehouse in Europe.”
Crossing two taboo topics: prostitution and the sexuality of the physically and mentally handicapped.
RIO DE JANEIRO – Cleide Oliveira, a 45-year-old beauty salon owner specialized in straightening curly hair, says she’ll soon be forced to find a new job. Since November 2011, when a Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora or Police Pacifying Unit (UPP) was created in Rocinha — Brazil’s biggest favela near Rio de Janeiro — she has […]
KOMMERSANT (Russia) Worldcrunch MOSCOW – It’s a thorny question that has plagued governments for years: What exactly constitutes a bribe? It is particularly relevant in Russia, where corruption is so rampant that even well-meaning business people must grease the wheels in such a way that their counterparts in the West would scoff at. Russia’s Supreme […]
BERLIN – The Berlin chapters of the Bandidos gang, whose members have a reputation for being armed and dangerous, had been considerably weakened of late with many members in jail. But the Berliner Morgenpost has learned from law enforcement officials that all 15 members of the “Midtown” chapter of the Bandidos – the last remaining […]
ANKARA – Huda lived in Mezza, a rich neighborhood of Damascus. Her husband, Sami, used to monitor the resistance movement for the regime from the Syrian capital. His daily reports weren’t supposed to harm anyone. His cooperation with the military and the police put food on the table. One day about a year ago, he […]
BBC MUNDO (UK), CLARIN (Argentina) RIO DE JANEIRO – The 2014 World Cup in Brazil is just 18 months away, and the entire nation is preparing. Local prostitutes, for their part, are getting ready to make sure they can keep up with the expected influx of international visitors by studying English, French, and Italian, as […]
CLARIN (Argentina), PERU 21 (Peru) Worldcrunch A Peruvian man is behind bars for allegedly raping and strangling to death his teenage girlfriend, a reality TV participant whose on-air confessions police say led to her murder. The victim, 18-year-old Ruth Thalía Sayas Sánchez, earned 15,000 Peruvian soles (about $5,800) for her recent appearance on El Valor […]