"The police tell us that we will have to leave" : three months before the Paris Games, prostitutes denounce their "social confinement"
Elena* looks at the five or six “girls” gathered around her. A “girlfriend” called on her a little earlier to answer our questions. The thirty-year-old, from Moldova, is the one who speaks French best in this corner of the Bois de Vincennes. Around a hundred women, many from Eastern European countries and sub-Saharan Africa, prostitute themselves there. “The police sometimes don’t let us work”, says Elena, between two drags of a cigarette. She lists: “fines to customers”, “PV for wrong vans parked”… “Now the police are telling us that we will have to leave when the Olympics come.”
Since the fall, the authorities have taken increased interest in places of street prostitution in the capital: Bois de Vincennes, Bois de Boulogne, Strasbourg-Saint Denis and Belleville. In nine months, twenty police operations were carried out in the Bois de Vincennes sector alone. Result: 203 people were checked, assures the office of the Paris police prefect, Laurent Nuñez, to franceinfo.
Among them, 44 were placed in administrative detention to verify their right to stay. In the end, 37 orders to leave French territory were issued and two placements in administrative detention centers pronounced, before forced return. Relatively modest figures, compared to the thousands of prostitutes in the capital, but increasing, in the opinion of those interviewed.
This increase in control of sex work comes as the Olympic and Paralympic Games (JOP) are to be held this summer in Paris and its suburbs. The police headquarters has also promised to “to strenghten” the presence on the ground of services dedicated to controlling prostitution in the Ile-de-France region during this period.
In December, Bérangère Couillard, then Minister Delegate for Equality between Women and Men, already feared that the Games would “to prosper networks (…) of prostitution. “We have received alerts of increased risks of exploitation”also assures franceinfo the former Minister of Sports Roxana Maracineanu, who heads the Interministerial Mission for the protection of women against violence and the fight against human trafficking (Miprof).
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