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Photo: Sex-workers in Lyon protest against the government's plans to penalise their clients.
Photograph: Jean-Philippe Ksiazek/AFP/Getty Images
In a parking bay on a deserted industrial estate in Lyon, Karen, in her late 40s, sat in the passenger seat of her second-hand Ford Transit van wearing only black underwear. It was 7.30pm on a Friday night. She lit a pink lantern on the dashboard. Soon, a steady flow of cars was circling the car park – Mercedes, jeeps, old bangers — their drivers slowing to peer at the women in corsets sitting alone in a dozen parked, white vans, arms folded, candlelight flickering across their faces. "Some men drive round for hours just staring," she said. "Then they'll stop, ask the price, and demand a discount. I'll say, 'What, for all that petrol you've wasted?'"
A silver car slowed. "20 euros for a blow job, 40 euros for 'love'," she smiled. "Too expensive," said the man, accelerating. A 60-year-old agreed to sex for 40 euros. Karen climbed into the back of the van, which she had decorated with a bed, a heater, purple curtains and a chest of drawers. Three minutes later the man walked out into the night. Karen laid out a clean sheet of paper-towel on the bed, spruced her blond hair. "See, it's all very quick," she said. Most of the evening was spent sitting waiting. Then in 15 minutes, three clients paid for sex, including a Spanish man in his 20s in designer clothes. Each took less than five minutes. She had made her daily quota of cash needed to pay her bills.
A former secretary from the southern naval city of Toulon, three times married, with two daughters, Karen first started selling sex in the 1980s: a brief stint on the street near a Lyon station, working mainly in clients' cars, "which is very uncomfortable". She quit and got married, but in 1992, divorced and with a young child she suddenly needed to "put food on the table". She returned to sex-work, first in a hostess bar, then meeting clients at her home via a newspaper small-ad. For seven years, she has worked on the street in her van, Monday to Saturday from 7pm to around 1am, paying tax as self-employed. "'No pimp, no boss' is my motto. I'd rather do this than an office job, getting shouted at by a boss for a pittance." Her strict rules include condoms for everything and no kissing clients. "You have to hit rock bottom to do this," she said. "It's not an easy job, but it's a job where you can make money quickly. People try to say we're victims, say that we're alienated, that there's a sex attack in our childhood history, but I've never been raped by anyone. This is my free choice." She never looks into a client's eyes in the moment of a sexual exchange – "I look anywhere but" – and they rarely tell her their names. But in her top drawer beside the condom supplies is a petition signed by several of them: in neat writing, stating their profession: such as "public works" or "driver". It's a protest against the new French government's war on prostitution.
Sex work was hardly a priority in the French election campaign, yet it has become one of the defining social issues of Francois Hollande's new Socialist government. In June, the women's minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, made the bold announcement that she wanted to "abolish prostitution" in France and Europe. "My objective, like that of the Socialist party, is to see prostitution disappear," she said. The previous French parliament had already adopted a resolution aiming for a "society without prostitution". But can a government rid society of paid sex? The debate is raging among French intellectuals. Sex workers have taken to the streets, accusing the government of moralistic paternalism, saying Socialists are using the issue to distance themselves from the pariah Dominique Strauss-Kahn. DSK, once the Socialist hope for president, is under official investigation in France over complicity in a pimping operation after sex workers were allegedly procured for his orgies. He said he didn't pay and didn't know the women were sex workers. "I challenge you to distinguish a naked prostitute from any other naked woman," his lawyer told the press. The inquiry has been extended to examine alleged group rape over the question of whether one sex worker was forced. Strauss-Kahn denies any violence.
The "white van women" selling sex on Lyon's industrial estate in Gerland embody the French state's difficult attitudes to prostitution. As in the UK, prostitution itself – receiving money for sex, or paying for sex – is not a crime. But activities around it are. Laws prohibit pimping, human trafficking, buying sex from a minor and soliciting sex in public. Brothels were outlawed in 1946.
Lyon, France's third biggest city, which has around 600 street prostitutes, has always been at the heart of sex worker protests. In 1975, more than 100 prostitutes occupied a church in the city complaining about police harassment, sparking similar protests across France until riot police evicted them. Now the Lyon Transit vans are the new frontline. In 2003, Nicolas Sarkozy, then interior minister, introduced a controversial law against soliciting, making it illegal to stand in a public place known for prostitution dressed in revealing clothes. To get round this, women started working in private vans. Selling sex inside a vehicle was not breaking the law. But police are now using any means to crack down on the growing number of sex-work vans, namely parking tickets and tow-trucks. In Lyon, sex workers complain of constant parking fines and being towed to the pound. Some on the industrial estate owe thousands of euros in parking tickets and pound-release fines accrued each month. "You can get two parking tickets in 20 minutes, or be towed away on Tuesday, pay a fine, and be towed again on Thursday," said one. The women stand their ground. One drives 500km from Bordeaux each week, works and sleeps in her van for four days and nights, before going home. Others travel to the area from Burgundy or Paris.
Source: uk guardian
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