PARIS: As Paris hosts the 2024 Olympics, undocumented Chinese sex worker Hua says increased police patrols threaten her livelihood.
“I feel really under pressure, I'm constantly afraid. Every day there are police checks,” said the 55-year-old man, using another name to avoid recognition.
“So I'm going out to work less and less.”
About 40,000 people – the overwhelming majority women – sell or are exploited for sex in France, according to government and charity estimates.
Under French law, selling sex is allowed, but it is illegal to exploit someone or pay for sex, making pimps and clients criminally liable.
However, it is more complicated if the sex worker is undocumented.
“I'm so scared of being arrested that I won't work on the streets during the Olympics,” added the divorcee, who came to France seven years ago hoping to earn a decent wage as a maid and was diagnosed with breast cancer breast.
“If they arrest me, I will be sent back to China and they will not give me medical care there.”
Inside an office of the Medecins du Monde charity in the Belleville district of northeastern Paris, she broke down in tears.
“I don't understand, what have I ever done to anyone?” said the Chinese woman, who says she sometimes sells her services to nicer customers for as little as 20 euros ($21) because “they don't have money, and neither do I.”
In another part of Paris, on a street famous for the sex trade near the city center, Mylene Juste was looking for clients.
She said she was most disturbed by new security rules restricting pedestrian and traffic movement around Paris.
“Our regulars won't be able to make it with all the restrictions in place,” said Juste, 50, a sex worker for 22 years.
“And I don't think the tourists walking by will jump on us. So we're leaving here,” she added.
Ahead of the opening ceremony along the Seine River for the two-week sporting fest that took place on Friday, sex workers like Hua and Juste have all but disappeared from their usual Paris haunts.
But with the majority of sex trade online these days, police fighting sexual exploitation are focusing their efforts there.
“Customers go to a website, check a category, price and time,” a police officer specializing in the problem told AFP.
It's like ordering food online, “except for the girls” who get delivered, she said, asking to remain anonymous because of the nature of her job.
Medecins du Monde, which also tries to support sex workers virtually, says it recently saw more than 46,000 ads in one night on a popular site.
Through the charity's Jasmine Project, since 2019 sex workers have reported tens of thousands of 'dangerous' or 'dangerous' clients in a bid to warn others about them.
The run-up to the Games also coincided with a key ruling by the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) on Thursday, which said France's criminalization of sex worker clients did not breach the European Convention on Human Rights.
The ruling disappointed some justice groups who argue that France's policy only increases the stigmatization of sex workers.
“Criminalization increases physical assaults, sexual violence, and police abuse of people who sell sex, without a demonstrable effect on eradicating human trafficking,” said Erin Kilbride, women's and LGBT rights researcher at Human Rights Watch.
French authorities anticipate that gangs promoting women in Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay will continue to advertise during the Games.
They speculate that luxury prostitution may be on the rise with all the expected wealthy visitors.
But they also remain concerned about the rise in the number of abused minors in recent years, including vulnerable young girls in state care.
About 20,000 minors are sexually exploited in France, according to the rights group Acting Against the Prostitution of Children.
In May, a court jailed five men for paying for sex with a 12-year-old girl, in a rare case where such a case has gone to trial.
She was pimped out after running away from home.
