Newsweek on W European prostitution
Newsweek looks at Western Europe’s new wave of immigrant prostitution.
Not long ago, Europe’s prostitutes tended to be native-born. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, the breakup of Yugoslavia and the advent of a borderless European Union, they’re increasingly from elsewhere. In Rome, as in most major European cities, most prostitutes are foreign-born. In some cities, such as Vienna, the figure approaches 90 percent. Like any industry reeling from the effects of the global economy, the influx of immigrants has shaken up the European sex business. Competition has grown tougher, prices lower and solicitation bolder. “At the end of 1999, Western Europeans began witnessing a new, very visible form of prostitution,” says French feminist author Elisabeth Badinter. Traditionally, she explains, European prostitutes more or less chose their trade, even if for unsavory reasons. Today, prostitution is vastly more coercive, dominated by mafia syndicates trafficking in younger and younger women imported often against their will from Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa.
