Quotes of the Day
When Henry Miller arrived in Paris in 1930, he was immediately impressed by one aspect of the French capital's street life. "Montmartre is simply lousy with whores," he noted on his first Sunday in town. "They sit in the cafés and beckon to you from the window, or bunk smack up against you in the street, and invite you to come along." You're more likely to bump into a tourist in Montmartre today, but Miller would recognize those streetwalkers in other parts of the city. After dark, the ringroad that circles Paris is dotted with very young girls in very short skirts and very high heels, showcasing their wares in the headlights of passing cars. Depending on the area, they may be Moldovan, Nigerian or Chinese. In the Bois de Boulogne — a favorite of joggers and picnickers — transvestites from North Africa and Latin America ply their trade beneath the trees, while older French women receive customers in minivans parked on the access roads.
In Miller's time, prostitutes were considered as French as pastry. But with criminal gangs from Eastern Europe, West Africa and Asia now funneling large numbers of girls onto French streets, the Assemblée Nationale is ready to allay voters' fears over mounting lawlessness. The loi Sarkozy, as the legislation proposed by France's high-profile Interior Minister is called, is a ragbag of internal-security measures whose targets include gypsies, beggars and gangs found loitering in hallways, as well as hookers and pimps.
The brief section devoted to prostitution abolishes a previous distinction between active and passive soliciting to create a new arrestable offense. Police will be able to detain people they suspect of soliciting for sex and hold them for up to 48 hours. If charged and found guilty, prostitutes face two months in prison and a j3,750 fine. Nicolas Sarkozy insists that his real targets are the pimps and gangs who organize prostitution, not those they exploit: "If prostitution is slavery, let's not allow pimps to display their merchandise in the street," he told the Assemblée last week. Foreign prostitutes will be deported. Those without papers who inform on their pimps will be given temporary residency permits.
It's the massive influx of foreign prostitutes that has brought a legislative response. According to French police, prostitute numbers have increased by at least 30% over the past five years. Foreigners, many of them illegals, account for more than 60% of the prostitutes in France. Although Paris remains the market leader, business is booming outside the capital too. "Sarkozy has decided to clean up the streets," says Bernard Lemettre, president of the Nest Movement, a Catholic group that helps prostitutes to break out of the business and build new lives.
That line may work with constituents, but Lemettre and other social workers have slammed it as simplistic. "The government's position is: We'll never be able to eradicate prostitution, so let's do what we can to hide it from view," he says. Last week, dozens of prostitutes demonstrated outside the Assemblée Nationale to protest the punitive measures contained in the new bill. "This law won't solve the problem of trafficking," says Claude Boucher, director of the Friends of the Women's Bus, an association that acts as an intermediary between prostitutes and social services. "Over 90% of the girls in Paris are controlled by Mafia pimps, but no one's going to denounce their traffickers under duress with handcuffs on." French police don't appear to be under any such illusion. "We're not going to bust pimps by arresting prostitutes," says Dominique Achispon, assistant general secretary of the National Union of Police Officers. "It's very hard for a prostitute to say who she works for. Most girls who inform on pimps are either found dead or vanish without a trace." Boucher claims the new law will actually make matters worse, as pimps cover their losses by putting more girls to work.
The situation is complicated by prostitution's awkward legal status in France. Before World War II, the country had some 1,500 licensed brothels. Since they were abolished in 1946, the government has steered an uneasy course between prohibition and regulation. Although pimping is a criminal offense, selling sex is technically legal. If police enforce the new measures that outlaw soliciting, most observers predict that prostitution will simply be driven underground. Achispon counts himself amongst the pessimists. "This law's good for us because it's going to enable us to arrest prostitutes when they cause a disturbance on the street. Before, we could only give them a caution. But it's not going to solve the problem. The pimps are just going to move their girls indoors, where they'll get beaten up and exploited just the same." The new law may reassure voters, but the oldest profession in the world has a few years ahead of it yet.
- NICHOLAS Le QUESNE/Paris
- France cracks down on foreign prostitution gangs