In August 2018, Vanesa Campos died staring into the barrel of a police officer’s gun.
But it wasn’t the officer himself who killed her in the heart of Paris’ Bois de Boulogne – a large public park on the outskirts of the city and one of France’s most famous sites for sex work. A few nights before, his car was broken into in the same area. His gun – stolen by a group of men. A few nights later, that group of men, who now had the gun, decided to get some quick cash by robbing someone in the woods. They knew of Bois de Boulogne’s reputation, and they likely assumed that lots of sex buyers would be walking around in the dark, alone, with cash on them. So they went there. When they came upon Campos and a client they struck. Campos called for help and tried to intervene. One of the men pulled the trigger.
The chain of events that led up to Campos’s death opens up a host of questions. First and foremost: why has a dark and remote wooded area on the outskirts of the city become one of the centres of the Parisian sex trade? According to Thierry Schaffauser, a French sex worker and spokesperson for French sex workers’ union STRASS, the answer is starkly clear. “When Vanesa Campos was murdered, we made a lot of noise because to us, it was so obvious that her death was due to the law.”
The Law of April 2016 is the country’s Nordic model-inspired framework for dealing with prostitution (This article uses both ‘sex work’ and ‘prostitution’ as specific terminologies. ‘Prostitution’ is only used to reflect the ideological position taken by governments and abolitionist feminists). Its key elements are a nation-wide ‘exit programme’ to help people stop selling sex, its continuation of France’s well-established anti-pimping law, and its criminalisation of the purchase of sex. According to Schaffauser the last of these is the reason why Campos was working in a place where she could easily be killed. “She had to work in a part of the forest that has no light and is very remote,” he explained. While sex work has taken place at the Bois de Boulogne for decades, it used to primarily occur on the outskirts of the woods –closer to other sex workers and roads full of light. “This is a place where nobody would go before the law, because it’s known to be dangerous.”
When Campos died, many European countries paid attention to her murder. France didn’t. Despite the European sex worker community’s outrage and the clear line they drew between the law and her murder, only one French politician even bothered to comment. The dynamic remains the same today, even though the situation has drastically escalated in the intervening two years.
In the six months between June and December 2019 at least 10 sex workers were killed in France. That’s double the already startling rate of one sex worker death per month that France had in 2014, two years before the law was introduced. Schaffauser said that he has never seen such an egregious increase in violence like this throughout his entire career as a sex worker and activist. He blames the law, as do the majority of France’s sex workers, multiple healthcare associations, and influential NGOs like Médecins du Monde. Yet no politican has publicly commented on the recent rise in sex worker mortalities.
In June 2020 the government published the Evaluation of the Law of April 2016, the first official assessment of the legislation since it was implemented four years ago. A beast of a report at 238 pages, it covers everything from administrative issues inhibiting effectiveness to the need to better protect minors from prostitution. But not a single page in this long-awaited report addresses the violence that sex workers have experienced since the law arrived. In fact, it doesn’t mention how the law has affected sex workers at all. “The government interviewed our associations for the report, but nothing we said made it into the final result,” said Sarah-Marie Maffesoli, a lawyer and sex workers’ rights project leader at Médecins du Monde. “It’s like we don’t even exist.” Indeed, the report’s list of sources shows that its authors had a clear preference for speaking with anti-prostitution organisations during the research process. Of the twenty associations interviewed, fourteen are overtly abolitionist while only six are anti-abolitionist or more evasive in their positioning.
The French government’s continuing commitment to the Nordic model falls in line with a global trend. Despite ample evidence that the Nordic model and increased violence against sex workers are correlated, sex workers and their allies are failing to convince the model’s supporters of its faults. Why is that? And what have been the consequences of that failure for sex workers?
To find out, I interviewed five people who have followed this from the beginning – people who experienced the transition and witnessed the havoc it wrought amongst the community. These include a current French sex worker and activist, a former French sex worker with ample experience working before the law, an undocumented sex worker, a lawyer and sex workers’ rights researcher, and the head of a grassroots organisation supporting trans sex workers.
Each of the people I spoke with had their own burning qualms with the law, as well as unique experiences in trying to navigate it. Some emphasised that the more the evidence mounts that the law harms sex workers, the more it’s disregarded by the French government. Others struggle with the lack of federal interest in compiling data about sex workers’ lived experiences, and what they see as the government’s manipulation of existing research to prove an abolitionist point. But overall, a clear red thread exists between them. Together, the people I spoke to painted a picture of a piece of legislation oriented towards a single goal: looking like it’s stopping prostitution, no matter the human costs.
How did we get here? From regulation to neo-abolitionism
First: a history lesson. In the early years of the twentieth century, France took a regulationist approach to prostitution. Sex workers were monitored by the state through mandatory medical checks, and the country tried to confine sex work to the more controllable quarters of indoor brothels. The Marthe Richard law, passed in 1946, signalled a change in approach: it closed 1400 brothels in a matter of months and created prevention and ‘social rehabilitation’ services for sex workers in large French cities. As a result sex work in France largely moved into the streets, but some enterprising sex workers sought to find creative ways around the law instead. A cat and mouse game had begun.
“After the Marthe Richard law, sex workers decided to buy studios in buildings on the streets,” Anne (name changed) said. Anne is a French citizen who worked as a sex worker from 2002 to 2018, and who has been part of the activist scene in Paris for most of the past decade. “On [Rue Saint Denis] there are a few buildings with four/five floors. Those are entirely occupied by sex workers,” she said. “Twenty years ago, in the building where I used to work, we were all sex workers. We owned the building.”
But despite the continued presence of sex workers both in buildings and on the streets, social attitudes towards the industry began to change following the passage of the Marthe Richard law. The impluse to regulate prostitution had come from the idea that prostitutes are ‘social deviants’ who must be closely watched and dissuaded from their worst impulses. Abolitionist thinking, meanwhile, argued that prostitutes are victims of the violence inherent in their work, and that they must be saved and rehabilitated into ‘normal’ society. Abolitionists are also closely tied with a particular strain of feminism – one which views prostitution as “inherently abusive”, and considers selling your body as one of the greatest enablers of misogyny and patriarchy in society. And it was this line of argument that was on the rise in France.
In 1956, the French government made soliciting on the street a misdemeanour. Four years later, the country ratified the United Nations Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others. That year all state and medical records related to prostitution were deleted. More preventative programmes were created and the regulation of prostitution was prohibited. By the 1970s, sex workers were regularly being fined for soliciting customers; and in 1975, the country passed a law in which sex workers with repeated soliciting offenses could face prison time.
Yet despite the increasing strictures around sex work it remained legal – the buying and selling of sex were never explicitly unauthorised. In fact, until the 1990s the only officially criminalised aspect of prostitution was pimping, or profiting off of sex work as a third party – something that remains under the law that’s in place today. This ‘gray zone’ created confusion, even for lawyers: simultaneously ignored by the law yet fought against by abolition, prostitution had no clear legal status.
In 1994, the country criminalised active solicitation of customers by sex workers. Then, in 2003, France passed a new Law for National Security (colloquially known as the Sarkozy Law after the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy), which criminalised passive soliciting as well as the procuring, trafficking and buying of sex from a prostitute of “particular vulnerability”. Few sentences were issued under the Sarkozy law, but many people were arrested and held in custody. Under this policy of “institutionalised harassment”, as the French Ligue des Droits de L’Homme called it, if someone was caught soliciting they could go to prison for up to two months and be fined €3750.
Anecdotal evidence from sex workers demonstrates that, even as the government made the environment around sex work more repressive, people continued to sell sex. The anti-soliciting law had failed to end prostitution. So, in 2011, the French National Assembly signaled a second shift in strategy by adopting a resolution that confirmed the country’s neo-abolitionist position on prostitution. The subsequent law took over four years to draft, and in April 2016 it was finally passed.
The Law of April 2016 did the following:
- Repealed the anti-solicitation clause of the Law for National Security
- Criminalised the purchase of sex. First-time offenders are fined €1500, while repeat offenders are fined €3750.
- Created a nationwide ‘exit programme’ for prostitution, administered by abolitionist organisations. Sex workers can, under certain conditions, apply for this programme; if they are approved they can obtain temporary residence permits.
- Strengthened France’s commitment to fighting human trafficking.
- Continued the criminalisation of pimping, or profiting off of sex work as a third party.
- Introduced a fight against the ‘glamorisation’ of prostitution under the premise that this targets young people and lures them into the industry.
Polina Bachlakova | Radio Free (2020-10-16T05:00:05+00:00) Long read: How the Nordic model in France changed everything for sex workers. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/10/16/long-read-how-the-nordic-model-in-france-changed-everything-for-sex-workers/
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