Sex and the City

Sex was a booming business in the port city of Athens even back in ancient days. Today Greece has legalised prostitution, and the city’s skin trade has increased tenfold during the last decade. Yet out of some 20,000 full and part-time sex workers, only about 1,000 are legal.

1 in 4 Greek men regularly pay for sex. 24-hour-a-day brothels with white lights above their doorways are easy to find, even around the corner from the city’s poshest hotels. Customers only pay 15 Euros a visit; about half that amount actually goes to the girls. Other sex workers take their clients from streets or bars to cheap hotels. The great majority of women involved, however, are not Greek. According to estimates there are 13,000-14,000 trafficking victims in the country at any given time, including 1,000 between the ages of 13 to 15, mostly from Eastern Europe—Russia, Moldova, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania—and Nigeria.
The EU’s invisible borders have made it easy for traffickers to move girls around. And Nigeria has its own powerful—and highly lucrative--criminal ring. Although it may cost 1000 Euros to transport girls to their destination cities, the latter will be forced to pay back their traffickers up to 80,000 Euros. And girls are kept from rebelling by the strong hold of voodoo oaths –and threats to their families.
Traffickers typically lure their victims to the city with false promises of jobs. Others are entrapped by “lover boys,” pimps who talk of marriage to vulnerable females, grooming them before they’re pushed into prostitution. Perhaps 40% of prostitutes are saddled with massive debts to pay back. And then there are the women kept under lock and key, slaves controlled by violence.
Joanna Bassham, who pioneered OM’s work in Greece, met up with the fledgling New Life outreach ministry of International Teams about six years ago. The goal of New Life, or Nea Zoi in Greek, is to support and restore individuals involved in prostitution by addressing their physical, emotional and spiritual needs. Staff and volunteers offer their friendship along with practical help to develop exit strategies, cooperating with local officials and partnering with the local church.
When Joanna moved to Athens at the end of 2004 she began accompanying the team on some of their weekly late night outreaches, visiting brothels and street workers, distributing hot drinks and helpful literature in many languages.
“What we hope for is that girls will see their real value,” explains New Life team leader Emma Skjonsby-Manousaridis. She downplays their accomplishments, saying that it’s only God who transforms. “We care for the people He brings into our lives, but really we’re just called to be faithful.—To show up! And sometimes we’re witnesses to a miracle.”
Some girls who receive New Life cards keep them as long as a year or two before going for help. Volunteers speak a variety of East European languages. Young Bulgarian Dena tells of meeting a girl with an evangelical church background who had been trafficked to Athens. Dena was able to help her find a safe place and, eventually, a job. But such happy endings are rare. When a Greek 15-year-old we’ll call Lila was sexually abused by her aunt and uncle, she told her parents. They didn’t believe her and threw her out. Lila met a man who gave her a baby and then left her. She met another man who put her in a brothel. Her earnings bought him a house and a motorcycle. But after getting infected with an STD, Lila called Dena to ask for help.
Finding other jobs for girls who have been involved in prostitution is difficult, but Dena managed to get her cleaning work. Failure to appear for a court hearing, however, landed Lila in jail for four months. Her boyfriend never visited, and Dena’s attempts to see her failed. Lila cut her wrists twice after being abused by women inmates. When she got out she was bitter against God and men. By this time she was 24. With no place to go Lila went back to work at a brothel. “She told me it would only be temporary,” sighed Dena. “But that’s what they all say.”
If women in prostitution are marginalized by society, transvestites and trans-sexuals on the streets are pushed to the “edge of the edge.” Joanna Bassham felt God’s compassion stir within her when she realised how few people ever tried reaching out to them.
It took Joanna and the team several years of building relationships before she could start a Bible study for these men. Now a small group eagerly gathers around the Scriptures each week to ask questions. And they are keen to bring their friends. “They are really counting the cost,” Joanna observed, “and some have even agreed to cut back on their working hours as a first step. One of the group has acknowledged, “If I did this God thing, there’s a lot I’ll have to give up.”
Other OMers are addressing the darkness of Europe’s major cities. Zurich’s Global Action team has been active since 2000. During the last year, Marcel and Ase Georgel in France have begun working with an outreach group in Nantes. And since 2007, a team member in Vienna has joined volunteers visiting her city’s red light area, another big trafficking centre. Prostitution is legal in Austria and because the capital city borders other countries, many women travel there by train just to solicit customers in the underground overnight. Some are single mothers working to feed their families.
The irony is, says this OMer, East Europeans can come and live in Germany and Austria, but they can’t legally work there—except in prostitution. They can go on the streets because there’s a special category that allows sex workers. So the system gives them few choices. And, she adds, the city doesn’t seem to see anything wrong with including brothel visits as part of the package for businessmen travelling to Vienna.
Police have recently advised her team to be on the watch for increasing numbers of boys being trafficked from the Czech Republic for the sex trade. And as in Greece, large quantities of Nigerian girls are being exploited. Christian workers are startled to meet many with evangelical backgrounds. In fact, they have held Bible studies with them in a van before they go off to ply their trade!
“I’ve never given out so many Bibles in different languages in my life!” muses the OMer, saying that some sex workers ask her to put the Book into their bag; they do not want to touch it themselves until they can go home and shower.
Emma of New Life believes the logical place to attack this ever-growing criminal industry is in the countries of origin, raising awareness and reaching out there to the abused and vulnerable, the children at risk, the minorities. Deal with problems at the root, she points out, and there would be no need to clear up the mess at the other end.
Education is certainly critical. HIV/AIDS isn’t much talked about in the ‘shame’ culture of Greece, for instance. Many Greeks actually believe that only African people can contract the disease! But the fact that cities and even their officials sometimes profit from the sex business, and are therefore unwilling to act, makes it mandatory that more Christians take up the challenge.
“We hear them all the time exclaiming, ‘I could never do that!’” Joanna Bassham smiles. “They can’t imagine what to say to people on the streets. But when they try it, they realise they can do it.”
Perhaps a deeper question is whether churches are ready to open their doors to the marginalised—the homeless, the trans-gender, the druggies and prostitutes. Joanna thinks that’s a problem in every country. “They expect people to change overnight when they get saved. But people who have struggles don’t suddenly change. So how will they find Christ? And if they do find Him where can they go to grow as a Christian, if not the church?”
Marcel Georgel agrees emphatically that Christians can no longer sit on the sidelines. “I believe that the Church must once again become God's hands, His feet, His voice.--Because the Church alone has a message that can transform and change man during his earthly existence, and for eternity.”