Ogi is one of our participants from 2004 and group leader from 2005 – 2007. He is a journalism major at Shoumen University in Bulgaria and this article has appeared in Transitions Online.

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Ogi’s Article

Unchecked Danger
by Ognyan Isaev
17 December 2007

Prostitution is a serious problem in Bulgaria that threatens thousands of women, but little has been done to stop the “crime of the flesh.”

SHUMEN, Bulgaria | Along roads and highways in Bulgaria, there are often clusters of women. They wave to drivers and passersby, hoping to get their attention. Some also wait in the lobbies of hotels along the roads, smiling at people stopping in for the night. At a four-star hotel in northeastern Bulgaria, several girls sit on large sofas, their faces plastered with makeup and their bodies scantily covered by short skirts, low-neck tops, and sleek stockings. They smell of heavy perfume. By their sides are obese, greasy men who are eyeing the hotel customers for fat wallets and drunkenness.

The women are prostitutes, the men their pimps. Their roadside activities remain largely unregulated, due to inadequate national legislation.

There are many concerns at stake in the debate over Bulgarian prostitution. Between 60 and 70 percent of women working as prostitutes are under 18, Svetoslav Spasov, chairman of Bulgaria’s Parliamentary Commission for Youth and Sports, recently said on television. Not all of them chose their profession.

“A great number of them are forced to do it by the pimps and the clients, too,” Spasov said. “Nobody protects them. If 10 journalists or [members of parliament] disappeared, a huge scandal would break out, but if 10 prostitutes from the highway disappeared, nobody would notice.”

Spasov and others are pushing for legislation to regulate prostitution. They note that the women’s lives are at risk. The workers face coercive pimps and customers, and also the flow of drugs and disease that inevitably accompany unfettered sex trafficking. So far, however, little progress has been made.

“To adopt a prostitution law, there should be a political will and not only MPs but also the ministries of internal affairs, health, education, labor, social policy, and justice to back it up,” Spasov said.

DANGEROUS LIVES

While sex trafficking is a problem for all European countries, it is particularly acute in the southeastern states. The International Organization for Migration has estimated that roughly 200,000 women are trafficked throughout the region each year, particularly in Bulgaria, Albania, Romania, and Moldova. Moreover, women from Eastern Europe frequently are trafficked in countries further west; the German Federal Criminal Police Office released a report in 2003 stating that 11 percent of women providing sex services in Germany were from Bulgaria.

In Bulgaria, the northeast is the region with the most prostitution. According to the National Service of Combating Organized Crime, the cities with the worst situations are Varna, Burgas, Turgovishte, Razgrad, Dobrich, and Shumen. The women sell themselves openly, unafraid of the authorities.

Many say they feel that they have no choice.

At the four-star hotel with the sofa-filled lobby, one of the women most in demand is a 29-year-old Romani worker. The woman’s husband died seven years ago, and with the money she earns from prostitution, she supports herself, her mother, and her 14-year-old daughter. “Honestly, I try to hide my work from my family because I know they will be ashamed of me. But this is how I survive,” said the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “If I stop doing it, how will I support my family?”

Another woman whom customers frequently used to ask for finished high school two years ago, and she has a boyfriend who is also her pimp. But no one has seen her in a while. Colleagues say she may have left the country for work elsewhere.

The women get half of what they earn, and their pimps – sometimes women have more than one – divide the rest among themselves. The hotel hasn’t banned the women from its lobby because it would be bad for business; when customers come for the women, they pay for rooms. Among the clients, there are police officers, politicians, drug dealers, university professors, actors, and foreigners – some of whom came to Bulgaria specifically for the sex trade.

Law enforcement shows up sometimes, and when it does, the pimps vanish. The women are left to defend themselves, and a few have been jailed for a day.

While some women have chosen their line of work, others were coerced into it. Some say they struggle to handle the stresses of their jobs, including drunk clients, rape, and other abuse. A few have even ended their lives. Recently, a young girl jumped from the fourth floor of a building in northeastern Bulgaria where pimps had locked her up. They had kidnapped the girl from her village and wanted to earn easy money by selling her for sex. She survived, but others have not been so lucky.

LINGERING ON THE LAW

Governments in southeastern Europe have made some efforts to combat sex trafficking, even joining forces in 2004 in a cooperative investigation of organized crime, including prostitution rings. In Bulgaria, the law technically punishes the trafficking of a minor with two to 10 years imprisonment and fines, according to the U.S. State Department’s Country Report for Bulgaria. Inducement to prostitution is punishable by 10 to 20 years imprisonment, if the victim is a minor. These laws, however, are not enforced efficiently.

Still, the government considered legalizing prostitution until as recently as October. Some legislators argued that legalization would allow the government to oversee and tax the profession, and that it would prevent minors from participating in it. But others, who ultimately overran the legislative proposal, said legalization would pose great risks for the growth of kidnapping and trafficking women against their will.

“We should not make a difference between the women victims of trafficking and the ones that offer sex services voluntarily…. If a woman says she does it voluntarily, does this mean we have to legalize prostitution?” Janice Raymond, director of the Coalition Against Trafficking Women, an organization working to combat exploitation, told the Bulgarian weekly newspaper Capital “Some people say they take heroin voluntarily. Does it mean, we have to legalize heroin because some people take it voluntarily?”

At an October forum on human trafficking, Interior Minister Rumen Petkov called prostitution a “crime of the flesh” and argued that Bulgaria should stand strong against the practice. It is unclear, however, when the ruling coalition will pass or even draft a bill fully banning prostitution.

The dragging debate has allowed prostitution in Bulgaria to continue existing in a sketchy legal area, and ultimately to boom. Antoaneta Georgieva, director of Face to Face Bulgaria, an organization dedicated to combating forced prostitution, states on her group’s website: “Trafficking in people is the second most lucrative illegal business after arms trade.”