On summer
afternoons, before the sun sinks behind the pine forests on Rome's
western edge, a dozen or so young African women take up their places on either
side of a remote commuter road, scanning the traffic for customers.
Then,
about 6 P.M., the shift changes. The African women leave, ceding their spots to
transvestites from South America who stay until the sun sets, before moving to the safer glare of
the city's lights.
On another
commuter artery to the south of Rome, two young
women from Ghana
sit perched on a metal traffic barrier until two cars pull up, offering each a
ride. Farther down the road stands a 22-year-old Romanian in short shorts and a
skimpy T-shirt who says she is getting ready to give up prostitution and go
back home.
''Another three months, and
then I quit,''
said the Romanian, who came to Italy
16 months ago with a cousin looking for another line of work. ''I have
put money aside, enough to buy a house or a store. I'm
going to get married and then I'll
be O.K.''
In the last 10
years, street prostitution in Italy
has undergone a sea change: once the last resort of desperate Italian women, it
is now a reflection of the shifting demographics of a country that used to see
very few foreigners, except tourists.
And although the
volume of immigration -- legal and illegal -- into Italy is still lower than in many
other European countries, foreign prostitutes are a visible reminder that this
country, once an exporter of emigrants, now has to make room for newcomers --
including those who earn a living on the edges of society.
''If you look, you don't see any Italian prostitutes on the streets
because of the laws of the market,'' said Angelo Bonnelli, president of a regional commission on
criminality. ''There
is strong competition, and foreign women charge lower prices.''
There is more to
the issue of foreign prostitution than the displacement of Italian
prostitutes, most of whom -- with the exception of
drug addicts -- have now retreated to apartments and massage or sun-tanning
parlors.
Prostitution is
not a crime in Italy,
but aiding, abetting and exploiting prostitutes is, and according to recent
statistics, such criminal activity is increasing. According to Mr. Bonnelli, the number of such arrests doubled in the Lazio
region around Rome
just in the last two years.
Police statistics
also confirm that an increasing number of foreigners are being charged with
crimes related to prostitution. Of the 737 people charged with exploiting or
abetting prostitution in Italy
in 1994 (up from 285 in 1990), one third were foreigners -- most of them from
the formerly Communist countries of Eastern Europe.
And of the 2,594 Albanians in Italian jails, 20 percent are being held on
prostitution-related charges.
But to many, the
most troubling development is the growing evidence that as many as 10 percent
of the foreign prostitutes now working the streets and highways of Italy are
really indentured servants -- bound to their jobs, even more than most
prostitutes, by fear and by financial obligations incurred when they first
accepted offers of a train or plane ticket, a visa and work in Western Europe's restricted job market.
''Sometimes they have been
duped and then forced into prostitution,'' said Livia Turco, Italy's
Minister for Social Affairs. ''Sometimes men promise them marriage or tell them
they will find work for them, but once the women arrive, their passport is
taken from them.''
''This is a form of modern
slavery,''
said Ms. Turco, a member of Italy's
center-left Government and the prime mover behind a clause in Italy's latest immigration bill that would give illegal
immigrants now working as prostitutes a chance to leave the business in return
for a temporary residence permit.
Other European
countries are confronting a similar situation; according to one estimate, there
may be as many as 500,000 women throughout Western Europe
working as prostitutes. Experts in various countries, Italy and the Netherlands
among others, have estimated that 1 in 10 is a victim of trafficking, a woman
brought here from one of the dislocated economies of Eastern Europe, Africa or elsewhere and forced into prostitution.
In Italy, where the number of street prostitutes is
estimated at 25,000, most of the foreigners come from Eastern Europe and
sub-Saharan Africa, with particular concentrations here, in the region around Rome, of Albanians and
Nigerians.
A recent study of
50 foreign prostitutes working in seven regions of Italy
done by the International Organization for Migration, based in Brussels, found that the Albanians were
usually recruited informally, through relatives or friends, whereas the Nigerians
were the victims of a more organized operation.
One of the 10
Nigerians interviewed for the study described her ordeal as beginning at a
disco in Lagos where someone suggested she could
go to Europe to work and study. ''I paid
a lot of money to an agency which organizes trips to Italy,'' she said in the anonymous interview.
''The money was not enough,
and so I signed a contract where I promised to work as a maid for a family in Naples and I soon
understood that my job was another one. I was threatened, and they said I had
to pay, otherwise my family would have been threatened too.''
Cinzia, one of
the two young women from Ghana
who had taken up a position on a road south of Rome,
said she came to Italy
with ''a
visa, a passport, everything,'' adding in English, ''I don't
know how they organized everything.''
Silvia Angelini, a sociologist who works with Magliana
80, a social agency in Rome
that distributes condoms to the prostitutes working on the city's outskirts as part of this society's effort to control AIDS and other diseases, says
that in many cases the women are under the control of small-time operators.
''The stereotypical idea of
the pimp is not really correct, but you sometimes get the impression that somone is in the shadows controlling the situation,'' said
Ms. Angelini, who together with colleagues from
Nigeria and the Balkans makes an evening tour four or five times a week in a
minivan.
Some women, like
the Romanian, insist that they have turned to prostitution on their own, as a
way out of bad economic situation. But it is work that comes with its own
rules, and its own schedules. She works from 11 A.M. to 1 P.M., then from 3:30
P.M. to 7 P.M on a road usually occupied by three or four other women.
According to the
transvestites on the Via Lido di Castelporziano, most
of them from Colombia,
those rules are strictly understood and observed. ''During the day, you find the Africans here,'' a
22-year-old prostitute said. ''But after 6, it is ours.''
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