A Prostitute Was Killed in France. Is a New Law Partly to Blame?

PARIS — The group of transgender prostitutes working in the Bois de Boulogne, a wooded park in western Paris, had a rallying cry for when they needed help. “¡Todas!” they would shout. “Everyone!”

It was a call for help the Latin American prostitutes knew all too well, and one they heard one night in mid-August, when Vanesa Campos, 36, a Peruvian working in the area, was shot and killed as thieves tried to rob her client, who survived.

“To die in a bush like that is no life,” lamented Giuliana, a 38-year-old Peruvian who gave only her first name, fearing for her safety. She and others working in the park that night had rushed to help Ms. Campos, but were forced to retreat when they heard shots being fired.

For many prostitutes in France, the death of Ms. Campos is proof of the growing dangers they face since Parliament passed a law in April 2016 penalizing those who pay for sex rather than those who provide it.

A prostitute’s clients now face fines of up to 1,500 euros, or about $1,750, and about 2,800 people have been charged so far, according to the Interior Ministry.

The law, adopted under former President François Hollande, was intended to discourage prostitution while increasing the safety of prostitutes. Instead, many prostitutes argue, it has made things considerably more dangerous.

“Vanesa was murdered; the state is complicit,” protesters chanted in Paris on Sept. 22 as they paid tribute to Ms. Campos.

One of the reasons for the increased exposure to violence, prostitutes say, is clients now demand to have sex in out of the way places, where the police are unlikely to be patrolling.

“Girls are now forced to hide and promise their clients that the police won’t find them,” said Giovanna Rincon, a former sex worker and transgender activist who leads the organization Acceptess-Transgenres. “Today, they work in places where we, the old guard working at the Bois de Boulogne, would never have set foot.”

There are about 30,000 prostitutes in France, according to government estimates, and 93 percent are foreigners. Ms. Campos was part of a subset of transgender Latin American prostitutes that arose in the Bois de Boulogne over the past two years, and her colleagues say that the isolated spot where she worked made her an easy target for a group of thieves who have repeatedly attacked them and their clients.

Five people have been charged with homicide and robbery in Ms. Campos’s case.

For some, her death highlighted how little attention is given to violence against prostitutes.

“The political class remains silent,” Thierry Schaffauser, president of Strass, a union of prostitutes in France, wrote after her killing. “Our deaths are normalized. A prostitute who dies is a bit like a person being killed in a video game. It doesn’t matter.”

Forty-two percent of prostitutes in France say they have been exposed to far more violence since the 2016 law took effect, according to a survey of 583 prostitutes conducted this year for Médecins du Monde and other nongovernmental organizations.

“They have far less control over their working conditions, as the number of clients has diminished since the new law came into effect,” the authors of a report summarizing the findings said. “Clients feel more entitled to impose their conditions” because they view themselves as bearing the legal risk, the authors said.

In the western city of Nantes, prostitutes surveyed for the report said they now accepted clients they used to blacklist. Some in the port city of Marseille said they worked in the darkness of construction tubes to reduce the chances of their clients being discovered. Thirty-eight percent of those surveyed said it was increasingly difficult to demand the use of a condom.

In 1999, Sweden became the first country to prosecute prostitutes’ clients rather than the prostitutes themselves, a “Nordic model” that has been adopted in countries including Canada, Iceland, Ireland and Norway.

Such policies, also called “end demand” laws, are intended as a middle ground between countries like the Netherlands and New Zealand that have legalized buying and selling sex, and ones that penalize prostitutes and their customers, as in most of the United States.

Mr. Schaffauser of the Strass union advocates the decriminalization of prostitution for both those who buy and sell sexual acts, arguing that doing so is the only way to protect sex workers, the term he prefers, from violence, rape and trafficking.

Five prostitutes in France have joined with nine organizations in asking the country’s highest legal authority, the State Council, to review the constitutionality of the anti-prostitution law. They argue that the measure infringes on the rights of prostitutes, in addition to reducing their income and forcing them to work in more dangerous circumstances and locations.

To those who had opposed the new law in France, the outcome is hardly surprising. “We knew from other countries that clients would be afraid,” said Esther Benbassa, a senator who had opposed the bill, “that sex workers would face harsher conditions, that they would have to hide.”

“Unfortunately, this Peruvian prostitute paid a high price for that,” she said, referring to Ms. Campos.

Her views are not shared by Claire Quidet, a spokeswoman for Mouvement du Nid, a group that seeks to end prostitution, and which was an early supporter of the law. “Prostitution is a dangerous and violent activity, and the law on prostitution in France provides tools to protect,” she said. “In no way is it the direct cause of more violence.”

After Ms. Campos’s death, France’s junior minister for gender equality, Marlène Schiappa, asked two government organizations to investigate ways to reduce violence against prostitutes. In a brief statement on Twitter, she condemned all forms of sexual violence, but did not mention the law.

Ms. Schiappa declined to comment.

Supporters of the law argue that by punishing clients, and lowering demand, it will lead to a decrease in prostitution.

The measure also provides some compensation money for those who wish to leave the sex business, and under certain conditions, undocumented foreigners can receive a six-month residency permit. The government had hoped to help 600 prostitutes move into other lines of work by 2018, but by last spring, only 55 had signed up, according to the government’s office for gender equality.

Some prostitutes argue the payments, a monthly stipend of €330, or about $384, are too low to allow them make ends meet. The Médecins du Monde study also found that 61 percent of prostitutes were not even aware of the program, and that of those who were, only 26 percent said they intended to apply for it.

For Mr. Schaffauser, “end demand” policies that view all sex workers as victims worsen the situation by conflating prostitution and human trafficking. While he acknowledges that many have been forced into prostitution, he argues that numerous others, including him, just want to keep working.

“The authorities wrongly see all sex work as a form of violence, and they refuse to listen if we don’t plan to quit prostitution,” he said in an interview. “In the meantime, actual violence within sex work is increasing, and they say, ‘Look, sex work is violent.’ It’s a vicious circle.”