How the Paris Olympics is impacting sex workers in the city

On Friday (July 26), the streets and sights of Paris became host to a spectacle of curated French history: headless Marie Antoinettes, an Assassin’s Creed torchbearer doing parkour, and, er, Minions stealing the Mona Lisa. It was the first Olympics opening ceremony to be held outside of a stadium – and, as it was marred by torrential rain that soaked athletes as they sailed down the Seine, it might also be the last.

Away from the jovial pageantry broadcast to the rest of the world, some of Paris’ quieter streets have been filled with cops. In the months leading up to the Olympics, French authorities have been accused of ‘social cleansing’ – a policy under which homeless people, migrants and sex workers in Paris have faced a rise in evictions and heavy-handed policing.

Berthe De Laon, coordinator of the Fédération Parapluie Rouge (the Red Umbrella Federation), a national collective of sex worker organisations, tells Dazed that police crackdowns have been on the rise since December 2023, with migrant workers — who make up about 80 per cent of France’s street-based sex workers — being the primary target. De Laon says there have been many more ID checks than usual, with “a large number” of sex workers being put into administrative detention centres and issued with OQTFs (obligation de quitter le territoire français), an obligation to leave the country.

They pinpoint the Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes – which are both public parks and famous sex work sites – as well as the Belleville neighbourhood of Paris as crackdown hotspots. The latter is home to a big community of Chinese sex workers who, De Laon says, have faced particular harassment in the last few months. “Recently, the police have been trying harder to scare them by following them into their apartments and denouncing them to the owner,” they explain. “According to the law, the owner, knowing they are sex workers, would have to evict them.”

For context, in April 2016 France adopted the Nordic model, a controversial approach to sex work that criminalises clients and third parties as opposed to sex workers themselves. Under the model –which is abolitionist and based on the idea that all sex work is abusive and all sex workers are victims – renting a property to a sex worker can be considered ‘profiting off sex work’. As landlords risk prosecution for this, they tend to evict tenants if they find out – or even suspect – that they’re engaging in sex work. Or, as sex worker and activist Thierry Schaffauser tells Dazed, they accept the legal risk, but will make sex workers pay for it through higher rent prices, “sometimes twice the market price”.

The Nordic model – which was upheld last week in France after a legal challenge by 261 sex workers – has been widely criticised by sex workers’ rights and global human rights organisations, who say that it only serves to increase violence against sex workers by forcing them to engage in riskier behaviours in more remote (and subsequently more dangerous) spaces. This is clearly evident in France. In fact, a 2019 report found that 63 per cent of sex workers said their quality of life had reduced since the introduction of the law, while 78 per cent said they’d experienced a decline in their earnings. 42 per cent had been exposed to more violence. Plus, as per openDemocracy, in the last six months of 2019 at least ten sex workers were murdered in France, double the already troubling rate of one sex worker death per month in 2014, before the Nordic model was introduced. In 2018, the murder of trans migrant sex worker Vanesa Campos in Paris’ Bois de Boulogne sparked protests around the country, with demonstrators demanding the repeal of the model, which had forced Campos to work in a more isolated area of the park to avoid police.

Crackdowns ahead of the Olympics, then, are yet another hurdle for sex workers trying to work safely in Paris. “There’s been an abusive use of force, manipulation, and humiliation from the police on the sex work community,” says Alex, a Paris-based sex worker and elected board member of STRASS, a national sex workers’ union. “Colleagues working out of vans have received a lot more fines or abusive control. The police have been threatening sex workers with outdated laws, like ‘public solicitation’, which is no longer in place, or ‘public indecency’.”

A lot of the targeting of sex workers happens under the guise of tackling the alleged ‘increase in prostitution’ that happens around major sporting events — a claim that first materialised at the 2004 Games in Athens. In 2016, ahead of France hosting the Euros, the country’s Haut Conseil à l'Égalité (High Council for Equality) declared that these kinds of events offer “prostitution networks… an opportunity for gigantic profits, and fuel global trafficking of human beings”. Not only does this erroneously conflate trafficking and sex work, but it’s also a claim with little, if any, empirical evidence. It’s been disproved time and time again, including by the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women.

Yet, the myth prevails. As Act Up-Paris advocacy officer Eva Vocz recently wrote, rather than serving to protect genuine victims of trafficking, it’s used to “justify surveillance measures and social control and push forward gentrification policies in certain neighbourhoods via anti-prostitution by-laws”. 

In Paris, this myth has led to authorities making deals with Airbnbs and hotels, empowering them to ‘train’ homeowners or staff to recognise, and then evict, supposed sex workers. This recently happened to one of Schaffauser’s friends, who was refused entry to a hotel because she was identified as a sex worker — via an identification process that’s crude and discriminatory. “It works on stereotypes,” he tells Dazed. “Like, if you’re a woman alone who has visits from men, or a migrant woman or trans woman. Sometimes they make mistakes and evict people who aren’t sex workers.”

One hotel that Alex describes as a “go-to” for sex workers – “an establishment that’s made a lot of money out of our work” – has had a rebranding ahead of the Olympics and has, as they put it, “become actively hostile against sex workers, calling the police on colleagues or barging into rooms”. Women and femme-presenting sex workers seem to bear the brunt of this discrimination, with Alex – who’s transmasc and non-binary – revealing that they face less harassment when they “dress to pass as a boy”. (That’s not to say male sex workers have it easy; Schaffauser says authorities don’t regard male workers as “real prostitutes” – and therefore, under French law, victims – so they tend to see them as “pimps”.)

“Sex workers have been confronted with the necessity to work longer hours and take more risks to save up money, because rather than expecting an increase in demand [during the Olympics], they expect more repression” — PG Macioti, coordinator of Project Jasmine

The aim of this policy, Schaffauser says, is to disorganise sex workers’ work. “The more they do this, the more we rely on third parties,” he explains. “[The authorities] claim that they’re fighting exploitation, but they’re increasing it.”

The government has even embarked on what Schaffauser calls a “propaganda campaign”, which includes posters on the streets and at bus stops discouraging people from buying sex. One poster that Schaffauser shared with Dazed reads: “How much?”, followed by “In France, there’s a fine of up to €150,000”. Though this poster is false (the actual fine for buying sex is €1,500, rising to €3,750 for repeat offenders), Schaffauser believes this is a scaremongering tactic and says lies like this are common.

All of this in the name of anti-trafficking? “No, it’s pure social cleansing,” says PG Macioti, the coordinator of Project Jasmine, a Médecins du Monde-run programme that works to combat violence against sex workers. “Sex workers have been confronted with the necessity to work longer hours and take more risks to save up money, because rather than expecting an increase in demand [during the Olympics], they expect more repression. The sex workers who access our services are scared.”

“It’s a humanitarian façade for a very violent police ‘rescue’ agenda,” adds Amanda De Lisio, assistant professor at York University in Toronto and co-author of a recent study into the impact of sport mega-events on sex workers in Rio. In her research, De Lisio found that ahead of the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Rio, the police shuttered dedicated sex bars and hotels – places where sex workers could work with safety nets, like security guards, cameras, and staff checking clients before they enter. “This really leaves [sex workers] in precarious places.”

There were also violent raids and evictions of sex workers, some of whom alleged to have been raped by the police. “We’re a decade out and no one has been held accountable for those illegal evictions,” continues De Lisio. “And yet investments in security still increase with every Olympics, making it incredibly unsafe for women working in these host economies.” De Lisio says crackdowns are already happening in LA ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup and 2028 Olympic Games.

In an email statement to Dazed, the Préfecture de Police confirmed that “public highway operations and checks have been organised and will continue in the Bois de Boulogne, Bois de Vincennes, and Belleville areas” with the aim of “establishing a precise profile of the phenomenon and to collect usable information to dismantle pimping networks”. It continued: “The Brigade de répression du proxénétisme [Brigade for the Repression of Pimping] will significantly increase its presence on the ground during this period […] and monitoring of night establishments will be strengthened.”

When asked what, if any, services they’re offering to sex workers to help them during the Olympics, the police responded: “That question is not our responsibility.”

Even without these supposed anti-trafficking policies, general Olympics logistics make many public spaces inaccessible for sex workers anyway, like inflated prices of hotels. “As prices in the city get higher, clients are reluctant to go, and so we have to find hotels further away,” says Alex. “This is more dangerous because I have to go places I’m not used to, and the person backing me up is further away – it’s a safety protocol to always have a person that knows where you’re going and what you’re going to do. Also, a lot of my usual clients planned to be away from Paris for the Olympics, meaning I have fewer work opportunities. Having fewer clients means I have to lower my prices or accept more dangerous practices.”

Liv, an escort who works in the Parisian suburbs, echoes this, saying that road and train station closures have made it difficult for clients who have stayed in the city to travel out to her. “One customer couldn’t come today,” she says. “And for girls who work in controlled areas, it’s even more difficult because you need a QR code to enter certain areas. They can’t move where they want and neither can the clients.”

As for what authorities should be doing to protect sex workers and victims of exploitation during the Olympics, Macioti outlines Project Jasmine’s recommendations: don’t carry out campaigns reminding clients of the law that criminalises them, which only serves to further marginalise sex workers; develop information tools for survivors of exploitation, made in collaboration with individuals concerned; and establish partnerships with hoteliers and private landlords to provide information tools on the rights of exploitation victims in their accommodation.

Sadly, although the Olympics is making things more difficult, sex workers in Paris have been navigating an increasingly hostile and threatening environment since 2016 – and “it will continue to increase as long as they [authorities and society] don’t consider us to be human beings,” Liv says. “When we’re attacked as women, it’s already complicated to go to the police and be taken seriously,” she continues. “When we’re attacked as sex workers, none of us will file a complaint.”

Along with the total decriminalisation of sex work and, simply, the same rights as every other worker in France, sex workers just want their voices to be heard. “If laws and decisions that concern sex workers are made without them, they will never help them,” says De Laon. “Since the 2016 law, they’re considered to be vulnerable people unable to make decisions about their own lives. We want it to change. We want to be heard.”

In the meantime, organisations like Fédération Parapluie Rouge, STRASS, and Project Jasmine will continue to work with sex work communities to, as Alex puts it, “give them the means to help each other — whether that’s through STRASS’s open meet-up where sex workers can find food and harm reduction items, or our group chats where we can find back-up, advice on where to work, or how to face repression and violence. We even have a legal team available for help”.  They add that STRASS is “also doing outreach, strolling to where our street colleagues work to distribute available resources.”

“We’ve always been there for one another,” they surmise. “We’ve always faced violence and repression. The Olympics don’t change that, but they do make our community and organising all the more important.”