Three years ago, when Stella, 33, from Athens, Greece lost her job at a supermarket, she became homeless. Stella is one of the many women who have turned to sex work during Greece's financial crisis. It's not the line of work any of these women imagined for themselves when they were studying in school or interviewing for jobs.
Selling their bodies for sex is, for most, the ultimate last resortβbut then again, it can seem like the only feasible way to survive when there are no jobs left and nowhere to go home to. Prostitution is legal in Greece, but it isn't easy to become a registered sex workerβthe process involves a routine medical examination every 15 days and a record free of criminal activity.
Married women are barred from sex work. There are strict limitations on where sex workers can operate. And though it's regulated by the government, sex workers have no rights under labor laws. Roaming the streets, sex workers also regularly face police brutality.
According to Human Rights Watch, officers in downtown Athens use broad stop-and-search powers to target them and hold them for long periods of time for no reason. In fact, just a few days before Anna spoke with Human Rights Watch, she was harassed by three plainclothes officer while she was at a hair salon in Athens' Omonia Square. Now they even know me by my first name. They call you a whore, dirty," she explains. Their response is, 'I don't care, go live on a bench. Their cruelty isn't entirely random: In , the Greek health ministry cracked down on hundreds of unlicensed brothels as a response to a sharp increase in HIV rates.
The police were accused of randomly arresting sex workers and forcing them to undergo HIV testing, which an AIDS advocacy group called "an appalling violation of human rights and medical confidentiality. In the aftermath, about 30 women tested HIV positive and were subsequently charged with felonies. Their names and photos were posted online , so people could get tested if they'd had sexual contact with the women. This traumatizing incident had a huge impact on Greek photojournalist Myrto Papadopoulos, who at the time was researching a boom in Greece's underground porn industry and its link to the financial crisis.
