Procuring

Hookers and transvestites would line up around Syngrou Avenue or at the backstreets of the National Theater at Omonoia.  They’d enter luxury cars and chide young rookies going on joy rides. Then, suddenly the pulsating streets around Panteio, began to empty. Shops shut down, and unemployment caused young men looking for paid thrills to diminish. Then there was all that bad press about HIV.

Half of the women who end up working in prostitution rings in Greece are lured into them by pimps offering them fake jobs, according to research carried out by the Greek office of the A21 Campaign, a nongovernmental organization that fights human trafficking and sexual exploitation.

Former IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn on Feb. 10 denied knowing the women he took part in sex parties with were prostitutes, as he took the stand at his French trial on charges of aggravated pimping.
      
The silver-haired economist, whose presidential prospects were torpedoed by an earlier sex scandal, appeared tense as he answered questions from the lead judge.

Ex-IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn went on trial on Feb. 2 for pimping as part of a prostitution ring, four years after a sex scandal cost him his job and a shot at the French presidency.
      

Demonstrations that erupt into violence, shaking the Greek capital and affecting the country’s image as a whole, like the ones experienced in 2008, should not be repeated. Athens cannot become a battleground again as it was in December of that year and on other occasions.

A Thessaloniki court on Thursday sentenced two men, aged 19 and 20, after finding them guilty of raping and procuring a 14-year-old girl with whom they had gone to school.

The pair were released after court officials decided to allow them to pay off their sentences – of three years and three months – for just under 6,000 euros each.