Sex industry

Greek sex workers are concerned that new health and safety guidelines to protect them and their clients against the coronavirus will harm their business.

Regulations which came into force on June 15 urge sex workers to keep names and contact numbers of customers, who will lose the anonymity they previously sought.

At a Vienna peep show, all the usual trappings are in evidence -- from mirrors and red velvet to soft lighting -- but coronavirus has led to a change of act.

Artists tired of performing on the internet have moved in and can sing to a live, if ephemeral, audience that now just pays for a few minutes' music at a time.

A March of Red Umbrellas gathered about hundred people who walked through Skopje's main pedestrian areas on Tuesday, calling for the decriminalisation of prostitution in North Macedonia and better social treatment of sex workers in general.

The event this year focused in particular on the fight against gender-based violence.

The Special Prosecutor's Office has brought charges against three persons involved in an organised crime group for trafficking of women for the purpose of sexual exploitation in the country and abroad, said the Appellate Prosecutor's Office, quoted by Focus News Agency.

Police in London have released 29 Romanians held captive by a group of 17 people suspected of trafficking women into the UK and forcing them to work as prostitutes, according to BGNES.

A large prostitution racket that exploited women from Moldova has been unraveled by police in Attica who have arrested 15 people - 12 foreign nationals and three Greeks.
According to authorities, the gang preyed on women in the Eastern European country and lured them to Greece, where they were forced into prostitution at brothels across central Athens.

"The government does not enforce the law which is part of the constitution and a requirement under international agreements," Nuray Cevirmen, secretary of women's rights at the Human Rights Association in Ankara, told BIRN.

Cevirmen said that Turkey has a very conservative, male-dominated society in which men are resistant to challenges to their privileges.

285 women were killed in Turkey in the first seven months of 2019, Yeni Safak reports. In July alone, 31 women were killed in the country.

According to the publication, the number of women homicide victims has increased fourfold in the last seven years.

A large-scale criminal gang that sexually exploited foreign woman and forged residence and work permits for them so that they could be employed at brothels was unraveled at the weekend.

The Greek Police (ELAS) Monday announced the arrest of 14 suspects who were allegedly involved in a prostitution racket that employed women in their early 20s and at least one high school senior.