Prostitution and Human Trafficking: Focus on Clients

Andrea Cauduro, Andrea Di Nicola, Marco Lombardi, and Paolo Ruspini Client: Have you ever had a […] by an Albanian? Researcher: No… Client: You should have one, they’re great! “I’ll tell you something: between an exploited girl and a ‘free’ one, I choose the exploited one. Because a girl who’s being exploited has to give money to her pimp, otherwise she’ll be beaten. The others, when they’ve earned enough they stop working. The exploited ones no: even they don’t want to work, they have to stay there and if they don’t pay the pimp they’re beaten […] If you think about it, you notice it is more a help than anything else. We all know they’re exploited, so it’s better to go with them, otherwise they’ll be slaughtered!” These two tough excerpts from interviews with clients of foreign prostitution stress the core point of this work: There seems to be a different view, a different logic that moves these men in their search for commercial sex. This is the focus of the discussion and the main reason for this volume. We have attempted to study the phenomenon of trafficking from a different and innovative perspective: the demand. Trafficking in human beings for sexual exploitation (and not only) has involved all the European Union and more in general Western European countries in the past twenty years.