Spain’s sex workers left to fend for themselves

MADRID: With the coronavirus pandemic emptying the streets of Madrid, life has become even more precarious for sex workers Evelyn, Alenca and Beyonce under the lockdown.

Already extremely vulnerable and with an ambiguous legal status, many of Spain’s sex workers have struggled to make ends meet during the state of emergency, with clubs closed, clients staying home and fines for staying in the street. “The club owners in Spain, those who could, just threw all the girls into the streets,” Evelyn Rochel, the only one who agreed to give her real name, remarks bitterly.

The 35-year-old Colombian lives in a room inside a Madrid hostess club and pays 2,100 euros ($2,300) per month for “the right to work” as a prostitute.

“The management says we pay these 2,100 euros for the room, they say it’s rent, but that’s a lie, I’m paying for the right to work,” she says.

There were 15 women at the club, most from Latin America, but almost all have left, according to Rochel. She says she was allowed to stay but made to feel as if it was “a humanitarian gesture, and not the right of an employee”.

Despite her situation, Rochel is a hardened activist who last year forced the courts to acknowledge there is an employment relationship between a woman working as a hostess and the owners of the club, in a case involving one of Madrid’s best-known brothels.

S he ’ s a l s o a member o f OTRAS, the unofficial union of Spanish sex workers set up in 2018 in a country where prostitution is neither legal nor illegal, but is not recognised as employment.

The crisis has exposed what she says is a “shocking” paradox.

“It can’t be that the big club owners, as businessmen, can legally furlough the waitresses, the cleaners and everyone else with a contract but throw the prostitutes onto the street, those who can’t get help because they’re not recognised as employees,” she said. “That is just not right, we can’t carry on like this.”

Alenca arrived in Madrid in October after fleeing violence against transgender people in her native Mexico.

When she couldn’t pay her rent in April, the estate agency threatened to throw her out but she received legal help from OTRAS which also provides food packages. Just before the epidemic took hold, she started receiving clients at home for “erotic massage” but has since stopped, shifting her business online.