‘Steel Roses’: Paris targets Belleville’s Chinese sex workers in pre-Olympics sweep

Every month, Aying* sends a part of her earnings to her family in China. Back home, everyone thinks this “60+” grandmother-of-one works in the checkout at a local supermarket.

The reality could not be further from the truth.

For the past decade, she has belonged to a small group of Chinese women who, for various reasons, have ended up selling their bodies on the streets of Belleville, a working-class neighbourhood located in the northeastern part of Paris.

Aying did not mean for things to turn out this way. When she first arrived in Paris in 2013, she had hoped to land a job in one of the city’s many restaurants or bars, perhaps in a boutique.

“I chose France because people said it was easy to make money here. I had this very romantic image of France, and for me, Paris represented luxury and fashion, Coco Chanel, Dior and all that,” she said with an ironic laugh as she reminisced about her former naivety. “But Paris is not at all that. It’s dirty, far from just bling-bling,” she said, describing through an interpreter a world as full of contrasts as the pretty Prada scarf around her neck and the chunky black combat boots on her feet.

Finding a job, it turned out, was a lot harder than Aying could have imagined. In just a few months, her money had run out and she found herself working on the streets of Belleville. Returning to China, which she had left for financial reasons and unspecified but seemingly painful “changes in the family”, was never an option.

Repressive methods

The Chinese sex workers in Belleville are well known to locals and tourists alike for their cutthroat rates and forward style of propositioning, approaching potential clients on the sidewalks or by traffic lights.

Historically, the women are said to have set up shop here because the Belleville intersection marks a crossroads between four of the city’s 20 arrondissements (districts). By operating around it, they made it harder for the different police districts to distinguish which was responsible for arresting them.

In 2016, France decriminalised public solicitation for prostitution, and instead transferred the punishment onto those buying sex. Aying said that although the law change scared many of her former clientele away, it did at least result in fewer police controls targeting her and the other prostitutes.

Until about a year ago.

Since then, Aying said the controls have become more and more frequent, and the closer the Paris Games approach, the worse they have been getting.

“They carry out checks all the time now. They even come in the evenings and in the nights. It’s become systematic on Tuesday nights, for example, and on Sunday nights too,” she said.

For her, there is only one reason: “They want to stop us from working.”

Other sex workers in the city have also complained about the increasingly oppressive police methods. In March, a collective of 17 associations and unions representing Parisian prostitutes issued a joint statement in which they condemned an “all-out repressive approach” ahead of the Olympics and warned it had “clear consequences for the health and safety of sex workers”.

But since police can no longer book them for selling sex, the prostitutes say officers have turned to another, more efficient way to drive them away: carrying out identity checks.

Murders and heart attacks

For the Chinese sex workers, the ID checks are devastating. Not only are the women undocumented, the vast majority are also older and experiencing health issues.

“These aren’t young women. Most of them are 45, 50 and 60 years old, sometimes more,” explained Ting, who works as the manager, coordinator, administrator, interpreter, accountant and much more for the association Les Roses d’Acier (“Steel Roses”). The association was set up in 2014 to help the Chinese sex workers understand their rights as undocumented migrants and to help them navigate France’s administrative system to be able to access fundamental services like healthcare.

To have access to doctors and medical treatment is essential for these women. The fact that they are older means that many are going through radical hormone changes linked to menopause and therefore suffering a host of health issues compared with their younger colleagues.

“There are a lot of cancers – uterus and breast cancers – and many strokes. And, as we all know, strokes are linked to stress,” Ting said, pointing to the women’s dangerous work environment.

“I get calls like: ‘I’ve just been raped and the guy has a knife, what do I do?’” she said, noting that aside from rape, they are also often subject to robberies and other types of attacks.

Because the women are undocumented, few of them dare to go to the police for fear of having their papers checked. If they are caught while in France illegally, they risk being sent back to China and losing eligibility to ever get a visa again.

One of the group’s members was sent back to China as recently as December.

Since Ting started working with the women 10 years ago, several of them have been murdered. “More than six or even eight, and that’s without counting all the natural deaths we’ve had. We’ve had quite a few who’ve died from heart attacks.”

Mothers and grandmothers

Ting, the only one in the collective who speaks fluent French, said that most of the “Steel Roses” (some 150 in Belleville, and roughly 600 in France) came to Europe in search of a better life after experiencing severe social and financial hardships in China.

“Perhaps they lost their job, escaped a partner who beat them, or found themselves isolated and without recourse after their husband passed away,” she said. “A lot of them are mothers or even grandmothers who are trying to improve their situations in some way while still fulfilling their [financial] responsibilities towards their families back home,” she explained.

The fact that they now appear to be targeted by police has sent a shockwave of fear through the community, she said. “We’re very worried. We’ve already noted a lot more police controls and arrests in the past few months, and it’s clear they’re targeting the Chinese sex workers [in Belleville]. It’s totally discriminatory – if there are three sex workers in the street and one of them is Chinese, they’ll go for the Chinese one. And it’s only going to get worse the closer to the Games we get.”

Ting said that Belleville, one of the few areas with overt prostitution activity still found within Paris city limits, may become so unworkable that many of the Chinese sex workers will either have to leave for other cities – to locations and clients they are unfamiliar with, and possibly far from necessary healthcare services – or not work at all.

“If they can’t work, that means they have to save up and make more money now. And that means taking more risks,” she warned, estimating that the women earn between €30 and €80 per client, depending on the service.

In an emailed response, the Paris Prefecture acknowledged it had stepped up its “fight against prostitution” ahead of the Olympics by activating its anti-pimping and anti-brothel brigades. But it did not make any mention of the prostitutes, despite the specific questions asked about them, or the type of controls it is carrying out in the Belleville area. It left the accusations voiced by the prostitutes unanswered.

The mayor’s office of the 20^th arrondissement, where Belleville is located, was unreachable for comment on the issue.

Easy targets

Aying, who now represents the “Steel Roses” as their president, said it was obvious that authorities are zooming in on the Chinese sex workers because they are particularly easy targets. “Most of us are undocumented, so they’re using the ID checks as a pretext to clean up the streets,” she said.

Although Aying no longer has to fret over the ID checks herself – she is one of just a handful of “Steel Roses” to have been granted legal status in France – it is already hard enough for an aged Chinese sex worker to find clients as it is.

“There are many days I have zero clients. Zero revenue.”

On those days, she said, it is even more important to keep a cool head and not take any unnecessary risks. “It means everything in trying to keep safe.”

But for her undocumented Belleville street sisters, she said, the pre-Olympics crackdown is making that difficult.

* Not her real name