In the previous issue of the SWAN News we exchanged experiences and provided tips for opening low-threshold drop-in centers for sex workers. The topic raised significant interest among our readers who contacted both the SWAN News and our Macedonian partner who provided the tips. We decided to continue this topic by presenting one such center that recently opened in Murmansk, in the Russian Federation.
More: Girls from Sverdlov Street
August 29, 2007
– How come you are not so many today? Where are all the girls? – The Trust Center’s employee is asking while handing a plastic bucket to the visitors to put their used syringes in. 75 pieces.
– Ah, “the Vice Squad” took them to their station on Somov Street. I’ve just returned from there. All they do is taking fines! – says the girl. Chestnut hair, simple make-up, short skirt. Lenka looks like an ordinary student. She is actually a student, one year before thesis defense. – Can I have syringes, a bit more water, wipers and two packs of condoms? Oh, can I have the sweet flavored ones? While one employee puts this “lady’s professional kit” together, the other one fills in the data in the form: “22 years old, Hepatitis B and C, 4 years of drug use. Not married.”
A short chat at the end. About life.
– How’s your daughter?
– Everything is good; we are seven months old since yesterday! She is already refusing a dummy.
Heroine made the decision
… I am sitting in the outreach service bus Contact that belongs to regional center of AIDS prevention. After a short break the bus is running again on Sverdlov Street. Every Friday evening it is here providing outreach work with sex workers. Girls are invited to the center for a check up via the newest test. They are given exchange syringes, so that they are not discarded in the city or used repeatedly and this way transmitting infection from one person to another. They are also distributed disinfectants, so that the girls’ veins don’t get inflamed after drug consumption. And, of course, condoms to protect themselves and their clients.
– We don’t ask about their clients, – the specialists tell me while waiting for the next visitor. – Well, sometimes if they get very emotional they share their experience. Usually we talk about life: where they have been, what they bought, about the baby. We say compliments too: how good they look today, how the new haircut suits her.” They can’t talk about this with anybody, but any woman still wants to communicate. Unfortunately, for the society these girls – these social groups simply do not exist. But we are trying to make sure they understand that it is not true, that they still have a chance to start new life. We return at least by bits and pieces self confidence to these “outcasts”…
The conversation is stopped again: a gorgeous blond pops in.
– Great that you are here. I thought you completely abandoned us! I just need condoms and a wiper – the client is waiting. I will send Andrjuha to bring syringes in a minute! Andrjuha, as it was clarified to me, is her boyfriend. Both are in their thirties and have long history of heroin use. The girl has to earn for the drugs for herself and her “husband”. It’s about three thousand rubles per day. She is HIV positive.
“Hepatitis”, “drug dependency” – I hear this diagnosis with every visitor to the bus. It seems to be a standard: Some of them also HIV-infected. Out of 15 prostitutes who had visited the bus in my presence only one turned out to be “clean”. She looked like a village girl: no make-up, long hair tied into a ponytail, and young and naive face. As I found out it was exactly as I thought: she came to her aunt to Murmansk from a village, entered university, ran out of money, became a prostitute. Now she has come to get some condoms.
– I am not working on the street now. The baby is small and I can’t leave her alone. I work at home. This lady partially fitted my vision of a prostitute: a woman who chose this profession in search of easy money. Heroin made the decision for the rest of girls.
Is it so natural?
– I wish people could realize: those girls standing along the road – they are our children, – says Natalia Yegorova, vice-head of low-threshold center Doverie (Trust), which was recently opened for sex workers in Murmansk.
– They are the children we lost in perestroika time, when there were no caring parents at their side, who could protect them from troubles. They deserve sympathy, not loathing. None of them would have chosen such way of living as their own choice – each of them was in some way dragged into it. Drug dependency is a life-long illness. Women don’t have other chances to earn money for their daily dose. Thus it is difficult for them to break this vicious circle.
We are talking while sitting on a comfortable sofa in a cozy room. It is a “warm guestroom” where street girls can come to get counseling from a gynecologist, get tested, and, what is more important, have a simple chat. Two specialists work with sex workers in this center are the only support provided by society.
Actually in addition to them there are three employees in the “department of social moral violation”, a part of regional Department of Internal Affairs. But prostitutes complain about them: they take girls to their station and humiliate and insult them.
The head of th ‘moral violation” division, a high-ranking police officer Andrey Milchenko, acted paternalistically when he was asked by news reporters at a press conference. He said his staff are “trying to find a decent job for them and to protect them from abusive clients”.
– It is difficult to prove that the act of buying sex service has taken place at the moment of detention – says Milchenko.
– Usually client would claim that this is his girlfriend and that they are doing it out of love. In addition to that, he would often verbally offend police officers. Then we would take the couple to the police station and show the client a file about “his beloved”…
Since the beginning of the year there have been 120 administrative offences charged against the article on “practicing prostitution”. Sex workers pay fines from 1500 to 2500 rubles and are let back to the street.
I should point out that the press conference surprised me with its a bit frivolous character. There were even jokes: “In what cities there are twice as much men than women, but nevertheless everybody gets enough? In port cities!” So prostitution is a natural thing, it existed, is exists and will exist.
– It is a social phenomenon, – pointed out the head of regional police. – Our task is not to let this business slip into the hands of organized crime gangs, who will swallow this trade completely. As they say, everybody is concerned only with one’s own problems.
When it rains…
Street workers in Murmansk are the most vulnerable and most unscrupulous. A street worker never knows how she will spend her working night: Would her client take her whole night earnings? Would he infect her or would she do it by allowing unprotected sex… But all this is not really relevant. The main thing is the dose, which you need to find money for. Die, but find it. The life of a drug addict, as specialists say, is flowing in a parallel dimension. Most of them don’t have passports, no permanent shelter, nor even basic knowledge on hygiene and sexually transmitted diseases…
– When it rains you can keep on talking about it, but it won’t stop the rain, – the main doctor of regional AIDS/HIV center, Ilja Osherov, comments the street prostitution issue.
– It makes more sense to open your umbrella and keep on walking and stay dry. This is the principle of the low-threshold in Murmansk. Our task is to reduce the harm on the society. This means we have to examine commercial sex workers and provide them with prevention tools, so that the disease does not spread further. We are not aiming for too much, but we are completing concrete tasks. That is why we have results.
This is also confirmed by the fact that the specialists of regional AIDS center have been invited to an international conference, which will take place in Helsinki in September. They will share their experiences as in most of the regions in Russia such practices do not exist. Usually, projects similar to this (e.g. low-threshold centers) are funded by foreign aid, but in the Murmansk region the financial support is provided by regional administration.
– Our center is the only state institution, which deals with HIV infections – underlines Oshev. – We address all social organization working on this issue, appealing on them to unite under our support. Today they are working separately, but together we will be capable to achieve a bigger effect.
Cinderella Story
An example of such partnership already exists: the furniture for the “warm guestroom” was provided by specialists from the charitable foundation New Start, that works with children victims of violence. The stories told by the employees of this organization rise a wave of indignation. Each small patient here is accompanied by a group of specialists – as in the model of the Norwegian organization Save the Children, financial supporter of this project. But unfortunately there is no certainty in the sustainability of their support. Too deep is the swamp where the child had been dumped. No comments about permanent clients who are street prostitutes!
Nevertheless, Natalia Yegorova shares a happy-end story. Yes, it’s only one such story, and it’s wonderful, and real.
– A girl in her twenties dropped by our outreach bus. Everything as usual: 16 years of drug use, a collection of STIs. But she came over… with her own poems, printed on sheets of paper and decorated with flowers. They were about life, love, and about drugs. We read them through, took them to Writers’ Union, they selected best of them and with the help from a Swedish donor they a book. This seemed to be the impulse for this girl to start a new life. She went to a rehab center and got off the needle. She then wrote a new collection of poems, mostly about God. Then she started writing essays for our magazine Territory of Life. She turned out to be very talented. Now she is married and has given birth to a child. She is happy. Of course her family played an important role. They tried very hard to help her. It is really great that this process of rebirth started with our outreach bus. This means we can help girls start valuing their own lives again.
Zhanna SOKOLOVA
Source: Murmanskii Vestnik, Russian Federation