here - Cooperazione Italiana allo Sviluppo

The reform foresees, under Art. 1, punishment with administrative pecuniary 102sanctions of the prostitute, who for the first time, violates the prohibition ofprostitution on the street, in the case of a repetition of this behaviour, the sanctionis transformed into a criminal punishment (arrest of from 5 to 15 days and a fine offrom 200 to 1,000 Euros). At the same time the client of prostitution on the street isalso punished: first with an administrative sanction then with a fine 103 .Article 2 eliminates the crime of reciprocal aiding and abetting amongprostitutes who help each other and collaborate in the activity, and decrees that therenting of private apartments, in which to exercise prostitution, does not constitutea crime; it is left to the inhabitants of the building and the instruments whichregulate relations under civil law the choice to forbid or limit prostitution in thebuilding.Already the first articles have produced doubts, perplexity and preoccupation inthose assigned to the work who express their fear that the law will end up hidingprostitution, making the persons who exercise this more “invisible”, less reachableby the social operators, thus increasing the victimisation and exploitation.The bill decrees the non punishability of those who, found prostitutingthemselves in the street, “result as being obliged to prostitute themselves throughviolence or threats”: it is easy to think that the criminality will adjust their ownorganisational means to the new regulative picture, with the risk of making theconditions of life worse for the women who would lose the possibility ofcontacting the operators today guaranteed on the street.Not by chance have some of the interviewed operators already imagined, if theproposal is approved, to help the women to start small business activities, perhapsunder a form of a co-operative to self-manage the activity in an apartment.And in any case it is difficult to imagine a closed up prostitution, exercisedfreely and which reduces the risks (for example health) for the users, simplyworking on the instrument of penal sanctions, without a series of regulations (forexample following the Dutch model or the attempts at zones of other places inEurope) which could affect the phenomenon and avoid or at least make lessdiffused the processes of victimisation and traffic of which so many young andvery young women are the protagonists.Improvement in the support action for the victimsThe forms of intervention foreseen under Article 18 at more than four yearssince their first experimentation, have given important results not only for supportprovided to the Nigerian victims, but also in the fight against the traffic. Accordingto the operators, in some local context - the area on the border between Marche andAbruzzo, the urban areas of Rome and Turin, for example - there seems to be somecorrelation between the start of Art. 18 projects and the reduction of Nigerianprostitution. It is however difficult to evaluate in what measure the overall102The sanction is from 200 to 3,000 Euros.103The administrative sanction is from 200 to 1,000 Euros; the fine from 2,000 to 4,000 Euros.