Greek Women Offering Sex For Sandwich

Reports from Greece indicate that young women are selling sex for the price of a sandwich due to the economic crisis the country has faced in the last six years.

According to a new study sex workers operating in Greece, found that
Greek women now dominate the country’s prostitution industry, replacing Eastern European women, and that the sex on sale in Greece is some of the cheapest on offer in Europe.

The study compiled data on more than 17,000.

“Some women just do it for a cheese pie, or a sandwich they need to eat because they are hungry,” Gregory Laxos, a sociology professor at the Panteion University in Athens, told the London Times newspaper. “Others (do it) to pay taxes, bills, for urgent expenses or a quick (drug) fix,” said Laxos, who conducted the three-year study.

When the economic crisis began in Greece, the going rate for sex with a prostitute was 50 Euros ($53), the London newspaper quoted Laxos as saying. Now, it’s fallen to as low as two Euros ($2.12) for a 30-minute session.

Laxos said the some 400 such desperate cases he found may be “nominal compared with the thousands of other sex workers operating nationwide, but they never existed as a trend until the financial crisis,” he was quoted as saying. He said Greek women now dominate 80 percent of the prostitution trade in Greece.

He said his wide-ranging study showed that the number of desperate young women — the ones offering the cheapest sex — appeared to be on the rise. “It doesn’t look like these numbers will fade,” he told the Times newspaper. “Rather thay are growing at a steady and consistent pace.”

The price of sex is falling globally, as the Internet provides more and more sexual content online. The 180-Euro ($191) average price of a one-hour encounter in Europe has dropped dramatically, the paper reported.

Prostitution is legal in Greece, but very few of the country’s brothels are licensed, the paper reported, pushing many of the estimated 18,500 prostitutes operating in Greece onto the streets.

“Factor in the growing number of girls who drift in and out of the trade, depending on their needs, and the total number of female prostitutes is startling,” Laxos was quoted as saying.