In times of austerity, the value of human life seems to plummet. Suddenly, people find themselves dodging rubber bullets , taking devastating drugs and setting themselves on fire , while their governments look on, wondering how to salvage the situation. Greece in particular has proved to be an exemplary case study in how no money leads to more problems, and its latest problem is sex trafficking. Although prostitution in Greece is legal, in recent years the number of legally registered sex workers has been dwarfed by the multitude of unregistered foreign women who are rumoured to have sex for as little as five euros.
Most of these girls are said to be trafficked from abroad and despite the country's efforts to get on top of things, it's a sore that continues to fester. Aspects of the project range from the setting up of a safe house in conjunction with the Greek Salvation Army, to organising a photography workshop for prostitutes and women who'd been trafficked. The project's genesis was in , when Myrto noticed, "an explosion of porn films in Athens starring D-list celebrities.
I wanted to know how so many copies of porn films managed to be sold while Greece was in chaos. Myrto only took pictures once she'd formed a relationship with the women she met on Athens' streets. The personal connection she's built up has allowed her to hear stories of girls getting their faces slashed by pimps and being locked in cars.
There was one about a girl who was locked in an apartment and repeatedly raped by her captors. When they left the door unlocked and she escaped, running through the building naked and screaming for help, nobody came to her aid. Theodora Gianni, a social worker with Greece's National Centre for Social Solidarity , works with these women after they leave the sex trade — which usually happens when they're caught up in a police bust, or are rejected by their traffickers for being too sick or too pregnant.
The centre provides shelter and psychosocial support for victims who want it. They realise the emptiness of any hopes or expectations that they would make money for the families they'd left behind. According to Gianni, most of the women are trafficked into the country through false job adverts and are either emotionally manipulated or physically threatened into the sex trade. There's also the "lover boy" technique, which means that the trafficker starts a relationship with a girl before smuggling her into the country, sometimes even marrying her and having children with her as a means of submission and dominance.
