Sat, 21 November 2009
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It is a seedier side of Spanish life which everyone knows about. We investigate how expats are involved in the vice trade.She says her name is Rina, but it almost certainly is not.
Prostitutes work in the street
Asked where she comes from, she says the East, but refuses to say any more. 
She isn’t there to talk. She is pretty, perhaps late teens or early twenties, dyed hair, an outfit ludicrously skimpy for early January; she must be freezing cold. Her eyes are old, the pupils slightly dilated. She gets irritable at questions.
Rina is a Roundabout Girl, one of the prostitutes that stand around certain roundabouts along the Orihuela Costa, in south-east Spain, selling themselves for less than EUR 50, for a brief and sordid encounter in a car at the back of a building site.
Rina will probably not talk because her pimp may be watching. Forget the ‘Huggy Bear’ type of amiable pimp depicted in the movies; these men will cut the girls, maim them, even kill them if they step out of line.
“These are the saddest of them all,” says Manuel Esteban Coll, who has been with the local police for nine years, and knows many of the ‘girls’ by name.
“They come here from the East, from Romania or Russia, thinking they’ll be trained as nannies or suchlike.
"Once they’re here, their passports are taken, they’re introduced to drugs, sometimes forcibly, and then they’re put out to work on the roundabouts.
"They can make their pimps four or five hundred euros apiece, on a good night. They get nothing.”
Prostitution is legal in Spain. The Spanish themselves have open minds on the subject and see no real social stigma in going with a prostitute.
It damages a marriage far less than an affair, so they reason.
But the roundabout girls are still the lowest of the low, attracting only passing trade, lured by the flash of a thigh.
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