She says her name is Rina, but it almost certainly is not.

Prostitutes work in the street

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.

The clubs are different. Club Paradiso is large, three floors high, with a huge bar - clean, smart, gaudy, brash.

Many prostitutes work in seedy clubs

Experienced women - working, professional prostitutes, who pay their taxes, pay the club for the use of its facilities, pay for their own weekly medical examinations.

The men stand at the bar, laughing and chatting with their friends, and the girls approach them, girls who speak several languages, girls from all over Europe and Asia. 

In Catalonia, in north-east Spain, the regional government is considering clamping down on these clubs and making life harder for the punters.

But in Madrid, the national government's response has been half-hearted despite evidence the sex trade in Spain is growing at an alarming rate, mainly powered by foreign gangs trading in 'sex slaves' - or girls forced into prostitution. 

British-born Terry Billings, 42, is a successful property salesman, and the Paradiso is where he brings clients who ask, or hint, that they’d like to try such an establishment.

“The place is fun, the girls are clean, and everybody has a good time. They charge €50 for 20 minutes, or a €120 for an hour.

"The rooms upstairs are clean, and you can have a shower afterwards.”

But what about the morality of it?

“Doesn’t really come into it,” says Terry, “It’s what some clients want, and nobody gets hurt, nobody’s ripped off, or robbed. They want Spanish culture? Well, that’s what this is – European culture!”

It’s a point of view. Leave morality out of it, and it’s just a business, like any other.

Beyond the cruelty, the depravity of the lowest end of the business, the virtual slavery of the roundabout girls, and it’s just another, lucrative business, supply and demand, market forces at work.

Josie Brennan is in her late forties, is still attractive, has a good figure and takes care of herself.

Josie comes from South London, where she worked as a self-employed prostitute for years, earning well in excess of GBP 100,000 a year, after tax.

Clubs like this appeal to foreigners seeking sex

“I came out here to visit friends, and saw the opportunity to make a career change. Well, sort of,” she says.

Josie reasoned that Britons like to deal with their own kind.

“If they’ll pay extra for British builders, well, I figured they pay for a British working girl. So I came out here for a season, rented a flat, put an ad in the paper, and made twice as much as I would have done in London.”

Josie is an entrepreneur. She bought a villa, contacted a few other working girls from Britain, and opened what is, essentially, a brothel.

Each girl pays Josie for the daily use of a room, and for shared resources, telephone answering and security.

“The girls work around three days a week, not in the evening. They make more than, say, a builder would make in a fortnight, and they’re their own bosses," says Josie.

"Most are saving up, two or three years of this and they’ll move on, with a good little nest-egg to buy a business.”

Supply and demand. The demand is plainly there, and the supply will always exist to meet it. Morality is an issue, but who defines it?  Perhaps  police officer Estaban Coll should have the last word.

“It’s how it’s done in Spain, and frankly, the police appreciate it. It keeps sexual crime low, it keeps the men happy, and the clubs and brothels never give us any trouble. It frees us up to try to get the roundabout girls on the right track. Morality? Not our problem.”

[Copyright Expatica]

[updated November 2005]

Subject: Spain, expat prostitution