prostitution12

After a deputy of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly was escorted from his office in
handcuffs and several days later was accused of the attempted rape of a 16-year-old boy,
the city newspapers were filled with items about (the alleged) "lechers in the Mariinsky
Palace" [the Mariinsky Palace is home to the legislative assembly], their authors savoring
the details of the unsuccessful rape attempt. While in the city’s newspaper printing complex
editions with unproved accusations and the names of victims were coming off the presses,
12-year-old children, as before, were jumping into shiny foreign cars at the Moscow Station,
to emerge half an hour later with bundles of bank notes, and the city’s procuring agencies
continued to supply girls and boys to their proven clientele and, as before, video cassettes
with child pornography were being sold in the city’s marketplaces. On St. Petersburg’s
streets, 11-year-old boys sell their younger sisters to groups of drunken men for a handful
of candy; their peers are engaged in oral sex for two tubes of Moment glue. Child
prostitution is flourishing in St. Petersburg: no one catches non-deputy lechers. Loitering
on the streets in search of diversion, hundreds of children become the victims of perverts.
According to the estimates of social workers, nearly 500 children, aged primarily 12 to 15,
live permanently on the streets, spending the nights in basements and attics. Another
5,000 minors hang around on the streets during the day, leaving to spend the night not at
home, but with relatives and acquaintances, or at one of the few emergency shelters. In
places where children congregate (train stations, near downtown hotels, and around kiosks
near outlying subway stations) people approach them with the most varied propositions.
Child prostitution is well organized: those who become pimps are, as a rule, minors
themselves. They get half of each prostitute’s earnings. Prices for the services of minors
fluctuate from 5,000 to 50,000 rubles for oral sex; "normal" sexual intercourse costs from
30,000 to 200,000 rubles. [One dollar is worth approximately 6,000 rubles.] The
adolescents spend their earnings on marijuana, alcohol, and pills; their main form of
entertainment are slot machines and video parlors. In the historical center of the city,
children are admitted into porno film showings for free—the children and the parlor guards
enjoy the show together. Underage prostitutes of both sexes toil not only on the streets, but
in any of the city’s 250 procuring agencies as well. It’s impossible to order them up by
telephone: boys and girls are delivered only to tried and true clients—the article of the
criminal code that deals with inducing minors into prostitution is even more severe than the
article which punishes pimping. At night, the city’s bathhouses and saunas function as
sexual entertainment establishments. The unsuccessful attempt by the deputy to rape the
adolescent boy is being investigated by the Regional Commission for Combating Organized
Crime, which usually is occupied with cases of extortion, kidnapping, and racketeering.
Combating the other manifestations of prostitution in this city of five million is entrusted to a
group of some eight police officers referred to by the populace and in the newspapers as
the "vice squad." "What do a naked ass and fascism have in common?" ask these highly
moral police officers. The answer: "Nothing!" It turns out that apart from the battle with
prostitution and pornography, they are also entrusted with the struggle against fascism, the
illegal sale of Soviet decorations and medals, and violations of copyright. The prostitute
procurement agencies rake in multimillion ruble profits—the officers of the vice squad earn
less than a million rubles per month. One of the officers sold his car and bought himself a
mobile telephone so that he could call for backup in dangerous situations. According to
police estimates, the illegal turnover from the sale of sexual services in the northern capital
amounts to 12 to 18 billion rubles per year. The agencies pay out two-thirds of their income
in protection money to criminal "covers." For its part, the state, complaining about holes in
the budget, doesn’t receive even a kopeck from the sale of unlicensed videocassettes and
is in no rush to finance the work of the vice squad officers. Since there is no money for a
cleaning lady, they are obliged to clean the toilets themselves after each night’s detainment
of prostitutes. Social organizations in St. Petersburg are trying to make life easier for
children who live on the street. Together with Western charitable organizations, they have
opened up places in the city where children can go for help. The latest of these centers
was opened in early November 1996 by the organization Perspektivy, in cooperation with
the Berlin organization Perspektiven and Hamburg’s Diakonisches Werk. Social workers
themselves are pessimistic about the chances for preventing child prostitution. "The ones
who are already involved in prostitution aren’t going to give it up. The only thing we can do
is to distribute clothing and offer food to the children so that they don’t have to sell
themselves in order to earn a living," says one social worker.