A new market is developing in Switzerland among the clientele for call-girls, escorts, and prostitutes (the difference resides largely in the pricing), creating a whole new type of employment in Switzerland in the murkey world of the sex industry.

An increasing number of young women 20-30 years old are working occasionally – once or twice a week—as prostitutes to pay their debts or to afford luxuries that are normally beyond their reach. These women often work during the week at low paying jobs.

Their freshness, naivete, and amateurism is highly prized by a clientele largely composed of
doctors, lawyers, judges, portfolio managers and the like. These clients usually don’t want to deal with a professional. Often they think about finding a soulmate in which to confide and are not thinking only about sex.

In Geneva, agencies are opening to act as intermediary between the clients and the girls. One such agency, Essential Escort Service –which was opened by a single mother with a checkered past as a prostitute—is flourishing after only 8 months of operation. The agency proposes only non-professional women, referred to as ‘occasionals’ because they prostitute themselves now and then to make ends meet. “I knew there was a niche for this kind of service,” remarked Linda, the manager of the agency. “And I wasn’t mistaken because business is booming. It’s a social phenomenon.” Linda, an attractive woman in her thirties, worked for several years in the sex business, attracted by the easy money and the desire to move in the circles of high society and luxury.

It is precisely the attraction to the rarefied world of luxury and wealth that attracts working girls to enter the oldest trade in the world. They may be secretaries, the assistants of a portfolio manager or an accountant, a journalism student or a travel agent – they all share the characteristic that their salaries cannot offer them the lifestyle to which they aspire.

According to Essential Escort Service, the milieu is flourishing and one can see the enormous quantity of ads in the press and on the internet. With the integration of Switzerland into the European labor market, the competition has become rude. In Geneva, the Brigade des Moeurs (the part of the Police that oversees prostitution, which is legal in Switzerland) notes the presence of roughly 2000 registered prostitutes. Most women working as prostitutes or escorts obviously don’t bother to register. The Agency claims that there are even single mothers on unemployment that take assignments.

The profile of the occasional prostitute is an attractive woman in her 20’s, thin, well-groomed, feminine, and with a good education. “In a few words,” resumes an agency manager, “they look good.”

Since the business involves amateurs, there is part of the agency’s work that involves screening customers to insure that the romantic meeting goes off well and there are no bad experiences. The escort agencies for these occasional courtisans screen the potential clients for courteous men of a certain standing and lifestyle –also checking out their addresses and telephone numbers. “The objective,” says Essential Escort Service, is to avoid a bad experience.

The part-time prostitutes usually want to remain anonymous and customer base of well-off men in high finance, law or business are themselves looking for discretion.

The girls earn about $400 /hour to $1200 /night versus the professionals who earn almost double that. The agencies take on average a 30% cut.

Since the bilateral accords in 2004 allowing free flow of workers between Switzerland and The EU, Switzerland has seen the number of prostitutes explode. A spokesman for the Geneva Police reports, “in just 2 years, the number of registered prostitutes working in Geneva has gone from 800 to 1500.” In Switzerland prostitution is legal and prostitutes who work in Switzerland are required to “register” with the Brigade des Moeurs, report their income, and pay taxes on it. While obviously many do not register and work clandestinely, the fluctuation of registered prostitutes is a solid indicator of the percentage increase. Prostitutes working clandestinely are often harassed by those working legally since they tend to bring the prices down with discounted services.

There was a time, just a few years back, when the Salon de L’Auto brought a huge rise in business to local prostitution, as did many other large conventions. But with use of the internet now thoroughly generalized, clients more often then not connect with girls through the web. Easily and discretely.

Many students consider prostitution to be a means to make easy money. According to informal surveys, prostitutes make between CHF 15,000 – 20,000 / month. Given the prospect of such easy money or taking a long-hours job at the McDonalds, for many girls the choice is simple. The Profession is seducing a larger and larger number of young girls, and increasingly minors. Social workers are finding that more and more often girls are turning to prostitution simply to be able to buy luxury items, like Gucci bags or expensive watches. Or in some cases, students

resort to prostitution in order to pay their educational and living expenses. “Without a scholarship, if you don’t want to go into debt with a loan, it can be awfully tempting…” says Michele, a student at the University of Geneva. Michele’s friend Sophie adds, “Thanks to prostitution, I managed to clean up my finances in 6 months instead of more like 6 years.”

Neither girl was willing to go into detail about their activities and behind the financial attractiveness of this trade is a dark and often dangerous universe from which it can be difficult to extract oneself once inside. Recently in Geneva a student prostitute was murdered in her apartment by a client.

Both Sophie and Michele are counting on putting enough money aside to get of the ‘business’ rapidly. “I don’t want to sound materialistic” says Sophie, “but I really can’t imagine working as some boutique salesgirl making 3000 francs a month.”

Police in Bern and Schwyz have arrested over 200 persons over the past few days in connection with human trafficking and organized prostition rings. The current operation has uncovered dozens of women of Romanian origin working in Switzerland as prostitutes in the canton of Schwyz and is the result of a close collaboration between the Romanian and Swiss authorities.

Women from eastern european countries who are attracted by the prospect of finding work in switzerland are often tricked by criminal organizations who propose bogus swiss job opportunities and convince them to move to switzerland illegally via their smuggling networks. The women are subsequently brutalized, live in Switzerland as virtual slaves in sequestration without valid working or residency papers.

In Switzerland, while pimping (and inciting to prostitution) is illegal, prostitution itself is perfectly legal and many women (and men) work independently as prostitutes, free of the criminal constraint found in most other countries.

In Schwyz, the main arrests occurred at the Bolenberg Bar in the village of Tuggen, where a dozen girls were being kept in slavery.

The investigation and subsequent arrests have been difficult as the pimps and ringleaders –mainly Turks and Romanians– were for the most part not present at the quarters where the women were sequestered.

At the Hotel Schloss in Nidau / Berne 17 prostitutes were arrested as part of the trafficking investigation.

The trafficking of women has become a planetary phenomenon and non-governmental organizations treating the problem estimate roughly 20,000 victims coming principally from Albania, Bulgaria, and Kosovo. Figures, however, are very difficult to check and the notion of constraint has many different degrees. Most of the women working in Switzerland as forced prostitutes arrived with false promises of marriage or regular work.

Swiss authorities estimate that there are several thousand victims of sexual exploitation in the country with a large proportion coming from Romania. Swiss law punishes human trafficking with up to 20 years imprisonment.