Athens, Greece β Mahmoud looks out over the chaotic mess of rooftops and aerials and towards the neglected park he now calls home. Everything suggests he is a typical year-old, apart perhaps from the jagged scar on his brow. The Afghan asylum seeker clasps his hands tightly in front of him as he speaks. His only shelter is a cheap tent that he shares with an Iranian asylum seeker. Perched on the concrete roof of a small maintenance building hidden among the trees of Pedion Areos Park, it offers little protection from the cold.
A bag of oranges provides breakfast, lunch and dinner. Mahmoud says the money he makes selling sex only covers the cost of his daily food. He cannot afford to save anything. Pedion Areos Park has become a hub of illegal male prostitution, sometimes involving refugees as young as Greece has strict laws regulating prostitution.
Sex workers must register, be aged over 18, legal residents in Greece and work in a licensed brothel. Despite this, illegal street prostitutes, who are often migrants and refugees, are estimated to outnumber licensed prostitutes by 20 to one. Licensed sex workers have fortnightly sexual health checks and access to free treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. Unlicensed street sex workers, like Mahmoud, do not. The park, although grand and sprawling, has, like its inhabitants, been largely ignored.
The large statue of King Constantine I that stands at its entrance has been covered with graffiti. Used condoms and tissues litter the ground. Those familiar with the park say that the majority of the sex workers there are Albanian, Bulgarian and Romanian. Neno, a Bulgarian Roma, arrived in Athens eight years ago and has been a sex worker in the park ever since.
He lives in a small town to the southeast of Athens which is popular with tourists, and takes the bus into the capital each weekday. The bus stops directly outside the park. For Neno, being a sex worker is a job like any other. They spend their mornings waiting and warming themselves by fires started in steel cans, into which they put anything that will burn, often producing a choking smoke. Business begins in the late afternoon as the winter sun starts to set and the few dog-walkers and runners leave the park.
