Snap Photos by Myrto Papadopoulos As if Greece didn't have enough problems in the aftermath of the devastating economic collapse, with its horrific street drug epidemic , immigrants who are being stabbed to death on the streets , and police who are beating anarchists , it's now facing a wave of sex trafficking. Although prostitution in Greece is legal, in recent years the number of legally registered sex workers has been dwarfed by a multitude of unregistered foreign women who are rumored to have sex for as little as five euros.
Most of these girls are said to be trafficked from abroad, and despite the country's efforts to get on top of things, it's a sore that continues to fester. Myrto began the project in in , when she noticed "an explosion of porn films in Athens starring D-list celebrities.
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I wanted to know how so many copies of porn films managed to be sold while Greece was in chaos. Now she is setting up a safe house in conjunction with the Greek Salvation Army as well as organizing a photography workshop for prostitutes and women who'd been victims of trafficking.
Myrto only takes photos of the women she meets on Athens's streets after she has formed relationships with them. She's hear stories of girls getting their faces slashed by pimps and being locked in carsβone particularly nasty one was about a girl who was locked in an apartment and repeatedly raped by her captors. When they left the door unlocked and she escaped, running through the building naked and screaming for help, nobody came to her aid.
Theodora Gianni, a social worker with Greece's National Center for Social Solidarity , a government agency that provides social services, works with these women after they leave the sex tradeβwhich usually happens when they're caught up in a police bust or are rejected by their traffickers for being too sick or too pregnant. The center offers shelter and support for victims who want it. They realize the emptiness of any hopes or expectations that they would make money for the families they'd left behind.
