By Lee Yaron and Or Kashti, Haaretz Newspaper, 06/03/2016

The first-ever government survey into prostitution in Israel found that annual payments to sex workers amounted to an estimated 1.2 billion shekels ($308.2 million) in 2014. The survey by the social affairs and public security ministries found there were between 11,420 and 12,730 prostitutes in Israel that year, 95 percent of them female. The data, published last week, showed that each sex worker had approximately 660 clients a year.

According to the study, as many as 1,260 minors were employed as prostitutes or at risk of prostitution in 2014. The Social Affairs Ministry’s current budget for combating prostitution is 22 million shekels, with about two-thirds of it earmarked for dealing with minors.

“The data is very difficult, and we cannot remain indifferent to such a phenomenon,” Social Affairs Minister Haim Katz said. He said the budget for treating prostitution among minors will rise this year.

Over 40 percent of the 1.2 billion shekels goes to prostitutes working out of “discreet apartments,” while the total income of sex workers walking the streets amounted to about 70 million shekels in 2014.

The study was eight years in the making. In 2007, the year before it was launched, an interministerial committee formulated a plan to deal with prostitution among women and girls. However, it soon became clear that no precise numbers were available to indicate the extent of the phenomenon or its characteristics. This situation had been known since the 1990s, when government committees determined that research was needed.

Publication of the study was delayed by both organizational and methodological problems, which led to criticism of the Social Affairs Ministry by experts in the field.
The survey, conducted among a sample of some 600 female sex workers, revealed economic hardship as the primary reason women said they were working as prostitutes.

Sixty-six percent of the women interviewed said they started working as prostitutes to pay off debts, while 10 percent said they had no other profession and no other way of supporting their children. More than 70 percent said that working as prostitutes had failed to solve their financial problems and therefore they could not stop.

“I had problems with my mortgage, the National Insurance Institute didn’t help. They wanted to take my house,” one woman told interviewers. Another said, “I worked as a waitress and at McDonald’s before this, but inflation started and all the prices went up. Everything was expensive – food, everything – so I needed more money.”

The women interviewed had an average of 12.2 years of schooling, while 20 percent had academic degrees. Of the other reasons women said they entered prostitution, 9 percent said they were led into it by another person; 7 percent cited substance abuse; and 5 percent said sexual abuse.

The survey distinguished between various types of prostitution: street- or apartment-based; prostitution offering massage or escort services; services such as exotic dancing; domination; and prostitution among transgender individuals. The survey showed that prostitution in dwellings was nine times more common than in the street.

The women in the survey said they took an average of 5.3 clients a day and that they normally worked 2.5 days a week. About a quarter of the women said they took more than seven clients a day. The survey revealed that most of the women interviewed were not temporary sex workers: 40 percent had been working between five and 15 years, and 12 percent had been prostitutes for more than 16 years.

The findings showed a large gap between the number of women who want to leave prostitution and those who believe they can – 76 percent versus 24 percent. In answer to the question “Do you see yourself in prostitution for many more years?” one woman responded, “I really hope not. The truth is I tried to go home, but the easy money brought me back here. This is not my dream, but the reality is different. There’s nothing to be done. I would like a normal life.”

The main center of prostitution in Israel is Tel Aviv and the center of the country – 62 percent of the “discreet apartments” and 48 percent of the massage parlors are in the Tel Aviv area. Only about 1 percent of such facilities are in Jerusalem.

The survey discovered there were approximately 670 adult sex websites in 2014, including erotic pictures of women and men offering to pay for sex. Advertising sex for a fee is becoming more common, and there are also apps for this purpose. These findings, according to the survey, show a change in the sex industry in Israel. In the past, it was an underworld phenomenon dominated by pimps, whereas sex on the Web is global and without boundaries – which must be dealt with internationally, the survey concluded.

The authors of the survey conceded that they had difficulty pinpointing an accurate number of minors working in prostitution. To arrive at a figure, the survey used numbers provided by social workers and by an at-risk youth assistance organization, Elem.

“My mother threw me out of the house. If I went to her, she’d call the police right away. I was 12 and I saw some guy drive by in a car; he stopped for me. He was 27 and he asked me why I was outside at that hour. He offered to take me to live with him in a village in exchange for me sleeping with him regularly,” one minor said.

Forty-five percent of the women interviewed said they started working as prostitutes between the ages of 25 and 39. Only 9 percent said they started when they were under 18. Most of the women – 62 percent – were mothers, and 9 percent were married.

Fifty-two percent of the women interviewed were natives of the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe; most had come to live in Israel during the wave of immigration in the 1990s.

In terms of male sex workers, some 68 percent provide sex exclusively to men, and 23 percent only to women. Nine percent provided sex to both men and women. Forty-one percent of the men said they were sex workers because they were attracted to the profession; 40 percent cited economic hardship as the reason.

Haaretz

Aug. 18, 2015

 Just three hours after a prostitute killed herself in the room at a central Tel Aviv brothel where she lived and worked, the business was back in operation, customers crowding the waiting room.

G. was 36 when she hanged herself. She immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union as child and began working in prostitution as a teenager. She was one of the first sex workers to be hired at the brothel, at 98 Hayarkon St.

“Every day she would rise with great difficulty, as close as possible to the 6 P.M. start of her shift,” said Sharon (a pseudonym), a sex worker who was friends with G. “She would start the shift with four glasses of vodka and Hagigat [a brand of synthetic marijuana], and she’d do 20 to 30 Johns, on average, until 6 A.M.”

Ella, also a sex worker, said that by living in the brothel, G. had become “a slave of the sex trade,” and that she had worked 12 hours day, six days week.”

One of the oldest and best known brothels in Tel Aviv, it employs eight to 12 women per 12-hour shift. Four or five years ago, police issued a closure order against the brothel, but after a legal battle it was revoked.

“The atmosphere has become difficult and violent,” Sharon said. “The operator no longer comes here, so the guard and his wife run it.”

G. was a sex worker for nearly 20 years, and gradually she became addicted to drugs.

“I saw her crying more than once. It was always hard for her to get up for her shift, “Ella said, adding, “She always wanted to sleep. She sent the message she had nothing to get up for.”

Once week, G. would take the day off to visit her sister, whom she supported financially, Sharon said.

“When G. returned from the visit last Wednesday, it was clear she was a bit depressed. She began the shift, but after four customers, she said she didn’t want any more that night. It’s unusual to leave a shift in the middle, especially because she had never done it before,” Sharon said.

On Thursday, when G. didn’t get up for her shift and didn’t respond to yelling and pounding on the door, the brothel managers ordered the door opened. G. had hung herself.

Sharon and Ella were outraged that the brothel was reopened so soon after G.’s death.

“It’s inhuman,” Sharon said. “A woman committed suicide, it’s a tragic, terrible event, the police come, and after three hours everything continues as usual, with complete disregard for the value of human life.”

The suicide has upset female sex workers in the city and advocacy organizations that fight prostitution. A demonstration has been scheduled for Saturday at 8 P.M. outside the brothel.

Naama Ze’evi Rivlin, the director of Sla’it, a program established by the city to help sex workers, said the incident had led to a sharp increase in calls to Sla’it’s hotline.

“Women are calling to say it has triggered depression and difficult memories,” Ze’evi Rivlin said.

Tali Koral, the CEO of another organization that works to raise awareness about and to combat prostitution, Machon Todaa, said many people think prostitutes working in brothels or discreet apartments are better protected than street sex workers. This view “has no basis in reality,” she said; such women suffer the same emotional and physical violence that other prostitutes do.

Forward

August 14, 2015

The Reform movement and Jewish refugee agency HIAS called on the Israeli government to re-examine its asylum policy for African migrants.

In a news release issued Friday, North America’s Union for Reform Judaism, its Israeli counterpart and HIAS, took issue with Israel’s “anti-infiltration law,” which allows the government to detain asylum-seekers for up to 20 months in a Negev facility. They also urged Israel to offer more services for African migrants.

The Israeli High Court of Justice ruled this week that provisions of that law are unconstitutional. The Knesset has six months to revise the law, which passed its final readings in December.

Under the measure, an amendment to an existing infiltration law, illegal migrants can be held in closed detention centers for three months and then kept at the Holot open detention center in the Negev for up to 20 months.

Noting that the groups are “longstanding friends of Israel and committed advocates for the well-being of the Jewish state,” URJ President Rabbi Rick Jacobs questioned why Israel approves a dramatically lower percentage of asylum applications from Eritreans and Sudanese, than do other developed countries.

“We are deeply concerned because Israel currently accepts less than 1 percent of refugee claims. In other developed countries, 82% of Eritrean applicants and 68% of Sudanese applicants are recognized as refugees,” Mark Hetfield, president and CEO of HIAS, said in the news release, adding that the groups nonetheless “recognize that, with over 5,500 asylum seekers per 1,000,000 population, Israel has had to deal with more asylum seekers than the vast majority of other democracies.”

“We urge the government to set an example by treating African migrants with dignity and respect. It is our hope that the Israeli government will allow them to contribute to the Israeli economy and society until their status is appropriately adjudicated, rather than forcing them to be housed in the desert at significant government expense or pressuring them to relocate to an unfamiliar and unsafe third countries which offers no durable solution to their plight,” Hetfield said.

The groups also called on the Israeli government to “strengthen the infrastructure of the South Tel-Aviv neighborhoods where Asylum seekers reside and to ensure proper resources are allocated to provide services both to Israeli citizens and to asylum seekers.”

Read more: http://forward.com/news/breaking-news/319184/israels-anti-infiltration-law-unconstitutional/#ixzz3iyrXFjNl

Israel Social TV
Mar 3, 2014

The sex industry in Israel generates nearly two billion shekels a year. Thousands of women find themselves trapped in the prostitution cycle due to sexual abuse in childhood, along with severe social and economic circumstances. The bill proposes to take legal actions against clients of prostitution services passed its preliminary reading in the Knesset, and social organizations are now trying to push for final passage. Implementation of the law is expected to cost a lot of money. There is concern that to pass the law, the rehabilitation track will be removed from the law. Therefore, these women engaging in prostitution for lack of choice will lose their source of income and also the possibility of rehabilitation.