Volunteers in the Czech Republic visit brothels with kind words and helpful advice to sex workers looking for a way out.
On a biting-cold February evening, I met Yael Schoultz and a group of three volunteers in Prague’s Zizkov district. As a part of our first practical, anti-trafficking training, our instructor showed us around some of the city’s popular brothels. Yael, dressed in latex knee-high boots and gothic attire, led us to the first destination. We were greeted by lurid posters promising endless pleasure, and a QR code emblazoned on a wall invited passersby to peruse the menu of services on offer.
As we trudged through the bitter cold, we couldn’t help but notice the dissonance between the neon-lit sex club and an elementary school located just down the street. Schoultz, who has been assisting women in prostitution and victims of trafficking for more than a decade, explained that this is not at all surprising in Prague – popular brothels, or “night clubs,” are often located in plain sight. The capital’s“red light” street just off the crowded central Wenceslas Square is ironically also home to a police station.
Despite the visibility of sex clubs in Prague’s city center, many people in the Czech Republic remain oblivious to the stark reality of sex trafficking. Schoultz explained that there is a common misconception that the women working in Czech brothels are doing so of their own volition. “It is not the case. But when you come to a brothel as a customer, it is impossible to tell who is trafficked and who is not,” she says.
Originally from South Africa, Schoultz was working as a journalist in South Korea when she first read about North Korean women being trafficked to China. Later, she was trained in anti-trafficking work as part of a Doctor of Ministry degree program. She came to the Czech Republic in 2011, where she taught English and soon joined local Czech volunteers – a group of Catholic nuns who visited brothels and gave out contraceptives. But a year later she decided to found her own group, calling it L’Chaim, a Hebrew expression meaning “to life.”
Inside L’Chaim
When I first heard about the L’Chaim initiative, I was intrigued. Living in the Czech Republic for five years, I had hardly heard the problem of human trafficking brought up in the mainstream discourse. After interviewing Schoultz and learning about the scale of human trafficking in the country, I decided to join the anti-trafficking training program and study the approach firsthand.
For more than a decade, a committed group of volunteers has been visiting women working in prostitution in Prague and Brno, forging friendships and establishing connections. Though the frequency of visits has varied over the years, volunteers typically visit the brothels once or twice a month. Occasionally, they have sought to gain entry to new venues, but in the majority of the most visible clubs in Prague, L’Chaim volunteers have been regular visitors.
In 2022, this grassroots initiative transformed into a civil society organization, still called L’Chaim, with a team of 10, still all volunteers, both long-standing and recent. All are women, with the exception of a man who helps with organizational matters.
Maria Antsiferova, who is originally from Russia, joined the group in 2019. Although Antsiferova has since left Prague, she now leads online training sessions for L’Chaim. Like Schoultz, she is a teacher by profession. Other volunteers come from all kinds of professional backgrounds, ages, and parts of the world, and for a variety of reasons, Schoultz explains during a training session.
“Many people join our work because of their past trauma and abuse. It pains them to know that there are still others suffering from injustice, so they want to help,” she says. “But if they have not yet moved and properly processed their own trauma, being in a certain environment and hearing certain stories can trigger their own mental issues.”
One of the volunteers – an Australian expat, who requested anonymity – said that after she had been on the inside of the industry, working as a masseuse many years back, she saw the brutal reality which some of the women had to face. Now she wants to become a voice for these women in the Czech Republic as she believes they have no representation.
Prior to actually heading to the brothels and clubs, volunteers learn what constitutes sex trafficking, how to recognize it, and how to communicate with potential victims. Once a volunteer attends at least five online sessions, they can start the practical training if the instructor believes they are ready.
For the volunteers, the most challenging part of the brothel visits is building a relationship with the sex workers. “To get in, we tell the manager that we are an NGO and that we want to give out some presents and chat with the women. We don’t always get in, but most of the big clubs in Prague do let us in because for them it is a bad image not to let social workers in,” Schoultz says.
Volunteers typically bring items to distribute, such as handmade soaps, contraceptives, and cards featuring information on partner organizations like Rozkos bez rizika (Pleasure without risk), which seeks to minimize social and health risks for sex workers, and the Czech affiliate of La Strada, an organization that assists human trafficking victims. Unlike La Strada, which primarily provides crisis aid, shelter accommodations, and professional counseling to trafficking victims, L’Chaim acts as a liaison between “victims” and “rescuers.” During visits, volunteers aim to raise awareness, educate women on their rights, help some recognize that they may be trafficking victims, and direct them to appropriate resources.
“The only way for sex workers to come forward with their stories or seek help is if they trust us,” Schoultz says. “And building trust takes time.” During training sessions, Schoultz advises volunteers to establish friendly relationships gradually before asking more in-depth questions. Consistency is also essential, Schoultz says, ideally visiting once a month to help women feel more comfortable opening up.
Schoultz cautions that there is no single method that will work in all cases, as it depends on each individual and the social dynamics at play. “Most of the women who work in the brothels are very good at reading people – it is part of their job,” she explains. “So to succeed at bonding with them, you simply need to be a good, sincere person.”
Initially, Antsiferova had questions about the anti-trafficking program. “Even though I was interested in the topic, I had some doubts about the usefulness of this particular type of social work before I started visiting brothels and working with the women directly,” she says. “The issue seemed so big, and the impact of one small team seemed so little to me.”
But the volunteer’s attitude changed after she began receiving feedback. “All my doubts vanished. Seeing the women feel better in such a rough environment, hearing their stories, supporting them or helping practically, hearing them say ‘thank you,’ I realized how much initiatives of this kind are needed and how greatly they can make other people’s lives better.”
Volunteers admit that while this work is very rewarding, it is often emotionally difficult.
For Antsiferova, the most challenging part was the moment of realization that slavery is not a thing of the past. “It wasn’t that unexpected for me – it just hits you differently in real life. Also, meeting girls of a younger age and finding out what they’ve been through was emotionally tough.”
The consistent work of the L’Chaim volunteers yields results. “Probably one time a year we influence a trafficked woman to escape,” Schoultz says. “Right before the pandemic, a woman from Brno ran away after we talked with her and provided all the contacts of organizations that could help. At the time we spoke to her, she seemed very scared,” the L’Chaim director says. It is quite common for a brothel to have both trafficked and non-trafficked women under the same roof, she adds.
Sex Workers and Victims in a Legal Vacuum
While organizations like L’Chaim are making strides in helping trafficking victims, the systemic issue of human trafficking and sex work remains largely unaddressed in the Czech Republic. Lawyer Charlie Lamento notes that the country is not alone in this. “We are losing this battle. To see this, all you have to do is look at the worldwide rate of trafficking and the rate of prosecution. It is one or two percent – a joke,” says Lamento, who worked on trafficking cases as a U.S. prosecutor, and now advises several child-protection and international development charities on the issue.
Lamento also notes that the Czech Republic lacks a strong legal framework to regulate sex work and address the issue of human trafficking. “What bothers me the most about the laws in place in the Czech Republic is that there are no prostitution laws,” says the lawyer, whose firm has offices in Prague and Geneva.
The lack of regulation creates a breeding ground for criminal activity. As Schoultz explains, the scheme in the Czech sex industry is a bit more nuanced than in other European countries where sex work is either decriminalized or is a punishable offense. “The owner of a club advertises the place as renting a hotel room, technically excluding themselves from the sex business. Then the sex workers pay per night for the room, which can be anything from 2,000 to 3,000 Czech crowns [$90-$145], so they normally need one or two customers to cover the room cost.”
The U.S. State Department’s most recent report on trafficking in the Czech Republic notes that human traffickers exploit domestic and foreign victims in the Czech Republic, and transport Czech victims abroad. Among them are women, girls, and boys from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Nigeria, the Philippines, and Vietnam. The report marks the United Kingdom as a significant destination in recent years for Czech female and male victims of trafficking.
“In the majority of cases that our initiative has dealt with, the trafficked women either come from organized crime groups – Nigerian mafia or Romanian ‘loverboys’ – or they are Czech women trafficked by individuals, usually their partner,” Schoultz says. “Everyone is always surprised that it is not Eastern European women, but it is possible that the trafficked women from that region could be in other clubs or unmarked flats to which we don’t have access.” The State Department report indicated that the commercial sex industry increasingly operates out of private residences, complicating efforts to identify and locate victims.
In addition, the report notes the sketchy official statistics on trafficking victims in the Czech Republic. Police records for 2021 list only 13 trafficking investigations involving 21 suspects. Sixteen suspects were convicted in court for labor or sex trafficking.
“Police data collection generally focused on perpetrators rather than victims; an overly broad definition of a victim according to police regulations further hindered data accuracy,” the report states.
More recently, the flood of refugees from Ukraine since the Russian invasion has created a pool of potential trafficking victims, La Strada director Marketa Hronkova said in a recent interview with People in Need, a Czech humanitarian organization.
One of the most prominent – and by many accounts ruthless – crime groups operating in the Czech Republic operates out of Nigeria. Most Nigerian women caught up in trafficking leave their homes in hopes of a better future, but in reality, they often become victims of a very organized and sophisticated net of human trafficking and sexual slavery.
As far back as 2006, the International Organization for Migration reported that Nigerian women were increasingly becoming aware that they would be working in the sex business when offered jobs in Europe. But they were often unaware of the circumstances that awaited them. Many women, the report stated, incur debts of anywhere between $40,000 and $100,000 to traffickers in their bid to reach Europe.
To devoutly religious Nigerian women, the juju ritual ceremony many undergo while still in Nigeria is more significant and binding than any contract, according to an article in the Guardian. The rituals make it clear that failure to pay off those debts will result in terrible things happening to the woman and her family.
As part of the ceremony, Schoultz says, the woman promises to pay the people who take her to Europe – often a huge amount, 50,000 euros or more. “The women do not understand how much that is and how much they will be actually earning,” she says.
With age, some of the trafficked Nigerian women become “madams” themselves, as they are promised their debt will be written off if they recruit more women from their village.
Another prominent group in international organized crime operating in the Czech Republic is the Romanian “loverboy” network. But the mechanism for trafficking women differs remarkably from the Nigerian. As Europol defines it, this trafficking method entails “the recruitment of a victim by establishing a fake romantic relationship between one of the members of the criminal network and a targeted potential victim of trafficking.” Loverboys also often threaten to harm the children they have together with a trafficked woman if she does not obey.
“Once a trafficked Romanian girl told me she wanted to leave the guy because he was beating her,” Schoultz recalls a conversation she had during a brothel visit. “Her mum knew she was doing prostitution – she knew the guy was beating her – but she convinced her to stay.” She also said that her group once met a 14-year-old Romanian girl soliciting sex on a Prague square. “We could not talk to her much because she was being watched, but she told us her age and where she was from.”
In 2020, a large operation exploiting young Romanian women was dismantled in Spain, Romania, and the Czech Republic. The Europol investigation concluded that “once under their [the Romanian network’s] influence, the victims were often drugged, threatened, abused, and trafficked among the members of the network for up to 6,000 euros each.” The women were also regularly moved from one location to another – part of the strategy to minimize the risks of detection from law enforcement.
‘The Typical Target Is an Unhappy Woman’
Sex trafficking is not just the domain of international criminal groups. Czech women themselves are also at risk of being trafficked. “The typical target for traffickers is an unhappy woman – a woman in whose life something is missing,” says Veronika Caslavova, a security analyst whose research topics include human trafficking with an emphasis on Africa.”Domestic abuse, poverty, homelessness may trigger their vulnerability and willingness to take risks, making them easy targets for traffickers.”
In some cases, women in the Czech Republic are trafficked by partners or family members who use manipulation, pressure, and abuse to coerce them, she adds.
Lack of support is another major issue facing victims of trafficking and sexual abuse. One Czech girl’s story, as told by Schoultz and Antsiferova, illustrates the dire circumstances many women face. The girl was abducted by a man in Ostrava. He held her captive, and he and other men raped her repeatedly for three days. He even had a man in a police uniform participate in the abuse. The abductor also forced the girl to take drugs to make her addicted, and after three days, he told her that she must now work for him.
When the girl returned home and told her mother about the ordeal, they concluded that it was pointless to contact the police, as they seemed to be complicit. The girl ended up working for the abductor until he was arrested for a different offense. She then fled to Brno. There, she went to a brothel because she felt that prostitution was the only thing she knew. At the brothel, there was a no-drugs policy, so the manager and the women working there helped her get off drugs.
At the brothel, the girl told L’Chaim volunteers that she saw it as a positive development in her life to end up there. However, she now faced a new problem. For years, she had not paid social insurance. Part of L’Chaim’s work is in educating women on dealing with such matters and to offer help getting their paperwork in order, Schoultz says.
Traffickers vs NGOs
Cooperation between the government and NGOs in anti-trafficking work is very important, says Katerina Belohlavkova, manager of crime prevention projects at the Czech Interior Ministry.
“The most challenging part when it comes to combating trafficking in the Czech Republic is victim identification. Through the NGO La Strada, we work with victims of trafficking, but they are often reluctant to talk,” Belohlavkova says.
While NGOs do an important job of helping trafficking victims in numerous ways, not enough is being done to address the issue on a systemic level, lawyer Lamento believes.
According to him, the punishment meted out to traffickers is “a big joke in the Czech Republic – just like in most European countries.” Traffickers may earn millions of dollars yet only serve four or five years in prison, he says. “People get higher sentences for bribes and money laundering.”
Belohlavkova agrees that the penalties for such a severe crime as sex trafficking are not high enough. “Even compared to other EU countries, sentences for human trafficking in the Czech Republic are low,” she says, adding that the Justice Ministry is drafting amendments to this legislation.
The issue of regulating prostitution and prosecuting crimes of sex trafficking has been a long-standing challenge, with political will being a major roadblock to progress. According to Veronika Caslavova, the security expert, politicians are hesitant to put regulating prostitution on their agendas, given the indifference of voters or even potential backlash. “Nobody wants to say ‘I support prostitution,’ ” she says. Despite attempts at regulation, the problem persists, with prostitution remaining in a legal gray area.
The Czech sex business employs around 13,000 women as a rough estimate, Rozkos bez rizika has said. The NGO reckons that four in five sex workers are Czech, and more than half are single mothers.
On the related problem of violence against women, the country has not yet ratified the Istanbul Convention, a human rights treaty that specifically targets violence against women and domestic violence. Although the Czech Republic signed the convention in 2016, successive governments failed to take action, leaving women in the country without vital legal protections. This year four Czech ministries, three of them led by members of the socially conservative Christian Democrat Party, called for ratification to be postponed yet again. The ministries argue that more political and public discussion on the issue is needed, delaying crucial protections for women and girls in the country, according to Deputy European Affairs Minister Klara Simackova Laurencikova, who also serves as the government’s human rights commissioner.
Taking action against violence towards women and ensuring necessary protections poses deep-rooted systemic challenges in the Czech Republic, severely obstructing the work of NGOs. However, selected NGOs, such as La Strada, receive funding and administrative oversight from state bodies with which they cooperate. Meanwhile, L’Chaim operates independently of other NGOs, rights initiatives, or government bodies, potentially hindering the efficiency of the organization.
Acknowledging this limitation, L’Chaim plans to develop a special training program for police officers based on the decades-long experience of visiting brothels, communicating with women in the sex industry, and assisting victims of trafficking. Ministry of Interior representative Belohlavkova confirmed the government’s readiness to work with NGOs. “We are open to extending our cooperation with other NGOs that could be useful for victim identification,” she says.
For L’Chaim, building connections with like-minded activists and supporters in the government is crucial.
“I have learned that support and help really matter, are needed, and appreciated in this area. Small steps make big changes, and in this type of social work, you have to focus on the long run,” says Antsiferova. “I’d love to see our team holding more awareness events and continuing to visit and support women in brothels. The more people are aware of the problem, the better. The more people act, the more we can change our world.”
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Kathrin Yaromich is a TV producer for the TV and digital news service Current Time and a freelance journalist with a primary focus on human rights, social justice, and politics. Her work has appeared on RFE/RL, Bellingcat, and New Eastern Europe.
