Apparently 25-year-old Antonello P. could not face the shame of it all. He took a taxi home, gave the driver IR£25 and told him to keep the change. Then he walked to a field behind his parents' home, took off his glasses and his belt and hung himself from the lower branches of a cherry tree.
Hours earlier, in Marghera near Venice, Antonello had had his car impounded and had been charged with aiding and abetting prostitution after carabinieri stopped him as he was driving an Albanian prostitute back to her "waiting station". In a controversial but technically accurate interpretation of the 1958 so-called Merlin law, the carabinieri had charged Antonello, not with being the client of a prostitute (which is not a crime under the Italian penal code), but with favouring prostitution by driving the prostitute to her place of work.
Antonello's suicide inevitably rekindled the ongoing debate about how Italian national and local authorities might best deal with the increasing problems prompted by widespread prostitution rackets, involving East European and African women and usually run by East European crime syndicates. Authorities in Veneto, where Antonello had his car impounded, had opted for a new method in the belief that the shame involved in having one's car impounded would help reverse the recent surge in the paid sex trade.
Launching a new anti-prostitution campaign this week, Minister for Equal Opportunities Katia Bellillo appeared to refer to the Treviso suicide incident when saying: "Impounding clients' cars only serves to make newspaper headlines. Police should follow prostitutes home and there they would find the people who exploit them".
Minister Bellillo and Social Affairs Minister Livia Turco both believe that the real enemy in the war on prostitution are those criminal gangs who earn up to IR£70 million per month from prostitution rackets. Figures released this week by the Equal Opportunities Ministry claim that there are no less than 25,000 prostitutes currently plying their trade in Italy, with 18,000 of them being non-Italian.
Much documentation exists indicating that nearly all of these foreign women (from countries such as Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, the Ukraine, Nigeria and Senegal) have been duped into enforced sexual slavery. Promised jobs as house cleaners or nannies, they are offered "loans" (of up to $10,000 dollars) for a clandestine passage to Italy.
The idea is that they repay the "loan" when they start to work. Yet when they arrive in Italy, they find that there is no nanny job waiting for them; instead their "handlers" forcibly remove their passports and identity papers (if they have any), forcing them out on to the streets and into prostitution.
Part of the anti-prostitution campaign launched this week involves a TV ad offering help to such women. This follows on from the initiative of a toll-free phone line set up in July, which has already received nearly 7,000 calls, leading to the "freeing" of 73 prostitutes held by criminal gangs.
Offering help to women entrapped in the sexual slavery of prostitution, however, is but one aspect of this week's campaign, as pointed out by Minister Turco: "This campaign removes that old alibi. From now on, no man in this country can say that he didn't know that a woman prostitute might also be a slave."
