Santiago - When the nightclub in which she
touted for business in southern Chile was shut down by the
authorities as the new coronavirus spread, sex worker Camila
Hormazabal was left without access to her sole source of income.
The heavily tattooed 24-year-old had been picking up clients
in the downtown bar in Concepcion for four years, making about $715 (R13 000) a month. Overnight, her income disappeared.
With no way to pay her bills, Camila switched to video calls
conducted from her high-rise apartment bedroom, and asked her
regulars to meet her online.
"The calls bring in something, obviously it's not the same
and the money is not even what it would have been on a bad day
before, but it's something," she told Reuters by phone.
Camila is one of the thousands of sex workers worldwide left
in a precarious position after the very intimacy that defines
their work was thwarted by social distancing measures.
Camila Hormazabal, a 24-year-old sex worker, uses a laptop to hold an online erotic meeting with a virtual customer in Concepcion, Chile. Picture: Juan Gonzalez/Reuters
From Singapore to Germany to Mexico, sex workers have been
left without an income, and often without a home.
In Chile, more than three quarters of the country's
estimated 60 000 sex workers are sole earners and have at least
one dependant, said the Margin Foundation, which provides the
workers with social, legal and emotional support.
With an urgent need to replace lost income, many have
switched to online services, offering their clients video calls,
erotic photographs, and videos instead.
Older prostitutes who were not technologically literate have
been trained up by a younger generation of largely middle-class
women who finance university tuition fees by selling online sex,
according to the Margin Foundation.
"We call them 'the virtuals', and some can make a lot of
money," said Herminda Gonzalez Inostroza, 59, a former nightclub
dancer who now acts as the foundation's spokesperson.
"They're teaching others over WhatsApp how to get into it,
how to find clients, how to set up an account to charge credit
cards, how to sort out a webcam.
"For the women over 45 it's not easy, but you can always
learn."
Relax Chile, a website offering both adult content and a
meeting place for prostitutes and clients, said almost all of
its accounts had replaced offers of physical contact with online
entertainment. While that meant the loss of some clients, it
opened doors to others from abroad, a spokesperson said.
Previous to the coronavirus outbreak, a nighttime curfew
intended to quell violence associated with months of intense
protests over social inequality had already made life difficult
for traditional street walkers in Chile, the spokesperson added.
While sex work itself is not illegal in Chile, hosting sex
work is, meaning the trade remains in limbo.
Camila Hormazabal reinvented herself, offering sexual services online after the nightclub where she worked was closed due to the outbreak of the coronavirus. Picture: Juan Gonzalez/Reuters
FOOD PARCELS
Inostroza said a small handful of women were still risking
physical encounters with clients.
"Their regulars are asking them to meet up and they don't
want to risk losing them and have bills to pay," she said. "They
are doing it with masks, gloves. They're with them for 10, 15
minutes, no more."
Camila, who sometimes dons a neon pink mask in her
videos to remind clients of the importance of sanitary measures,
said most of her customers had been supportive of her move
online.
"Obviously some of them still wanted hook-ups but I tell
them that would be irresponsible on my part and theirs," she
said.
Inostroza said sex workers fell through holes in social
safety nets because around a third were undocumented foreigners,
while others were too afraid of stigmatisation or investigation
by government agencies to request one of the recently announced
hardship payments offered to those left destitute by the
pandemic.
A neon sign advertising a sex shop is seen switched on at a local commercial centre during the coronavirus outbreak in Concepcion, Chile. Picture: Juan Gonzalez/Reuters
The Margin Foundation handed out 60 food parcels in March
and 100 in April to women working in the sex industry who had
children to support, she said.
The March parcels were funded by some of the clients of the
more successful online sex workers, she said, along with the
workers themselves.
A spokesperson for Chile's ministry for women said sex workers
were being offered support amid the pandemic as part of new
measures to tackle domestic violence, and were free to access
social benefits "like any other person".