Editor's note: Wanderlust is a regular GlobalPost series on global sex and relationship issues written by Iva Skoch, who is now traveling the world writing a book on the subject. Prositution taught her to defend herself, to be honest and to fight for the truth.
It also taught her to profoundly despise men. She says her last boyfriend abused her. The two women consider themselves lesbians, even though both spent a better part of their teens and 20s catering to the acute sexual needs of men.
Ivo Prochazka, sexologist at Charles University in Prague, says that the percentage of lesbians among Czech prostitutes is higher than in the general population, though few quantitative studies have been done on the subject. Many of the women who end up on the street as sex workers grew up in orphanages.
The Czech Republic has about 8, children living in these institutions, the highest rate per capita in the European Union. Among her 60 to 70 clients, Malinova sees many female sex workers who grew up in orphanages, which are typically divided by gender. Malinova is withering in her criticism of the country's pervasive institutions. She describes orphanage residents as a bunch of year-olds who are eventually released into the real world, unable to cope and to take care of themselves, let alone form healthy relationships.
According to child assistance organization ANV in the Czech Republic, 51 percent of adults released from Czech orphanages between and were convicted of a crime within one year. But the ban is seldom enforced. Only 10 percent of the thousands of prostitutes working here do so on the street. Since , when public indecency laws were enacted, many street sex workers have been pushed from city centers into more remote areas where they are more prone to be victims of violence. Violence inflicted by men, Malinova points out.
