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Please contact us at contact globalcitizen. A friend nearby heard her muffled cries and helped the year-old Dane break free from the man's grasp. Annika, who declined to reveal her full name, said it was the fourth time in a year that she nearly died at the hands of her clients.
But when you're a street prostitute, they think even less of you," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on a street corner in Vesterbro, Copenhagen's red light district. Studies show that sex workers in Denmark are violated or threatened by customers about 31 percent of the time while working the streets compared to only three percent in brothels, according to the Danish National Centre for Social Research. For while prostitution is legal in Denmark, it is illegal to profit from other people selling sex, such as pimping, or to rent rooms to sex workers, which means prostitutes can end up having sex in places like parks, alleyways, behind parked cars and telephone booths.
This can put sex workers in danger from some clients and passers-by, according to rights groups, who are concerned that migrant or trafficked women are especially vulnerable as they are often afraid to report violence or assaults to the police.
Annika said she reported her attack to the police but they dropped the case because she had no visible marks on her body. This level of violence compelled Danish social entrepreneur Michael Lodberg Olsen to convert an old ambulance into a mobile unit where prostitutes can work for no charge in a safe and clean environment, guarded by volunteers from a distance. Olsen, who has worked on initiatives for vulnerable people since the early s, previously started "Fixelance", an ambulance converted into Denmark's first safe drug injection facility, as well as a street magazine that drug addicts could sell for money instead of stealing or turning to prostitution.
