Index – Culture – Many Hungarian prostitutes in Brussels

New this week Urban foxes In his novel, he presents the secret world of Brussels and even its darker side. Sex, drugs, prostitutes, Brussels politicians, diplomats. How about spontaneously getting the best marketing of all time this week?

Durica Katarina: It is no accident that life is generally surpassed by literature. Basically, that’s what happened now. If someone were to write in their novel that an MEP who represents absolute conservative values ​​and the Christian family model gets into a gay gangbang and then falls down like this, the editor takes it out by saying, let’s not go overboard, it is so unrealistic that readers don’t believe.

By the way, since the Szájer scandal, everyone has been asking Well life is good in Brussels, huh? This is how I tell you, compared to this, our lives are very boring, on average, with the children I visit mainly in the kindergarten, school and playgrounds in Brussels. It should also be noted that the Brussels police take epidemiological measures extremely seriously. They pay special attention to parties at home, and after ten o’clock at night they jump to the slightest noise, ring and well.

After his novel about the victims of the Hungarian mafia in Dunaszerdahely a Urban foxes also made using a similar documentary method. He spoke a lot with those involved. How did you come into contact with the stories of prostitutes in Brussels, which are one of the main threads of the novel?

We moved to Brussels in 2019 after my husband got a job abroad. I was gathering material for a report on human trafficking, so I repeatedly visited parts of the city full of prostitutes, including the Gare du Nord, a red light district near the North Station. This should be considered exactly like the famous shopping street in Amsterdam.

I remember when my girlfriend and I walked for the first time at 11am on a weekday, with the exception of prostitutes, we were the only women in the neighborhood, and they said that this period, lunchtime, was the busiest lane because working men would get there.

Obviously, it is much easier to visit prostitutes at this time than at night, when you have to ask the woman to leave. Here I also met several social workers and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd who are trying to help these women, trying to evacuate them.

Is there some knowledge, estimate, statistic about that how many hungarians are there at the moment woman Can you be away as a victim of human trafficking in Brussels?

I can’t tell you the exact number either, but we can’t even imagine how many there are. When I started talking to Hungarian prostitutes in Brussels, at first I thought there were only one or two of these stories, and then I was forced to face it, that it was just the surface.

For example, only white girls are exhibited on the street of the shop window, while next to the hut system, the flat bell method works, where only black prostitutes work. Many times for living there with his children and his partner, who is usually his broker at the same time, exploiting his girlfriend.

Due to the prominent numbers, how girls are brought from Africa is a common topic of conversation in Brussels. Although there are many Hungarian prostitutes in Brussels that we hardly speak of.

The novel accurately paint the unthinkable for the average person surrounded by extremely harmful misconceptions process of how someone becomes a prostitute. As is the process going?

It is a really naive but false idea that typically young women take anything for the money and then earn so well that over the years they recover, go out, go home and buy a huge house. Faced with this, the reality is that a prostitute earns a lot in vain, that the money does not land with her, or only in a very small part, but in the pockets of her pursuers, her detainees. In fact, I’ve only heard stories where the girls didn’t want that at all.

Those who will eventually have this fate all come from dysfunctional families and deep poverty. For example, they were often hungry and never had nice clothes, and one parent sat in jail more than once, and so on. I have also found many times that these women became victims of domestic violence as children, even at the age of five or six, and even then they lost contact with their bodies, learning to walk with their minds completely. different during the act.

The book also reveals how consciously his runners manipulate the hunger in them, literally, and their hunger for love. What are the most common networking techniques?

The pimps specifically hunt them down. One of my heroes in the novel also hails from a small Hungarian town in the Highlands, where there are essentially no job opportunities and no prospect. They invite them to a Kofola, they say I love you, how beautiful you are. I have come to realize how fundamental food is in the lives of these victimized women. She met the man, who had behaved strangely from the beginning, was aggressive and unpredictable at times, but told her to move in with him. There was hardly any heat at home, but the man had a full refrigerator, ham, yogurt, and fruit in winter!

This is how those women get hooked. What is the next step in networking so someone can eventually be sold to a prostitute abroad against their will?

Very often, revenge porn or a sex video is made which then acts like a real electric leash. This can be used to blackmail victims, who constantly fear where the humiliating images of them will be posted, to whom, to what surface. Women are so afraid of this that they prefer to play each other’s dirty games.

From here on, they are constantly blackmailed, and from that moment on, harsh physical violence, beatings and confinement in the basement are also very common for all resistance attempts. If someone has a child, it is also a serious blackmail basis. Or they are manipulated so that if the woman has money, she can finally buy nice clothes and lots of toys for the child. Either they start threatening him if he disobeys, they cut the child’s throat, or they bring him here too and he too has to work.

Is there any way out of this? Or the intention to free women forced into prostitution?

If you look with this eye, you can read in the press almost weekly that the 35-year-old BL in Germany, who forced thirty girls and their partners into prostitution, was arrested. It also shows how big this business is today, and they get very rich from it. An unfortunate woman has sex with thirty or forty men a day without a day off, and when the pandemic broke out in the spring and massage parlors and brothels had to be closed, they took prostitutes out onto the streets for ten euros.

According to the civilians who help them, many girls are rescued and new ones are replaced almost immediately. There is a sensitization that seems an infinitely trite concept, but it would be vital that the many men, parliamentarians, Commission and NATO personnel, politicians, civil servants, multis, etc. who work in Brussels and visit them regularly, listen to them and learn about the history of these women. It’s amazing that otherwise intelligent, highly skilled, multilingual men still believe that the prostitute who doesn’t have it is the one who loves sex so much.

A Urban foxes It also shows the lesser-known side of Brussels that it’s not just prostitutes who suffer for the women who live there. In the upper middle class, Brussels is a city of lonely women. How did you come to this conclusion?

The so-called tens of thousands of diplomatic wives can live in Brussels today. As I write in the novel, it is mainly the lineup where the husband works from early morning to late at night, which puts the wife in a vacuum because she has nothing left but housework and parenting. children.

Despite a woman having a good job or her own home business, a foreigner generally has almost no chance of finding work in Brussels, because even a store clerk has minimal knowledge of Flemish and French. And working in the EU is largely incompatible with motherhood.

I met foreign mothers in a similar situation who had a doctorate or two master’s degrees, yet they spent their time transporting the child and attending all kinds of chocolate-making workshops and interior design courses in their boredom.

Once a traditional family model, the Sweet Anna institution still exists in Brussels today. The third thread of the novel describes the lives of staff in the service of prosperous diplomatic families. How did you get in touch with them?

On the one hand, I befriended many of the diplomatic wives and listened to their stories, as well as the guest workers who often worked outdoors without papers. By the way, there are many Hungarians living in Brussels, I think there may be more people today than in my hometown, Somorja, which is becoming so Slovak.

I know a Hungarian family who have lived in Brussels for 11 years and can do so by only surrounding Hungarians. Your hairdressers, artificial nails, cooks, gardeners, washing machine mechanics, babysitters, etc. they are Hungarian.

This is not a sociological study, but I also observed in our little outdoor bubble that Spanish diplomatic families living in Brussels are very often employed by South Americans, the French by Romanians, Russians by Ukrainians, and Hungarians by Transylvanians and Highlanders. .

(Cover photo: Durica Katarina. Photo: Kőnig Lilla)