Today i participated in a screening of Greener Pastures for a school class and after the movie we had a discussion about the topic.
Amongs the participants (besides Joana Adesuwa Reiterer and me) there was a victim of human trafficking who talked about her past and her life here in Vienna. It´s quite unbelievable that asylum seekers are not allowed to work here but they are allowed to prostitute themselves. I just want to repeat it once more: they don´t have permission to work, the only thing they are acutally allowed to do as a job is sell their body.
The reason behind it is that the authorities are quite aware of the situation of asylm seekers and that very often their last chance to survive (or pay back their dept to the person who brought them here) is prostitution. So there is some kind of id card they can get to have regular medical checks if they caught some virus or affliction. On one hand this is good for them, but just the fact that the only legal way to earn money is prostitution is so morbidly unbelievable.
But anyway, the discussion went very good, the school kids had interesting questions and i think we reached our goal with that movie: widen the eyes of people who are not aware of the situation (as well as i was not aware of it before i got involved in that project).
