įemale sex workers have less access to medical services which makes prevention and treatment more difficult to acquire.
Close to half of these workers said they would occasionally not use condoms if the client refused, if they were offered more money, and if the client was a frequent customer. In a study conducted in 2005, female sex workers knew sex without condoms increased the risk of HIV, but said they didn't always use condoms. HIV is contracted more frequently in people who do not use condoms during sex. This gives Ukraine the highest rate of infection in Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States. HIV and AIDS are prominent in Ukraine with 1% of people aged 15–49 having HIV as of 2003. Īlthough child prostitution in Ukraine is illegal, a retrospective inquiry of adults shows that 20% of women and a 10% of men have experienced a sexual abuse by the age of 18. According to the IOM data, 10% of the 1355 Ukrainian victims of trafficking, were adolescents. Ukraine experiences between 70 cases of sexual children exploitation per year. The group most prone to prostitution are ones belonging to poor families, homeless children and orphans the exposure of living on the streets without protection makes them the most vulnerable. In Ukraine, children are often the victims of forced labor and other kind of sexual exploitations. Main article: Child prostitution in Ukraine Ukrainians working irregularly abroad increased from 28% to 41% from 2011 to 2015. While an IOM survey in 2011 says that 92% of Ukrainians were aware of sexual trafficking, trafficking continued to increase since then. Approximately 60% of traffickers are Ukrainian women. If they succeed in paying off their debt, some become recruiters, going back to Ukraine and telling friends and family they made a significant amount of money by going abroad. Once they arrive in their destination country, they are frequently trapped by pimps taking away their visas, or by owing the pimps money to be paid off with prostitution. The majority of women cross the border with these genuine documents as opposed to being smuggled. Ukrainian police say 70% of trafficked women travel with genuine documents obtained from corrupt officials. Victims are usually exported with legal documents such as travel visas. The traffickers say they will work as dancers or in-store clerks. Many victims were convinced to leave Ukraine with the promise of profit by traffickers. Traffickers use this economic vulnerability to recruit women into prostitution. Of trafficking victims, 80% were unemployed prior to leaving Ukraine. According to multiple reports the Ukrainian sex-workers are the largest group of foreign women in Turkey involved into prostitution and the second largest group of foreign women involved into prostitution outside the US military bases in Republic of Korea. Ukrainian women have been exported to countries across the world, such as Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Spain, Hungary, United Arab Emirates, Syria etc. According to the International Organization for Migration over 500,000 Ukrainian women have been exploited with trafficking to the West since its independence in 1991 up to 1998. In 1998, the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior estimated that 400,000 Ukrainian women were trafficked during the previous decade other sources, such as non-governmental organizations, state the number was even higher. Ukraine is now known to have a greater number of trafficking victims than any other Eastern European nation after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Sexual trafficking victims tend to be women and girls between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six. In regards to trafficking, Ukrainian citizens make up 80% of traffickers with 60% being women. 10% of adolescents living on the streets (in 2011) were suspected to have provided sex to other men for food and clothing.
Research by the State Institute for Family and Youth Issues indicates that, for many women, sex work has become the only adequate source of income: more than 50% of them support their children and parents. The organisation claimed the largest number of prostitutes were found (in 2011) in Kyiv (about 9,000 people), then in the Odessa area (about 6,000), about 3,000 could be found in Dnipropetrovsk and in Donetsk, in Kharkiv 2,500 and 2,000 were said to have worked in Crimea. According to the Ukrainian Institute of Social Studies in 2011 there were 50,000 women working as prostitutes with every sixth prostitute being a minor.