In August 2018, Vanesa Campos died staring into the barrel of a police officer’s gun.
But it wasn’t the officer himself who killed her in the heart of Paris’ Bois de Boulogne – a large public park on the outskirts of the city and one of France’s most famous sites for sex work. A few nights before, his car was broken into in the same area. His gun – stolen by a group of men. A few nights later, that group of men, who now had the gun, decided to get some quick cash by robbing someone in the woods. They knew of Bois de Boulogne’s reputation, and they likely assumed that lots of sex buyers would be walking around in the dark, alone, with cash on them. So they went there. When they came upon Campos and a client they struck. Campos called for help and tried to intervene. One of the men pulled the trigger.
The chain of events that led up to Campos’s death opens up a host of questions. First and foremost: why has a dark and remote wooded area on the outskirts of the city become one of the centres of the Parisian sex trade? According to Thierry Schaffauser, a French sex worker and spokesperson for French sex workers’ union STRASS, the answer is starkly clear. “When Vanesa Campos was murdered, we made a lot of noise because to us, it was so obvious that her death was due to the law.”
