Working Grant - Trade fair - The business behind Dubai’s business prostitution

Last year, Dubai emerged as the most important non-European destination for Belgian business travellers, thanks to its strategic location, the booming real estate market and an especially high concentration of stinking rich people. Journalist Filip Michiels and photographer Isabel Pousset travelled to the small emirate on behalf of Vacature Magazine and discovered that Dubai has a whole lot more to offer to the exhausted business traveller: prostitutes. In every colour, size and nationality, they populate the bars and nightclubs of dozens of luxury hotels. In the thousands.

Internationally renowned hotel chains like Radisson and Hyatt cheerfully play along earning thousands of euros for this lucrative business. And although prostitution is strictly forbidden in this islamic country, the immigration services, police authorities and the local establishment happily turn a blind eye to it. What’s more, they share with equal cheer in the forbidden fruit, earning lots of money by importing women from Eastern Europe and Asia and, at best for appearance’s sake, take action against the most extreme excesses of traffic in human beings.

Filip Michiels has won the 2010 Vlaamse Citi Prijs (the Citi Journalistic Excellence Prize) for press talent with this project.
 

File number: 

2009/692

4.000 euro granted on 08/03/2009.

 

Authors

Filip Michiels

Filip Michiels (°1969) graduated in translation (Dutch-French-Spanish), but about twelve years ago now he ended up in journalism. He has worked for newspapers like Gazet van Antwerpen and De Tijd. Since 2005, he has been working with the team at Vacature Magazine, for which over the last few years he has written a number of reports dealing with traffic in human beings, slavery and migration in countries like Morocco, Niger, Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire. He was given an honourable mention by the Noord-Zuid Persprijs (North-South press prize) for his report entitled ‘De helaasheid van corrupt Congo’ (the troubles of corrupt Congo).

 

Isabel Pousset

In 2003, Isabel Pousset (°1976) graduated in photography from the academy in Ghent. Since 2004, she has been working as a freelance photographer for several newspapers and magazines including Vacature Magazine. She has gone on a number of assignments for this magazine including to Senegal, Morocco, Côte d'Ivoire and Palestine.