We created a fake escort website, girlsofparadise.sex, on which the girls are already dead, but the clients don't know it yet. Each story is a reconstruction of a real case. When the potential client called or started to chat with one of them he thought was a real prostitute, he was tricked into hearing her real, tragic story.
Execution
We asked 10 actresses to embody 10 characters based on the tragic stories of real-life prostitutes, victims of the system. We created girlsofparadise.sex, a website with the look and feel of a real escort website, bought the domain name, and published a few client posts on dedicated forums to attract potential clients to our site. In parrallel, we set up a call center to answer incoming phone calls and respond to chat and text messages. The call center was open for a full week. Today the website is still online, a robot answers live chat requests informing clients what happens behind the scenes when they pay for sex.
We created a fake escort website, girlsofparadise.sex, on which the girls are already dead, but the clients don't know it yet. A call center was opened. We received more than 600 phone calls and thousands of texts and chat conversations over the course of a single week. We created 3 radio spots out of these conversations recordings. The radio messages aired at a relevant time, one during which the French Parliament was debating over a bill that would penalize clients of prostitution. To amplify the debate and go beyond our borders we launched a PR campaign with a video case we made from our website. It was hugely successful catching the attention of more than 200 journalists around the world (from more than 31 countries) with 57,8 million organic impressions. Among the presse we note: Le Figaro, The New York Times, El Mundo, Corriere Della Sera, radio shows ieg NPR.
The Situation
Clients do not feel they are directly responsible for the violence the prostitutes often endure. Our campaign’s goal was to switch the perspective and make clients realize the role they play in prostitutes suffering. Our campaign provoked such a significant debate in the French political scene and allowed for a greater impact on the public opinion regarding the role the client plays in the system and thus participating in the creation an environment preferable to the passing of the law on April 6th (the penalization of clients of prostitution law).
The Strategy
The association's main objective is to prevent young generations from entering the prostitution system. To do so, we decided to show that clients are actually accomplices of the system: when they pay for sex, they actually promote the violence that prostitutes suffer from everyday. For us, the more powerful way to demonstrate this was to use true stories of prostitutes who were murdered or injured by a client or their pimp.