At least 20,000 women working as online sex workers in Turkey

ISTANBUL

At least 20,000 women are working as online sex workers in Turkey, earning up to 4,500 Turkish Liras per month, daily Habertürk has reported. 

Speaking to the newspaper, the administrator of one such website, identified only by the initials A.K., said he employed 600 women as sex workers using either webcams or written messages, earning an average of 26 liras per hour.

Website administrators say they take tight security precautions, including warning notes appearing if certain forbidden keywords - such as telephone numbers or addresses - are used during the chat. 

A.K. said his website had two separate “pools” for chatting, one being a general chat room and the other being a private chat room for text or webcam sex. Around 40 percent of women work as operators in the private chat rooms, while the other operators chat with clients about general subjects such as football, TV series, or movies. 

Most of the women operators are housewives, while some are disabled. They are free to choose whether or not to show their faces on camera.

One such worker, identified only as Meltem K., told Habertürk that there was a rising demand for this job at present. 

“One of the key reasons for this rising demand is rising unemployment in other sectors,” she said. 

Traditional sex work is tightly regulated in Turkey, but online sex work is largely free of legal restrictions.

“If there is no specific mediating for prostitution and people are just chatting on these kinds of websites, it is not a crime. If images or credit card information is used in bad faith, that constitutes a crime as a violation of privacy,” one information technology lawyer was quoted as saying in the report.