The Elite Byblos Hotel is a five-star establishment in Dubai’s upscale Al Barsha neighbourhood with a rooftop pool and 337 rooms which, says its website, ‘exude a sense of opulence and grandeur’.
Situated opposite the Mall Of The Emirates – a visitor attraction that contains the desert city’s only indoor ski slope – it offers sweeping views of Palm Jumeirah, that palm tree-shaped artificial island of skyscraper resorts and white sand beaches built in the Arabian Gulf during the early days of the tourist boom 20 years ago.
Within walking distance, if you can bear the 40-degree heat, you’ll find outposts of Dior, Burberry, Ralph Lauren and Tiffany, branches of Starbucks, KFC and Burger King, and a gated collection of vast expat villas on offer to tenants willing to cough up £80,000 per year.
On a more understated note, it is just a few hundred yards from the Shareefa Al Attar mosque, ‘a striking embodiment of Islamic architecture and spiritual sanctity’ from which the call to prayer echoes five times each day. This bizarre juxtaposition, between Western excess and Arab tradition, is supposed to form part of Dubai’s unique allure.
Yet a darker underbelly becomes immediately apparent when I walk through the Elite Byblos Hotel’s marble-floored lobby, step into a glass lift and press a button that whisks me up to the fifth floor.
Here, I am greeted by a 28-year-old Russian woman named Lilith. She is tall, dark-haired and wearing high heels, a short skirt and a white designer shirt unbuttoned to reveal designer lingerie. Following in her wake is a musky whiff of perfume. This is her ‘work’ uniform.
Lilith, who hails from Krasnodar near the Black Sea, earns her living as one of Dubai’s tens of thousands of prostitutes, catering to Emirati sheikhs, wealthy expats and tourists who have, in recent years, turned what was once a dusty fishing village into a decadent party destination.
In exchange for her usual fee – the half-hourly rate is 1,600 dirhams, or £320 – she talks me through the secrets of this swaggering Arabian metropolis.
‘People come to Dubai to enjoy themselves. They want to spend money, go shopping, visit nice restaurants and party. So naturally, they will also want women and for many, many of the men who are in Dubai that means they use escort ladies,’ she tells me.
‘I have clients of every nationality: Russian, European, Arab, Indian. Some live here but many are visiting. I even have customers who are staying on the Palm with their family and kids and, while they sleep, the man will get a taxi over to meet me here in this room.’
Lilith lives at the Elite Byblos Hotel for weeks at a time, typically spending two months in Dubai before returning to Russia for a month. Her clients are sourced online, via ‘agents’ who run shady Dubai escort websites, or operate Telegram and WhatsApp groups devoted to the sex trade.
The bizarre juxtaposition between Western excess and Arab tradition is supposed to form part of Dubai’s unique allure, writes Guy Adams
On a normal night, two or three men might visit. But at weekends, the trade is brisker. Last Friday, she managed a grand total of seven. Typically, punters message the ‘agent’ an image of their cash, plus a photo of the hotel’s exterior. They are then provided with her room number and told to ‘head straight up’.
‘Life here, I like very much,’ she adds. ‘The guys are sometimes nice and sometimes not nice. But I can choose who I want to work with. Most important of all, if you are a working girl, is to feel safe and in Dubai I feel very safe. And of course, I make very good money.’
Before she came to Dubai, just over a year ago, Lilith’s finances were in dire straits. Her business, an off-licence she ran in Krasnodar, was barely scraping a profit and her relationship with an ex-boyfriend had collapsed, leaving her mired in personal debt.
After two months in the sun, she had not only paid off her credit cards, but was left with two million roubles [£18,000] sitting in her bank account, despite having also sent ‘lots of money home to my family’ and ‘spent too much on shopping’. Today, her Instagram account depicts a life of turbo- charged glamour, with images of Lilith riding horses, posing with Gucci handbags and sitting at the wheel of Ferrari sports cars.
Underpinning the perks of the job – and the livelihoods of every prostitute in Dubai – is a basic demographic reality: of the four million people who inhabit the city (nine out of ten of whom are immigrants) around 70 per cent are male and a huge proportion of them are young and single.
Combined with a steady influx of wealthy sex tourists, many from Gulf countries that take a dim view of alcohol and extra-marital procreation, this imbalance has created a huge demand for women offering sexual services.
No official figures exist and estimates vary but, in 2010, The Guardian reported that 30,000 prostitutes were working in Dubai. Since then, the city has roughly doubled in size. Angus Thomas, the founder of Hope Education Project, a charity which works with women trafficked from West Africa, tells me it could now be home to as many as 80,000.
If true, that would equate to one sex worker for every 35 men in the city. What’s more, it would mean one in every 15 woman who live in Dubai are currently making a living by selling their bodies.
These are striking numbers. Yet when I put them to Lilith she betrays not a flicker of surprise. There are, she says, dozens of women like her plying their trade at the Elite Byblos Hotel. (There is, it should be stressed, no suggestion the management is aware if their existence.)
What’s more, it is one of at least three ‘working hotels’ within a 20-minute drive of the Palm Jumeirah. ‘This hotel is mostly Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian girls,’ she says. ‘In others near here are Latvians and Eastern Europeans. Farther away, you get ones where the girls from Thailand and Asia are. But that is just a fraction of the total amount of ladies working in Dubai, because many of my friends use rented apartments instead of hotels.’
Then, she adds, you have a second small army of prostitutes who trawl sports bars and nightclubs searching for single men willing to take them home.
‘You have to pay for drinks, lose energy from dancing. It’s not my style. I’m more lazy. I like to wake up, take a shower, do maquillage [make-up], then an agency will send me a message and half an hour later I open the door and a customer is here.’
The bewildering scale of the local sex trade can be glimpsed online. Dozens of websites advertise escort services in Dubai, each touting hundreds of call girls.
One which represents Lilith, Jumeirah Escorts, claims to have more than 450 women on its books in that neighbourhood alone. In theory, this secret industry is highly illegal. Like most Islamic countries, the United Arab Emirates has a legal system rooted in Sharia law which forbids everything from blasphemy to homosexuality and adultery.
Sex outside marriage was only decriminalised in 2021, signs in shopping malls still warn against ‘overt displays of affection’, pornographic websites are blocked and the government’s website warns visitors that ‘holding hands is acceptable but kissing and hugging in public is not’.
A few months ago, 19-year-old British tourist Marcus Fakana was given a one-year prison sentence for having a consensual romance with a female holidaymaker just a few months younger than him. (He was pardoned after serving seven months.)
Lilith, who hails from Krasnodar near the Black Sea, earns her living as one of Dubai’s tens of thousands of prostitutes. She charges a half-hourly rate of 1,600 dirhams, or £320
‘Escort ladies help Dubai make money,’ is how Lilith puts it. ‘If there were no escort ladies, many people wouldn’t visit. Others wouldn’t want to live here. Everyone knows this’
In practice, Dubai’s ruling class takes a pragmatic approach with regard to the world’s oldest profession, giving every impression of quietly tolerating it.
‘Escort ladies help Dubai make money,’ is how Lilith puts it.
‘If there were no escort ladies, many people wouldn’t visit. Others wouldn’t want to live here. Everyone knows this, I think, so they let you work so long as you don’t take drugs or cause a problem.
‘Other Arab countries are different. For example, I spent two weeks working in Saudi Arabia, in Jeddah and Riyadh. My friend told me to come as you can make a lot of money. But it felt dangerous. If the authorities catch you, it’s one year in prison. And if you are with a client who has drugs in their blood, it’s three years.
‘Here it’s just deportation and so long as your blood is clean, there’s no prison. This feels like a very easy place to work.’
One night this week, I ventured out to a Palm Jumeriah venue named FIVE, which markets itself as ‘Dubai’s hottest beach hotel’.
Sitting alone at the poolside bar, drinking a £12 bottle of imported lager, I was propositioned by two prostitutes within an hour – one Thai, the other Brazilian. Each introduced themselves then, within five minutes, asked if I would like to join them in an upstairs room for a ‘party’. Watching proceedings with a wry smile was Hugo, a former public schoolboy in his late 20s who works in finance and moved to the UAE this year after growing tired ‘of handing half of all the money I earn to Rachel Reeves’.
‘Ridiculous, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘I am single and at the age where I’d love to meet a nice girl and settle down. But prostitutes make that pretty much impossible because they outnumber normal women.
‘In a place like this, the rule of thumb is that the better looking a woman is, the more likely that she’s a hooker.’
Dating apps are no better, he says. ‘I’ve been on first dates where everything seems to be going well, and then at the end of the night the girl will turn around and say: “I’ve had a wonderful time but I can’t see you again because the rent on my apartment is coming up and I have to go home to Slovenia” or wherever. The idea being that I’ll offer to cover their living expenses in return for being allowed to sleep with them. It’s prostitution by another name.’
Another expat, George, tells me: ‘A lot of working girls like to pretend to be a normal single woman and meet men on apps. Then they suggest dates at hotels which are connected to shopping malls, so on the way to the taxi they can swing by Chanel. ‘If the man agrees to buy a handbag he gets sex.’ It’s why, he adds, there is a huge online market for second-hand designer goods. ‘The handbags all end up on a re-sale website called The Luxury Closet, which is massive in the Emirates.’
Lilith, for her part, goes shopping most days, after eating breakfast at the Elite Byblos Hotel’s buffet (it’s included in her nightly room rate) and visiting either its gym or swimming pool. Occasionally she has daytime visits from clients, but work generally begins around 11pm.
Over the past year, she’s slept with almost every nationality but the 250,000-odd Britons who live in Dubai made up a particularly high proportion of clients during July and August, when wives and children returned to the UK to escape summer temperatures.
‘Now we are in September it’s not so good because the school is back,’ she complains.
‘I always ask a client: “Are you married?” It’s very interesting to me. If he says “yes”, I then want to know, “why did you come?” and I hear many stories. One might say, “my wife is pregnant” or “my wife doesn’t want sex”, or “we have problems”. Some say they really love their wife or girlfriend. Everyone has a story.’
Different cultures in the melting pot of Dubai have very different attitudes to infidelity, Lilith adds. Britons tend to be embarrassed and furtive, while Italians (who, in her view, are ‘the best lovers’) take a more shameless approach to adultery.
The most bizarre tend, however, to be Muslim men. ‘The ones who are from Dagestan, Kazakhstan or Chechnya will tell me they cannot have sex with me because it is ‘haram’ [forbidden], she says, explaining that they instead insist on non-penetrative acts.
Many Arab clients, meanwhile, insist on conducting an Islamic wedding ceremony called a ‘nikah’ before sleeping with a Dubai prostitute. ‘They give me some words to say in Arabic and then, when we have sex, they think it is not haram. After, they give me more words to say in Arabic and they say: “We are now divorced.” It’s like a tradition but I find it funny.’
Not every prostitute in Dubai enjoys their work quite so much as Lilith, however – as I discover when I pay a visit to Deira, a less salubrious neighbourhood adjacent to the city’s bustling airport and nicknamed ‘dirty Deira’ by expats.
Unlike more upscale tourist areas, where sexual transactions are relatively discreet, this area is home to a flourishing and seemingly very public red-light district. Matters take a bizarre turn shortly after 9pm, as I am eating dinner, when half a dozen scantily-clad women walk into the downstairs bar of the Radisson Blu hotel and begin shamelessly propositioning any male customer who is dining alone.
A woman named Sara, who claims to be from Tajikistan, plonks herself next to me and promptly offers ‘a massage and make love’ in her room upstairs for 1,500 dirhams (£300).
After politely declining, I make my way to the nearby Moscow Hotel, a four-star establishment down the road.
Here things are more shocking still: this large property, in the heart of a Middle Eastern city, is to all intents and purposes operating as a brothel.
Its downstairs bar contains almost 50 girls, many of them very young, in varying states of undress. They are competing for the attention of half a dozen burly Russian men and a handful of Emiratis wearing traditional white Kandura robes. Customers are asked to choose which girl they’d like to sit with before being assigned a table. Drinking alone is not an option.
On the street outside, the scene is barely more edifying. I witness protracted negotiations between one prostitute and a client, before being asked to ‘come for a walk’ by a rotund Latvian girl with horribly bruised legs who is clearly being watched over by a sinister-looking pimp.
A similar experience in 2019 is what persuaded Angus Thomas to set up his charity. Visiting a Deira supermarket after dark, during a long-haul flight layover, he was approached by a young West African woman named Amy.
He discovered she had been trafficked to Dubai from Nigeria and was being held in unspeakably brutal conditions by a Nigerian woman named Christy Gold who had confiscated her passport and was forcing her to sleep with dozens of men each day, before confiscating the proceeds. Thomas resolved to help Amy and over the ensuing nine months uncovered five separate trafficking rings and helped to rescue nine women who had been forced into prostitution by Gold, who was later prosecuted.
Although his Hope Education Project and local contacts have since been involved in repatriating dozens more, he believes as many as 20,000 trafficked women may still be held in the country.
If true, that would mean one in four of the prostitutes on the streets of this desert city are being held against their will.
‘The people who run the UAE are trying to make Dubai the place to be but, if you want that to be the case, you need to keep workers happy,’ says Thomas.
‘The problem is that wherever there is money and men you get sex workers.
‘And wherever you get sex workers, you’ll find abuse.’
There is, in other words, more to Dubai’s cash-soaked sex trade than ‘opulence and grandeur’.
While some women are undoubtedly getting rich off its proceeds, there is a dark side to the city they call Sodom Sur Mer.
