By Alex Mita
MALE PROSTITUTES advertising their services on the walls of Nicosia’s public toilets are proving a challenge for the local authorities who are forced to spend thousands of pounds annually to keep the toilets operational.
The walls of the public toilets at Eleftheria Square are riddled with mobile telephone numbers of men offering their services in detail, and according to health department official Philippos Petsas, the municipality is finding the situation almost impossible to control.
“We have a serious problem with these people,” he told the Cyprus Mail yesterday.
“They walk in they write what they want to write on the walls and then we have to clean up and paint again and again.”
Petsas said the only way to prevent male prostitutes from vandalising the toilets was to close them during the night.
“The problem with that though is that we could have a serious health problem if we lock the toilets because people who find them locked would just go ahead and relieve themselves in the park,” he said.
There had been suggestions that the municipality would be hiring security guards to keep watch on the toilets. But according to Petsas, placing security guards would not solve the problem.
“We would have to have security guards for 21 toilets, which is practically impossible to do on a 24-hour basis,” he said.
“The other problem of course is how do you check whether someone is writing on the walls while he is inside the cubicle? The only way to do that would be to place cameras, but I don’t think people are going to like that.
“There was also a suggestion to have a system similar to that in the UK where you have to pay to use the toilets, he said. “Unfortunately in this country if someone doesn’t have the money, or doesn’t want to pay, he would just go ahead and relieve himself somewhere else.”
Petsas said plans to upgrade the toilets had to be put off until a solution was found.
“We have to upgrade our public toilets to EU standards, but we are finding it difficult to come up with a plan that would put people off writing on the walls and damaging the toilets,” he said.
“But we are working on it and we will be putting out tenders for the upgrades within the next month.”
According to a police source, public toilets are also a haven for drug dealers and users and that the light around the toilets in the parks is not adequate to put people off.
“We found drug users inside the toilets,” the source said. “On one occasion, we found a man who had overdosed on heroin and we had to rush him to hospital.
“Those areas are ideal for drug users because they are dark and there is a lot of cover. The lighting around the parks is not good, but we have stepped up police patrols in order to try and control the situation.”
