by Judith Mirkinson
Entertainment girls, hospitality girls, prostitutes, mail-order brides and massage girls: They're all part of the globalization of the world's economy. Around the world, women and children are being sold for profit and shipped across borders, through one airport to another, sometimes overland - commodities in the multibillion dollar transnational sex-trafficking industry.
The largest segment of the global market in women is international prostitution, followed closely by the mail-order bride industry and the export of "domestic workers" (who can be expected to send foreign capital back home).
None of this is new. Women have been bought and sold for thousands of years. We're only too familiar with the "world's oldest profession." Mail-order brides have also been commonplace (remember the hit film, The Piano?) The difference now is that the sale of women has become an organized and systematized global industry.
This free trade in sex directs poor women to richer men. The flow of poor women from the South to North is the greatest, although now there is also an increase of women from the former Eastern bloc. The most frequent buyers are found in Europe, North America, Japan, Australia and the Middle East.
The women come from rural areas and city slums. They are either recruited to work in tourism or kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery. In some countries there are markets where women are actually sold in the streets.
To call most of them "women" is a misnomer. Often they are only 10- to 15-year-old girls. Bought for $400 to $800, they are told that they must earn this money back before they can leave the brothel. They're charged for their food, housing and clothes and usually receive only 20 percent of the money they earn.
They often earn four to five times what they owe before their managers tell them they can leave. Once they are free, these women are often no better off than before. They know no livelihood other than sex work and they have no homes - they have been stigmatized for life.
The numbers are staggering. It is believed that from one to two million women and children are trafficked each year. During a 1991 conference of Southeast Asian women's organizations, it was estimated that 30 million women had been sold worldwide since the mid-'70s. Over 100,000 women are shipped each year to Japan to serve in indentured servitude in bars and brothels. Thousands of young women and girls are sent from Nepal to India and from Burma to Thailand.
In 1994, 200,000 women were sent from Bangladesh to Pakistan. Young women have been found in China on their way to the brothels of Bangkok. Women from Latin America and Africa are turning up in Thailand and Europe. Women from Latin America and the Caribbean are shipped to the US. (These numbers mostly exclude the trafficking of "domestic" workers.)
World Banking on the Sex Trade
During the '60s and '70s, tourism became one of the big industries for developing nations. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the US Agency for International Development urged countries to exploit their natural resources by developing resorts and hotels to attract foreign capital. Part and parcel of these new tourist developments was sex. Package tours were developed to include airfare, accommodations, cars - and women (or men, or children) for sexual pleasure. In Thailand, travel brochures promoted "sun, sea, and sex." They build on the patriarchal and racist fantasies of European, Japanese, American and Australian men by touting the "exotic, erotic subservience" of Asian women.
The war in Vietnam brought a military buildup in Asia that ironically proved fortuitous to many countries' economies. Burgeoning sex industries erupted outside US military bases in Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines and Okinawa. Rest and recreation ("R & R") actually created new cities and added much-needed capital to the overall economy of each nation. It is estimated that by the mid-'80s, the sex industries around US bases in the Philippines had generated more than $500 million. At the end of the war in Vietnam, Saigon had 500,000 prostituted women - equal to the total population of Saigon before the war.
Many of these countries developed policies and passed legislation to aid the sex business and "support the boys." Thailand, for example, passed an "Entertainment Act" that included an incredible policy called "Hired Wife Services." By the mid-'70s, there were 800,000 prostituted Thai women.
The Post-War Sex Boom
After the end of the Vietnam War, Asia's sex industry scrambled to attract a new generation of foreign clients through the creation of "sex tours." Men were convinced that practices frowned upon or illegal in their own countries would be available in places like Bangkok and Manila. (This has become true for both heterosexual and homosexual men. The sale of young boys is also big business.)
"If you want extremely young girls, or, generally speaking, if you want something for which you could get 'hanged' in your own country, you can find it in these places without the risk of getting hanged." - German tourist brochure on Thailand, 1983
Tourists arrived by the thousands, bringing in much-needed yen, marks, and dollars. Almost 75 percent of the five million tourists who come to Thailand each year are males. Tourism has emerged as the single largest foreign exchange earner in Nepal, Thailand, and the Philippines. Men are guaranteed a good time and, to sweeten the deal, are given the impression that they are actually doing good deeds.
Tax-free zones, industrial zones, and capital growth centers are becoming centers for trafficking. One of the lures for businesses and their employees is the promise of available women. The police and governments are completely complicit in the running of the sex trade. Sexual services are provided on a regular basis to government officials to keep them in line.
The Harvesting of Children
Entire villages in northern Thailand and southern Burma are being drained of girl children. In a strange twist, for the first time, parents are looking forward to the birth of a girl rather than that of a boy. They know that they will have a guaranteed wage earner. Most of these families feel they have no other choice than to give up some of their children.
Fueled by the thrill of child sex and the fear of AIDS, the sex industry has a growing appetite for younger and younger children. In many countries there is an age-old notion that having sex with a virgin can cure venereal disease. This dovetails with the belief that the younger the child is, the more likely she or he won't have slept with anyone and therefore won't be infected with AIDS. Girls and boys as young as eight years old are now being purchased for their sexual services. It is estimated that there are 800,000 child prostitutes in Thailand, 400,000 in India, 250,000 in Brazil and 60,000 in the Philippines. Each year, an estimated 20,000 young girls and boys are brought from Burma to Thailand to labor in the sex trade.
Children are actually more prone to AIDS. It is estimated that 20 to 30 percent of child prostitutes are HIV-positive. Fifty percent of the under-18 prostitutes in Thailand are believed to be HIV-positive. When you extrapolate these numbers to the entire population, the number of women and men who will have AIDS by the year 2000 is in the millions.
Sex-trafficking is not limited to "under-developed nations." It is now becoming commonplace to see fathers from Eastern Europe bringing their young daughters to work in the sex-industries in Western European cities.
The psychological consequences of this mass brutalization of children are only beginning to be understood. As one social worker who works with former child prostitutes in Thailand put it, "They remind me of empty shells - so much missing, no sense of self, no hope, no trust."
Mail-Order Brides
"MOBs" - you've probably seen the ads in the newspapers, but these ads aren't just about people finding companions. They represent million-dollar businesses. It's estimated that there are at least 50,000 Filipina mail-order brides in the US alone. The buyers are most often older white men who are looking for women as servants and sex partners. They've bought the message that Filipina women are passive and anxious to please - just the kind of women they want.
Many of these women become virtual slaves rather than happy homemakers. Sometimes these "marriages" work out. Many times they don't. Women have been tortured and killed. While not all the husbands prove to be psychotic, the incidence of violence against mail-order brides remains extremely high.
The GABRIELA Network, a US-based support organization for Filipina women, has convinced Harper's magazine to stop running ads for mail-order brides. Now, women from around the US are beginning to demand that their local papers stop the ads as well.
Domestic Workers
Part of the IMF and World Bank economic plan developed for the Philippines and other countries during the late '60s and '70s involved the idea of labor export.
In the Philippines, an Overseas Employment Agency was established to encourage the exodus of foreign workers. In the '70s, labor exports mainly involved men sent to the Middle East to work in construction. By the late '70s and '80s, however, the majority of Philippine nationals working outside the country were women. The following estimates of their numbers exclude the US and Canada: 75,000 prostituted women in Japan; 50,000 maids in Singapore; 50,000 domestics/prostituted women in Hong Kong; 75,000 domestics in England; 50,000 domestics in Spain; 75,000 domestics in Italy; 50,000 domestics in Germany; 150,000 domestics in the Middle East.
In Canada, domestic workers have to be married, or live in the employer's home for two years, before becoming eligible for residency. In Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, passports are taken from domestic workers the minute they arrive at the airport. In Hong Kong and Singapore, passports are held by the employer.
Although there are supposed to be laws guaranteeing their well-being, many of these women do not receive their full salaries and are not given adequate housing or health care. But the amount of money sent back to their home countries is enormous. Filipinas working abroad send back an estimated $2 billion a year.
The Defeminization of Society
The sex industry's exploitation of women touches on two of the basic foundations of Western society - capitalism and patriarchy.
Throughout history, patriarchy has valued women not as persons but as things, pieces of property to be bought and sold. Although this view was not held in all societies and at all times, it is common enough.
There is much evidence to suggest that it has been women who have held communities together and that it is through women that cultures are developed, sustained and passed down to the next generation.
So what are the implications when societies are stripped of so many of their women? (For the first time in 500 years, there are now more men than women in the Philippines.) The very fabric of life begins to disintegrate. After a while, it doesn't take much to be able sell off the children as well.
Unfortunately, the notion of woman-as-object is not going to go away anytime soon (nor are the millions of sex-related jobs that generate enormous sums of money for the industry).
Despite the periodic glamorization of prostitutes in movies and on TV, prostitutes continue to be looked down upon as people who somehow deserve their fate. But prostitutes are not criminals and they should not be penalized or jailed. Given the nature of sex-trafficking, one cannot believe that any significant portion of these women freely choose their profession. Many women's organizations have insisted on changing the nomenclature, preferring the term, "prostituted women," to highlight the presence of coercion.
By organizing against sex trafficking, women are challenging the view of themselves as objects and commodities. In doing so, they are beginning to unravel the historic connection between capitalism and patriarchy, challenging the concept that people are merely things to be moved around or discarded according to the needs of the marketplace.
Judith Mirkinson is a member of the editorial board of Breakthrough, the political journal of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee.
Excerpted from People's Rights [Legal Research and Resource Center for Human Rights, 7 Al Higaz St., Roxi, Heliopolis, Cairo, Egypt] as featured in Sex Crimes and Lust Market, a special issue of IDOC Internazionale [Via S. Maria dell'Anima, 30, 00186 Rome, Italy, idoc@gn.apc.org] The article originally appeared in the Spring 1994 issue of Breakthrough, the political journal of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee [PO Box 14422, San Francisco, CA 94114 USA].
Additional News:
Women Organize for Basic Rights
During the Vienna Conference on Human Rights held in June of 1993, women organized a special tribunal to demand that women's basic rights be recognized as human rights. Rape was declared a war crime against women and humanity. Women also demanded an end to the trafficking of women and children.
In their official presentation to the conference, the women observed:
"There is no international instrument in existence which explicitly stipulates that it is a human right to be free of sexual exploitation. Therefore, a new Convention must be promulgated. We introduce the new concept/definition of prostitution which is under the umbrella of sexual exploitation:
"Sexual exploitation is a violation of human dignity, therefore:
"It is a fundamental human right to be free from sexual exploitation in all of its forms. Sexual exploitation is a practice by which person(s) achieve sexual gratification or financial gain, or advancement through the abuse of a person's sexuality by abrogating that person's human right to dignity, equality, autonomy, and physical and mental well-being."
"As Easy as Buying a Pack of Cigarettes..."
"They [sex tours] offer meetings with the most beautiful and young Eastern creatures (age 16 to 24 years) in a soft and sexy surrounding and in the seductive and tropic night of the exotic paradise. You get the feeling that taking a girl here is as easy as buying a pack of cigarettes. Many of the girls in the sex world come from the poor northeastern region of the country or the slums of Bangkok. It has become more a habit that one of the nice looking daughters goes into the business. They have to earn money for the poor family. With this little slave you can do practically everything ... She gives real Thai warmth."
- Excerpts from a Dutch tourist pamphlet on sex tours in Thailand
Fourth UN Conference on Women Held in Beijing
New York - In March 1994, 800 women from around the world met to discuss preparations for the Fourth UN Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. When organizers pored through the official agenda, they found, much to their surprise and rage, that nothing focused on trafficking.
As one Filipina organizer put it, "All they're interested in is economic development on a mega-level. They don't see that women's very human rights are involved. Trafficking is one of the most dire problems facing women today and it must be addressed and stopped."
Sex Tourism on the Internet
US - "Welcome to the exotic world of Asia," says an Internet website provided by the US-based Ultra Infoseek Company. Click on the advisory page and you will see dozens of pictures of nude teenage Asian girls.
More than 100 websites are used exclusively to promote teenage commercial sex in Asia. The Internet sex site owners charge from $100 to $150 for membership and information about sex workers.
Turning lust into dollars, the sex industry earns about $8 billion a year from pornography, telephone sex, and Internet sex tours according to James Ridgeway, author of Red Light: Inside the Sex Industry.
- Haider Rizvi, Inter Press Service
International Action
Several international treaties have condemned trafficking as a gross violation of human rights. The 1949 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others specifically addresses the issue. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women also obliges states to enact legislation to suppress all forms of traffic in women.
Enforcement of these international covenants has been disturbingly lax. The Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women [PO Box 1281, Bangrak PO, Bangkok 10500, Thailand] is dedicated to improving protections for women under strictly enforced international law.
Red Light, Green Light: The Global Trade of Women