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Goodbye madame, hello 'sex sector'
By Laxmi Murthy
July 29, 1999
NEW DELHI - From humble beginnings as a shadowy, brothel-based activity,
prostitution has become a global business integrated into the economic, social
and political life of some Asian countries.
In a report for the International Labor Organization (ILO) last year, editor
Lin Lean Lim wrote that the "scale of prostitution has been enlarged to an
extent where we can justifiably speak of a commercial sex sector."
Case studies of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines revealed the
"illegal" sex business has assumed the dimensions of an industry and has
directly or indirectly contributed to employment, national income and economic
growth.
The Bangkok-based Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) agrees there
is a significant shift taking place in prostitution the world over. "Control is
shifting from the hands of women into those of men," says GAATW's Jyoti
Sanghera. From the "mamasans" of Malaysia to the "gharwalis" of Maharashtra in
India, the reign of the brothel madam is rapidly waning.
Prostitution is acquiring the characteristics of an industry - highly
organized, wages for work in a factory-like atmosphere, anonymity and complete
alienation in the workplace.
Even "the courtesans and geishas peppering literature and folklore have become
dehumanized and objectified into anonymous bodies on a dance floor," the Hong
Kong-based Zi Teng, a concerned group for sex workers, believes.
Although it is difficult to determine the actual size of the industry, the ILO
estimates that between 0.25-1.5 percent of the total female population in four
countries - Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines - are sex
workers, and that the sex sector accounts for between 2 and 14 percent of the
GDPs of those countries.
In India, an estimated 2.3 million women are in prostitution, one fourth of
them minors, in more than 1,000 red light districts across the country.
The financial turnover of the sex sector in Indonesia is estimated at between
$1.2 billion and $3.3 billion per year (0.8-2.3 percent of GDP).
In Thailand, close to $300 million is transferred annually from urban to rural
areas by women working in the sex industry. Significantly, this is much larger
than the budgets of many development programs funded by the Thai government.
The ILO document points out how the increase in disposable incomes of the
middle class has meant an enhanced capacity and motivation of men to buy sexual
services in a much wider and more sophisticated range of settings.
With technology, the industry has gone transnational, like the "mail-order
brides" of Southeast Asia who are selected on the basis of video-film clips,
CDs and via the Internet by clients elsewhere in the world.
The sex industry operates through "front" establishments such as night clubs,
cocktail lounges, karaoke bars, discotheques, saunas and massage parlors,
especially in countries where prostitution is illegal.
Siriporn Skrobanek of the Foundation for Women, Bangkok, says: "Official
policies promoting tourism, migration for employment especially of female
labor, which are important sources of foreign exchange earnings, encourage the
growth of prostitution and even trafficking." Thailand's income from tourism is
about 5 percent of GDP.
Moreover, macro development policies in developing economies also impact on the
proliferation of the sex sector. The virtual disintegration of the public
sector, lack of viable employment, the ghettoization of female labor in poorly
paid, contractual work have contributed to the "feminization of poverty."
The Indonesian study makes the point that workers in the textile, garment,
tobacco and electronics industry, 90 percent of whom are female, often do not
earn enough money to cover their own living expenses, much less to allow them
to remit money to their families.
Yet, absolute poverty cannot be identified as the major cause of prostitution,
since, as the ILO report reveals, all four countries studied recorded
substantial economic progress through the nineties until the collapse two years
ago.
More important is the pattern of economic development and its social impact.
Policies centering on industrialization and export orientation have encouraged
rapid urban development at the cost of relative neglect of rural areas.
Growing income disparities between rural and urban areas assume larger
proportions in the absence of a social safety net. Survival strategies include
"voluntarily" entering the sex industry and families selling children into
prostitution.
Sex-workers' unions are meanwhile demanding recognition of their rights as
workers and attempting to extend proper working conditions and freedom from
exploitation at the workplace - a demand the ILO supports.
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