Prostitution: The Skin Trade

Poverty, chaos and porous borders have turned prostitution into a global growth industry, debasing the women and children of the world

By Margot Hornblower/Paris Monday, June 21, 1993
    • Patrick Zachmann

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    Each month the Thai embassy in Tokyo repatriates about 250 escapees. But Japanese officialdom has been largely indifferent to the plight of prostitutes, and there are several recorded instances in which police, especially in rural areas, have handed escaping girls back to their abusers. Three recent murders — Thai prostitutes who killed their "Mama-sans," or female bosses, while trying to escape — are focusing attention on the women's plight. Citizens' groups, believing the accused are less in the wrong than the deceased, are lobbying for a fair trial. "When I arrived in March 1991, I realized I was sold," Gun, 25, wrote a watchdog group in a letter from the Shimozuma Detention Center. "My life was like an animal's. I was sold three times. I begged [my boss] to let me go home, but she said I owed much money and must pay it back. Every day I had to sleep with men. I was not allowed to leave even during menstruation. I was told if I escaped, they would track me, kill me — and my parents too."

    The sex trade sprouts inexorably in new areas. In Ho Chi Minh City, by one report, the number of prostitutes has recently increased from 10,000 to 50,000. Morocco has become a Mecca for Saudi sex tourists. The next tier of prosperous Asian countries is following in Japan's footsteps, with South Korea and Taiwan developing their own sex-tour operations. And last year, attesting to the growth of market economics, more than 240,000 people engaging in prostitution were arrested in China. Sex tourism takes on ever more ingenious guises as well. To Bombay, a center for inexpensive medical treatment, Arabs are flocking for such common ailments as high blood pressure or skin infections — excuses to stay a week or a month and patronize the brothels that have sprung up around the hospitals. These establishments, catering specially to Arabs, feature dancing girls in gaudily carpeted and chandeliered halls. Once the "patient" chooses his girl, they move into a room with a bed decked in flowers, like the nuptial ritual in glossy Hindi films. The rate: between $100 and $1,000 a night.

    Globally, prostitution plays a significant role in transmitting the AIDS virus. In Haiti, once a favored vacation spot for U.S. homosexuals, the virus flourished for years until political turmoil and negative publicity shut down the trade. But in many places the danger has yet to register. "If a young prostitute is found to have AIDS," says Peter Racine, a counselor who works with Honduran street children in Tegucigalpa, "they send her away to a smaller pueblo, where she continues to work." In Berlin, German streetwalkers are complaining about Polish women pouring into the city and turning unprotected tricks. Naively, the Poles — laid off from regular jobs and trying to support families — hope to cash in quickly and return home in a few months. Raised as Catholics, "their AIDS awareness is nil," says social worker Wiltrud Schenk. "They get embarrassed if you mention the word condom." In Bombay farmers migrate to town off-season for construction jobs. They visit the brothels — where a third of the prostitutes are HIV-positive — and later infect their wives. The virus is sweeping the subcontinent: from half a dozen HIV-positive cases in 1986 to a million today — and an estimated 10 million in the next decade, when the number of people suffering from the full-blown disease is expected to rise to 1 million. Even in worldly-wise Amsterdam, half of the 400 streetwalkers — most of them drug addicts — are reportedly HIV-positive.

    Public concern over the flesh trade is rising. Last year Pope John Paul II expressed "horror over the degrading practice of sex tourism." In 1990 he had warned that "men, women and children must not be used as objects at the expense of their inalienable dignity." And a backlash against the sex trade is taking form in several countries where it has long been entrenched. In Manila the new mayor, Alfredo Lim, vows "to eradicate prostitution," and has padlocked 300 bars. Under a new law, pimps and clients will face prison and deportation. In Karachi human-rights lawyers are mobilizing opinion against rackets that have kidnapped 200,000 Bangladeshi women into prostitution in Pakistan. In Negombo, Sri Lanka, a recent mecca for European pedophiles, Catholic priests staged protest marches until embarrassed authorities agreed to combat the trade.

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