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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    The issue has been debated recently in the Swedish, Danish, Swiss, British, Thai and Cypriot parliaments. Germany last year stiffened antitrafficking laws, and Belgium is set to do likewise. France has cracked down on the use of its Minitel — a widely distributed video-text telephone service — for child-prostitution ads. But police face a daunting task in stemming the sex trade. Many of the foreign-women victims, unable to speak the language of the country, are loath to file complaints for fear of being injured by pimps or deported by authorities. And faced with the difficulty of sorting out which women are prostitutes by choice and which are coerced, many officials shrug off the problem. "Almost all the girls who come to work in cabarets know what they are getting into," says a top Swiss bureaucrat. "We cannot reform the world's morals."

    Despite such sentiments, this week in Vienna, in conjunction with the World Conference on Human Rights, antiprostitution groups will propose a controversial update of the United Nations' 1949 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others. The proposal, to completely ban sex-for-sale — and not just forced prostitution — is endorsed by UNESCO. Legalized prostitution, as in the Netherlands and Germany, "is an open door for traffickers," claims Janice Raymond, an activist with the U.S.-based Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. Many experts, however, say a hard-line approach is impractical. "Prostitutes should be paid better, protected from abuse and perhaps taken into the social-security system," says Marie-France Botte, who runs rescue centers for child prostitutes in Thailand for Doctors Without Borders, the French doctors' group. "You won't get anywhere by moralizing."

    The policy debates of do-gooders are a world away from Bombay's Falkland Road district, where 8,000 prostitutes are packed into rabbit-warren brothels. There, on a hot, listless afternoon, Manju flashes an inviting smile, beckoning passersby with lewd remarks and suggestive body movements. With the fair skin and lovely slanted eyes of the Nepalese, so exotic to Indian men, she attracts an average of seven customers a day. Her fee: $1 each — of which the brothel owner, a squat, brutal woman, takes more than half. Despite her sexy put-on, her shiny blue dress cut above the knee and her vivid makeup, Manju, 20, radiates an odd schoolgirlish innocence, accentuated by the big white bow that adorns her hair. Alternately, she giggles shyly in talking about her life and grows frightened as she fears that the brothel owner might catch her conversing with a stranger.

    Her story is typical. Daughter of a poor farmer in a hamlet three days' walk from Katmandu, Manju was 12 when her mother died. Unable to cope with three children, her father handed her over a few months later to two strangers: she thought she was going to Bombay to work as a housemaid. When the two men sold her to a pimp for $1,000, "there was nothing I could do," she says. "I was trapped." She is never allowed to set foot outside the brothel. Moreover, she is expected to repay her full purchase price. Rent, food and clothing are also deducted from her wages, so that seven years later, she is told she still owes $300.

    Helpless, Manju, like many in her profession, is resigned to her fate. Returning home would not be an improvement. "Even if you work 24 hours a day in Nepal, you do not get enough to eat," she explains. "One can endure anything except hunger. If I were a man, maybe I would have committed murder to fill my stomach. But as a woman, I became a prostitute." It is a choice being forced upon too many. Along the highway of cheap love that now circles the globe, the cost in destroyed lives has become a blight to rival any of the depredations mankind has inflicted on itself.

    — With reporting by Nomi Morris / Berlin; Anita Pratap / Bombay; Susanna M. Schrobsdorf / Brussels; and James Wilde / Istanbul; with other bureaus

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