Global Policy Forum

Jyoti Sanghera

Millions of women and young girls, primarily from marginalized and impoverished communities of the third world, eke out a living in burgeoning red light districts of urban metropoles either in their own or neighboring countries. Hundreds of thousands of young, third world women have ended up in the urban centers of the West or Japan, providing sexual services to a vast array of primarily male clientele via an ever-expanding sex industry in the advanced, industrialized world. Whether opting to migrate voluntarily to sites of sex trade, or trafficked through means of deceit or coercion, prostitution has increasingly become a means of sustaining and maintaining vast numbers of third world women and their families.

To embark upon activism from a morally judgmental or a feministically purist platform is to indirectly acknowledge the privilege of one's own social location. Such practice merely serves to highlight the gap between those who live the reality of prostitution daily and those who dole out prescriptive solutions from afar. A genuine commitment to ensuring the right to individual and collective self-determination of women in the sex trade business entails that first and foremost, a multifaceted and comprehensive analysis of prostitution, in all its complexity, is developed.

The New Face of Prostitution

As accepted earlier and reinforced by common adage, prostitution is among the oldest professions. This is due to the fact that the social and economic vulnerability of women and their attendant powerlessness in society has left only a small range of options open to them to eke out a livelihood. So prostitution is indeed the twin sibling of poverty, and as old as indigence, destitution and compulsion.

The fundamental question we need to ask is: what is so novel and different about the contemporary form of prostitution which has come to exist in many regions of, particularly the third world, today?

Reams of data flowing in from various sites attests to the fact that not only is sex trade a transnational industry but that, among the most profitable industrial enterprises globally today, prostitution occupies the place of pride. As in the case of every major multinational enterprise under global capitalism, the principal players and beneficiaries of the sex industry are cohesive and organized. They have managed to secure, through bribes and payoffs, the services of politicians, police personnel, and high functionaries. Capital, labor and organization move relatively unhindered within and transregionally. A combination of the legal and illegal, hence, brings to the sex industry margins of profit which are astronomical. Reportedly, material benefits accruing to organizers of the sex industry currently equal those flowing out of the global clandestine trade in arms and narcotics.

A New Development Strategy

The second factor which makes sex trade qualitatively different today is that prostitution is no more simply the means of survival or material gains for sections of underprivileged women. It is the chosen strategy for survival, and indeed development, by nations.

To meet their balance of payments and debt deficits, innumerable countries of Asia, Latin America, and Africa have been encouraged by international bodies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to develop their tourism and entertainment industries. Vast amounts of loans have been advanced by these organizations to many countries. Thailand, the Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Chile, Guatemala, to name a few, have been actively encouraged to develop their tourism sector. At each of these sites (some more than others), the burgeoning tourism and leisure industry, without exception, has incorporated and indeed, focused disproportionately on developing sex trade into an industry.

The fact that forces of global capitalism, as well as its emissaries (the World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organization), ardently encourage a certain strategy for national development in these countries is vitally crucial. Sex tourism, sex entertainment, and indeed the sex industry, are bestowed with an international and national legitimacy.

Women and Children as a New Raw Resource

The third aspect which defines the newness of contemporary prostitution is the manner in which particularly third world women's bodies are related to the modern sex industry. A vast body of recent research data clearly demonstrates that especially women and children from those regions of the world which have been under the grip of structural adjustments and economic liberalization are increasingly defined as the new raw resource. They constitute the prime export item for national development and international trade. This human cash crop is unique in that it offers a double-featured advantage: women's bodies are both goods and services at the same time. Consequently, while the third world has been the principal source of raw resources, goods, and labor since colonial times, in today's age of globalization the new raw resources in national development as well as international trade are women and increasingly children.

Hence, we find Asian, African, Latin American, and increasingly, East European women either migrating voluntarily or trafficked and traded within and across continents, to be slotted in the sex and service industries. The flow of migration and traffic in women is from the rural to the urban, and from the less industrialized to the industrialized world.

Socioeconomic Causes

The changing and intensifying dimensions of the sex industry in most third world countries cannot be understood independently of the rapidly altering socioeconomic contours in the region. The growing saga of development in these countries, especially, in the wake of economic liberalization, while registering an increase in overall economic growth, has meant deepening immiseration, displacement, and rising unemployment for rural populations and cultural minorities as well as for the urban poor.

The substitution of traditional subsistence farming with modern technology-based, commercial agribusiness has meant that large masses of rural people who subsisted on traditional agriculture have been dispossessed and displaced. This crisis is intensified in the case of hill tribes, aboriginal peoples, and ethnic and regional minorities. It is not a coincidence, then, that often close to 80% of the women working in the sex industry of various regions belong to tribal and socially marginalized communities.

In the wake of globalization of the world economy, pauperization and displacement of large sections of marginalized peoples who are left with few means to subsist on except their bodies and labor has created a new poverty. Within this process, women and children who are often the most disadvantaged account for a majority of the new poor. Their productive labor has been exploited by multinational corporations in sweatshops in export production zones, and their reproductive labor is exploited via the sex and tourism industry.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C íŸ 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.