Part II: Speed
dongguan sex workers China’s Sex Industry ‘Too Big to Fail’ By Lu Chen, Epoch Times | February 19, 2014
[Warm Up]
China has launched a high-profile campaign against prostitution recently, with loud editorials in the state-run press and round-ups of hundreds of prostitutes who are humiliated in front of the cameras. No media organization in China is allowed to question the campaign, according to recent propaganda directives leaked online.
The purpose of the thunderous crackdown is to show that Communist Party leaders are serious about attacking corruption—and prostitution is a great hotbed of corruption.
Simultaneously, however, analysts are questioning whether the crackdown is really being conducted in earnest. Over the last few decades, prostitution has grown so much that it seems simply impractical to stamp out entirely. It’s a backbone industry of the country now.
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Target Dongguan
The manufacturing city of Dongguan, in the south of China, was the first target of the arrests and propaganda. Official media congratulated the hardworking police who arrested nearly 1,000 prostitutes and clients in nearly 200 locations.
This is only a fraction of the sex industry in Dongguan, however: the sex industry there is had an annual turnover of 50 billion yuan ($8.2 billion) last year, about a seventh of the city’s GDP, said a source familiar with the industry in an interview with Oriental Morning Post, a newspaper in Shanghai.
Dongguan’s economic growth has been above the national average since the 1990s, when the sex industry there took off, the report said. Dongguan is also a manufacturing and assembly center, however.
The source told the Oriental Morning Post that there are 250,000 prostitutes in Dongguan, embedded in places of business like saunas, leisure clubs, hair salons, massage parlors, and nice hotels. Hundreds of thousands more are in associated industries, like jewelry, cosmetics, and transportation.
National Prostitution
Dongguan is perhaps an extreme example of what goes on across China.
Although the sex industry is not considered in the National Bureau of Statistics reports, some researchers in and outside China have looked at the issue.
Wu Hai, a hotel CEO in China, published an “Analysis of the China Sex Industry and Its Impact on Hotel Management” in 2012, which revealed some startling numbers.
The report indicates that the total value of prostitution each year is nearly 500 billion yuan ($82 billion) per year, and that there are around five million sex workers. The price of sex transactions vary depend on the place, but the nationwide average is about 200 yuan ($33) per incident, the report says.
The World Health Organization says that China had an estimated four to six million sex workers in 2008. The industry has expanded rapidly since 1990s.
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‘Too Big To Fail’
He Qinglian, a Chinese economist now living in the United States, said that the sex industry makes a huge contribution to the Chinese economy.
In fact, it’s “too big to fail,” she wrote in a recent analysis for Voice of America’s Mandarin service.
“If China’s economy cannot create new jobs for these grassroots people, an industry that’s connected to 5-7 million people’s careers, and 20-30 million people’s livelihoods (including family members that sex workers need to support) will tenaciously come back, even though some of the authorities want to crackdown on it.”
Activists in China have called for decriminalizing the sex industry, in light of the recent crackdown and the entrenched nature of prostitution.
He Qinglian said that decriminalizing it would lessen the threat of triads to sex workers, encourage them to undergo regular health exams, and possibly decrease the instances of group sex, often reported to be ordered up by corrupt Chinese officials.
‘Gray Zone’
Rapid industrialization and modernization in China after the Cultural Revolution was the seed for the growth of the sex industry, according to Pan Suiming, president and professor at Institute of Sexuality Gender of Renmin University of China.
The reforms in the late 1970s led large numbers of Chinese to join the sex trade, after they had lost their land in the countryside. The influx of prostitutes served a rapidly growing rich population, Pan write in his “History and the Sex Industry.”
Official corruption has been another major stimulus to the growth of prostitution in China. Communist Party officials pay for their trysts with public funds, and sexual bribery is a constant in official transactions in China.
Chinese law says that prostitution is illegal, but it is so rampant as to render the law mostly meaningless—except when the authorities wish to carry out a political campaign.
“The sex industry in China has become a gray zone between the law and reality,” said Zhang Tianliang, an independent analyst of Chinese politics, in an interview.
“On the one hand the Communist Party wants to whitewash itself by not legalizing the sex industry. On the other hand, all levels of Party officials indulge themselves at those places, making it difficult to ban.”
Protection from officials and police is another reason why crackdowns are always short lived.
“The crackdown on prostitution always punishes the prostitutes, who have no political connections or power,” Zhang said. “A lot of the fines from those crackdowns go into peoples’ pockets. And the sex trade in some places is controlled by people with political ties.”
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Source:The Epoch Times
http://m.theepochtimes.com/n3/516205-chinas-sex-industry-too-big-to-fail/
An escort slips into a high-heel shoe in Washington D.C. Tiana Markova-Gold/Redux New report details vast sex economy 03/18/14 04:57 PM By Meredith Clark
[Warm Up]
The illegal sex industry in eight U.S. cities brings in nearly $1 billion a year, according to a new study on sex trafficking and prostitution published Wednesday.
The Urban Institute study, which was funded by a grant from the National Institute for justice to study human trafficking, examined underground markets for sex and child pornography in Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Miami, San Diego, Seattle and Washington, D.C. The study is the first to take such an in-depth look at how the illicit industry functions.
“Because it’s an underground economy, getting reliable information from individuals is very difficult,” Meredith Dank, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute told msnbc. While many earlier estimates on the size and structure of the underground commercial sex economy were based on anecdotal evidence from small samples of people within the sex industry, “what we tried to do was take a more scientific approach.”
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The study found that factors like a lack of economic opportunities, community encouragement and exposure influenced both pimps and sex workers to enter the industry. And, while the study was focused more toward parts of the sex trade that involve coercion or manipulation, the researchers also interviewed 36 sex workers to get a sense of how the industry has changed for them and to study that side of the economy. “Those numbers are part of the estimate as well,” Dank says. “It wasn’t only focused on pimps and traffickers, but those who were more ‘freelance’ as well.”
One of the findings that intrigued Dank was the fact that in six of the eight cities studied, the sex economy shrank from 2003 to 2007. The economic crash of 2008 didn’t spare the sex industry either; pimps and law enforcement officials describe special deals and dramatically lower prices in the wake of the crash. Looking at why those decreases happened and what implications expansion and contraction of the underground commercial sex trade might have now could be a fruitful line of future research, Dank says.
Because the grant that funded the study wanted research on human trafficking and was commissioned by the Justice Department, the report paints an incomplete picture of the sex industry, according to some observers. “The Justice Department funded this study, so it seems official but is hardly impartial,” Melissa Gira Grant, author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work and a journalist who covers sex workers’ issues, told msnbc.
Grant says she worries that the study could be used to further marginalize sex workers under the guise of fighting trafficking, an issue Dank admits is something advocates and law enforcement officials need to be conscious of. “One thing that we made sure not to do, was say we need more arrests, particularly around those who are engaging with the sex trade,” she told msnbc.
“If we’re really focusing on trafficking, a lot of times sex workers and even some trafficking victims are being criminalized as a result. We do not say it’s the right way to go.”
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Source:msnbc
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/inside-the-illegal-sex-industry
Escort girls await customers at Berlin's exclusive Night Club Bel Ami on May 16, 2006 in Berlin, Germany. (Andreas Rentz/Getty) The Economics of Sex Work Thursday, March 13, 2014
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A landmark government study released earlier this week finds that the sex trade can be a very lucrative business.
The report, commissioned by the Justice Department from the Urban Institute, compiled data from eight cities: Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Miami, San Diego, Seattle and Washington, D.C. According to the report, the trade is most lucrative in Atlanta, where it rakes in $290 million annually—more than the underground drug and gun trades combined.
The study also examined the sex trade in the internet age, where advertising sites like BackPage.com have radically changed the business. Robert Kolker, an editor at New York magazine, examined this issue in his book, "Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery." Kolker began his research by exploring a string of prostitution murders on Long Island.
He uncovered a range of economic issues that push many women into the sex trade, topics familiar to Melissa Gira Grant, author of "Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work."
Gira Grant and Kolker discuss the challenges facing many women in the industry, and how the economics of sex work have changed since the birth of the internet.
"I think [the sex trade] is fundamentally different—it's as different as the book industry has been over the last 10 years," says Kolker. "The internet has disrupted sex work, in my opinion, almost as substantially. There are a lot of people that aren't working walking the streets anymore, they aren't working with a pimp anymore, they aren't working with an escort service anymore, and they're just using the internet—BackPage or formerly Craigslist—to be solo practitioners or freelancers."
Kolker says while this report sheds light on some aspects of human trafficking, he says this report ignores this substantial change in the sex trade.
"Anyone new who might be getting into the business, if they're not being trafficked or coerced, they're probably doing it on their own," he says. "This study seems to focus more on pimps than the high-end escort services or the freelancers."
Kolker says that the internet as a vehicle for casual sex work has grown since 2007 and believes that the report may have had an heavier emphasis on this if it were commissioned slightly later.
"This study was commissioned in 2007 and in 2009, something like 30 different attorneys general got together and called Cairgslist the new Times Square," he says.
Gira Grant says the report focuses more on pimps than on independent sex workers because the DOJ has been more concerned about sex trafficking. According to a 2012 report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, trafficking for sexual exploitation is more common in Europe, Central Asia and the Americas, while trafficking for forced labor is more frequently detected in Africa and the Middle East, as well as in South and East Asia and the Pacific.
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Additionally, the U.N. report shows that trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation accounts for 58 percent of all trafficking cases detected globally.
"They didn't get to talk to the kind of people in the sex trade that work independently and who are unlikely to come in contact with law enforcement," says Gira Grant of the DOJ report. "They're getting a very skewed picture of the business that doesn't even itself fully represent how many more people are working on their own and how many more people are using the internet to take charge of their work."
Gira Grant adds that the reason the sex trade has migrated online is because law enforcement have been and continue to aggressively police the streets.
"That's something that's almost totally absent from the study," she says. "It's not surprising that the study can't report itself on how criminalization actually shapes the sex industry, how where the police are more apt to police shapes the sex industry, and in some ways the total failure of that."
Additionally, Gira Grant says that the report from the DOJ recommends that police crackdowns increase and pursue other parts of the sex trade, a strategy she says misses the larger problem—she says aggressive policing has failed people and driven them to the internet, which can put them at greater risk.
"There's a grey area in commercial sex work—people do it for a lot of different reasons," says Kolker, echoing Gira Grant. "The focus remains on trafficking, even though they can't quantify the problem. Even if they think there are fewer underage workers in it now, they don't seem interested in widening their lens and looking anything beyond the idea of coercion and trafficking."
Since the start of the recession, Gira Grant says the business has changed a great deal.
"Sex work has moved in doors, gentrified and privatized, and that's happened even more over the last few years," she says.
Gira Grant says that in the years after the recession and up until today, more and more people who would never solicit a customer on the street may not have a problem using the internet to freelance as a sex worker as a way to get an additional source of revenue while facing steep economic pressure.
"That's one of the most dramatic changes I've seen—somebody who might not ever intend to do this for a long time can put ad up and do a little bit of work here and there if they need to just make the difference between now and the end of the month to their rent," she says. "That's actually quite a different idea of what sex work looks than most people are used to—this is really something people can do occasionally or casually and it doesn't identify who they are, it doesn't make them a criminal and it doesn't make them a victim. It really is a way to earn an income in a really tough time."
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Source:The Take Away
http://www.thetakeaway.org/story/economics-sex-work/
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