FRANKFURT (ILO News) - A prestigious publishing prize, the 1998 International Nike Award, has been awarded to Ms. Lin Lean Lim of the International Labour Office (ILO) for a recently published study on the sex industry in Southeast Asia. Ms Lim, who authored The Sex Sector: The economic and social bases of prostitution in Southeast Asia (Endnote 1) , will accept the award on Saturday, 10 October at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany.
The prize was launched in 1997 by feminist writer Shere Hite at the Frankfurt Book Fair to honour nonfiction writing by women which contributes to the advancement of thinking about the situation of women in the world. The ILO publication was chosen by a jury including women from five continents, all of whom are renowned for their writings and activism.
The ILO study examines the social and economic forces driving the growth of the sex industry in four Southeast Asian countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. It says that the provision of sexual services has assumed the dimensions of a full-blown commercial sector, one that provides direct and indirect employment to millions of workers and contributes substantially to national incomes throughout the region.
Ms Lim, an ILO researcher and employment policy expert, thanked the jury on behalf of the ILO for its decision and said that she hoped "the award would focus attention on the many misunderstandings and the huge public policy void surrounding the sex sector as well as on the plight of its many innocent victims, including trafficked women and children."
She said that "the growing scale of prostitution raises alarming questions, not only about public health, morality and gender discrimination, but about the basic human rights of the ever-increasing numbers of commercial sex workers, most of whom would appear to enter the business willingly, but many of whom are forced, trafficked, tricked or exploited into sex work." She said that migrant women were a particularly vulnerable group and evidence abounds of "ruthlessly efficient international networks directing trafficking of migrant prostitutes throughout Asia and beyond."
Lin Lim added that while the conditions of adult sex workers differ greatly, ranging from freely chosen and highly remunerative to exploitation and virtual slavery, "there is no such ambiguity concerning child prostitution," which she said should be considered as a much more serious problem than adult prostitution.
"Adults can choose to become prostitutes or to work in pornography. Children cannot. Children are much more vulnerable and helpless against the established structures and vested interests of the sex sector and much more likely to be victims of debt bondage, trafficking, physical violence or torture. They are much more susceptible to diseases, including HIV/AIDS and suffer lifelong physical and psychological trauma. While there is a range of possible options for coping with the increase in adult prostitution, there should be only one goal for child prostitution - to eliminate it."
The report estimates that anywhere between 0.25 per cent and 1.5 per cent of the total female population in the study countries are engaged in prostitution. Related activities (including the numerous bars, hotels, entertainment facilities and tourist agencies that thrive on prostitution), employ literally millions more workers. Large segments of the population in Southeast Asia - notably the rural-poor families who often send their daughters to work as prostitutes - rely upon remittances from prostitution for their well-being if not for their outright survival. However, in spite of the size and economic importance of prostitution, it is almost entirely unregulated and goes unrecognised in official statistics, development plans and government budgets of almost all countries worldwide.
The report emphasizes the economic bases of prostitution, highlighting the strong economic incentives that drive women to enter the sector, despite the social stigma and danger attached to the work Sex work is often better paid than most of the options available to young, often uneducated women. The report also highlights the many vested economic interests that derive profit from the activities rather than the women and children who are the ones who are commercially sexually exploited. The report stresses that in order to come to terms with the problems of prostitution, it is necessary to tackle these various vested interests. These include a wide range of social actors, including the families of the women and children who depend on the revenues generated by prostitution and who sometimes sell their children into prostitution, the various sex establishments which include large swathes of the entertainment and travel & tourism industries and corrupt officials without which international trafficking networks could not operate with impunity.
The report argues that the growth of prostitution is probably linked, albeit inadvertently, to the macro-economic policies of governments which have a tendency to spawn rapid urbanisation at the expense of rural development, to promote cheap labour for industrialization, to facilitate the export of female labour for overseas employment and to promote tourism as a foreign exchange earner. All these features of modern, export-oriented economies, combined with the pervasive lack of social safety nets and deep-rooted gender discrimination against females, probably contribute to the growth of the sex sector.
The report says that "measures targeting the sex sector have to consider moral, religious, health, human rights and criminal issues in addressing a phenomenon that is mainly economic in nature." However, the report states categorically that it is outside the purview of the ILO to take a stand on whether countries should legalize prostitution. According to Lin Lim, "recognition of prostitution as an economic sector does not mean that the ILO is calling for the legalization of prostitution." The book takes pains to explain the different possible legal approaches - criminalization and total prohibition, legalization which involves registration and regulation of the sex establishments and the prostitutes, and decriminalization which treats the prostitutes as victims and imposes stronger criminal sanctions on those who traffic in, exploit or abuse prostitutes. But the ILO insists that it is for countries themselves to decide on the legal stance to adopt.
The ILO is the United Nations' specialised agency for workplace issues and for the development and implementation of international labour standards. Founded in 1919, it is the oldest United Nations agency. The ILO counts 174 member States.
Endnote 1:
The Sex Sector: The economic and social bases of prostitution
in Southeast Asia edited by Lin Lean Lim, International
Labour Office, Geneva, 1998. ISBN 92-2-109522-3. Price: 35 Swiss
francs.