A recent report by the International Labor Organization -- the United Nations labor panel -- shows that not all of Asia's problems are economic. "The Sex Sector: The Economic and Social Bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia" is the ILO's 222-page survey of what it calls "sex work" in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
"The sex trade is a flourishing economic enterprise," the ILO asserts, "and should be officially recognized as such." The study stopped short of calling for legalization of prostitution, but its editor, Lin Lim, said that "many choose it as the most viable, lucrative alternative."
The ILO report laments the fact that the "sex sector is not recognized as an economic sector in official statistics, development plans or government budgets" in the countries studied. But "the revenues [prostitution] generates are crucial to the livelihoods and earnings potential of millions of workers beyond the prostitutes themselves." Based on evidence from the 1980s recession, Lim concludes that "it is very likely that women who lose their jobs in manufacturing and other service sectors and whose families rely on their remittances may be driven to enter the sex sector."
In Thailand, the ILO found that prostitutes were sending as much as $ 300 million to their rural relatives each year. Based on that figure, the ILO report estimated Thailand's annual income from prostitution to be between $ 22 billion and $ 27 billion. The sex industry's revenues in Indonesia were estimated to be between $ 1.2 billion and $ 3.3 billion yearly. The study was researched before Asia's current economic crisis, but Lim says "the economic and social forces behind the sex trade show no signs of abating, especially in the face of the region's rising unemployment."
Nowhere does the U.N. charter laud prostitution as a "flourishing economic enterprise" or call for it to be "recognized as an economic sector in official statistics, development plans or government budgets." Yet this is exactly what the ILO report states. If such ludicrous proposals were carried out, what would governments call this income? Really Gross Domestic Product?
The report claims that many women choose prostitution "as the most viable, lucrative alternative." But as an alternative to what? Starving to death? Robbing banks? Embezzling? It is merely an attempt to put a happy face on what is indisputably sexploitation.
Michael H. Merson reports in the Lancet that "young Thai women from rural areas sold into bondage to sex-work establishments became the source of food, housing and luxuries for millions of Thais at the expense of agricultural development." Merson says that with Thailand facing hard times, and "with the AIDS epidemic now under some control and no new industrial or agricultural development planned, we are left to speculate that sex will be vital to the nation's economic rescue." And no moralism, please. Speaking openly about the sex industry, says Merson, "would threaten the public discourse of modernization [which] has come today to mean money, wealth, and Western materialism."
Small wonder Thailand, Indonesia, and other countries that look favorably on the "sex industry" are economic basket cases. It is truly disturbing to have a "modernization strategy" that profits from turning women into sex slaves while giving short shrift to developing industry and agriculture. The money-trumps-morality men running Thailand apparently think they can get more money for themselves, the rest of the ruling elite, and their so-called economy by having young women working on their backs rather than working at respectable jobs and professions.
When these rulers look at young women, they don't see human beings entitled to live free, constructive lives, but rather a rich vein of sex to be mined and rented out to high-rolling foreign sex-seekers euphemistically called "tourists." This is about as anti-woman as it is possible to get, which seems to have eluded some of our women's-rights advocates, who should be up in arms over women who are used and abused in this manner. Their silence has been remarkable.
This remarkably inane and repulsive ILO report offers more evidence that relying on the U.N. for guidance on virtually anything is like seeking advice on free enterprise from Boris Yeltsin. As for Thailand, Indonesia, and other countries run by sexocrats, there is no way these countries should be loaned U.S. dollars until they stop extracting money from prostitutes and quit mistreating and abusing their people in other despicable ways.
Oliver Starr Jr. is a former editorial-page editor of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.