The Prostitution of Sexuality by Kathleen L. Barry

Author:Kathleen L. Barry [Barry, Kathleen L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Feminism
ISBN: 9780814712771
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 622450
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 1994-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Prostitution Sector: From Trafficking to Sex Industrialization

Trafficking in women relies on the feudal privatization of women in the family, where wife and children are property of the husband. Family feudalism keeps women economically outside of local or developing economies, a marginalization enforced by traditional marriage. Where trafficking is heaviest, most of women’s income-generating labor is located either in informal-sector employment or in illegal and unregulated income-generating market transactions, neither of which are recorded in national income accounts. “In India, 89 percent of women workers belong to the informal sector and live and work in sub-human conditions or starvation and squalor. These women workers are most visible as hawkers and vendors; they are mostly providers of urban services, home-based petty manufacturers and traders among others.”72 In urban Bangladesh, the majority of low-income females in slums work as domestic maids.73 The informal sector is where women go to earn survival income, as vendors, as domestics—it is where women are marginalized from the standard labor force. It is the base for prostitution in that it establishes women’s economic marginalization, impoverishment, and vulnerability.

With the development of an urban economy, some women continue to be victims of traffickers, but other women migrating to cities simply find no other economic means of existence than prostitution. They are not trafficked in the traditional sense, nor are they forced through brute coercion. They are simply vulnerable to the only means of economic existence available to them because they are women, and because they are women they are homeless, and poor. Sex industrialization builds its economic base off that human need. Sex industries rely on the industrial sector not providing the means for women in the process of migrating to meet their material needs.

With the industrialization of sex, eventually neither traditional customs nor overt coercion is necessary to prostitute large populations of women. The massive industrialization of prostitution relies on a normalization of that commerce in the economic sector. If a developing country has been targeted for military prostitution or sex tourism, or if the economy is relying on foreign exchange and on immigration of its labor force, trafficking in women eventually gives way to a sex-industrial economic sector.

Prostitution may well be among the highest costs women pay for their country’s development.

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