ABSTRACT
In 2007 the UN Trafficking Rapporteur identified trafficking in women for marriage, in such practices as the mail order bride industry and forced marriage, as a significant aspect of the trafficking in women which needed to be addressed (UNHRC, 2007a). This is an important extension of feminist and human rights analysis of trafficking in women. It places the spotlight on marriage, which has not usually been associated with prostitution in contemporary human rights scholarship. As the Rapporteur’s report points out, marriage is often a straightforwardly economic transaction, in which sexual access to girls and women is purchased through bride price or a fee to an introduction agency. An understanding of the dynamics of marriage is helpful as a basis for an examination of the global industry of prostitution because it illustrates that prostitution is not just a form of ordinary ungendered work, like domestic labour or tomato picking, but has its origin, and its counterpart, in traditional forms of exchange of girls and women for cash or goods, in a form of chattel slavery (Rubin, 1975). Not all forms of marriage include the element of giving cash or goods in exchange for the woman or girl, but forms which do, such as child marriage, temporary marriage, the trafficking of women for marriage in India and China, and even concubinage, are increasing in many countries. The mail order bride industry has integrated the sale of women for sexual and other purposes into the global sex industry and the global economy. Where marriage is the result of sale or any form of commercial exchange it can be hard to distinguish this particular harmful practice from prostitution. I refer to this practice as servile marriage. Where no direct financial exchange takes place, but women are trapped by poverty and lack of remedy such as divorce, marriage still contains the aspect of prostitution
since women have to allow sexual access to their bodies in return for subsistence.
