ABSTRACT

I write this chapter during the waning months of the Bush administration. In recent years, the administration’s Trafficking in Persons Office at the Department of State, has crafted policies around the assumption that prostitution always involves coercion and sex trafficking.1 Yet my ethnographic research in the Dominican Republic with adult women who voluntarily choose to engage in the commercial sex industry has become an example of a place the Bush administration claims does not exist: a sex-tourist destination involving women who choose to sell sex, and, who keep all of their earnings.