ABSTRACT
The development of the sex tourism industry in Asia from the 1970s onwards was substantially aided by the groundwork put in place by US military prostitution. It began in the same sites in which prostitution had been developed to service the US military in rest and recreation, such as Thailand, the Philippines and Korea, and developed to the point where it was providing a substantial proportion of GDP in those countries. Indeed the governments of poor countries have deliberately developed sex tourism as a means to gain foreign exchange (Truong, 1990). But the sex industry grew strongly in other destinations in this period too, such as Amsterdam, Havana, Estonia, Jamaica, and needs to be explained in terms of other global forces. These include the development of the tourism industry and of consumption as a central engine of economic growth (Wonders and Michalowski, 2001). Sex tourism is a recent development, and an aspect of the development of tourism as an industry. Asian women caught up in the traffic in women in the east in the interwar period did not service occidental tourists as might happen in today’s prostitution tourism, but went to foreign countries ‘in search of clients among their own countrymen abroad’ (League of Nations, 1933, p. 22). Nowhere were there found ‘attempts to provide exotic novelty to brothel clients by offering them women of alien races’ (ibid.).
