ABSTRACT
Prostitution and trafficking in women is a highly political topic and it divides people into for and against camps.1 Prostitution – and trafficking in women especially – is often conceptualized as a violation of human rights and violence against all women. On the other hand, there are the voices that speak for the rights of the prostitute, saying that prostitution is rather a form of sex work and should be regarded as such and therefore, it should be protected in the same way as are other forms of labor. Most strongly, the debate over defining trafficking in women involves the debate over forced prostitution, on the one hand and voluntary prostitution, on the other, also including therein the aspects of being “forced to choose” (Doezema 1998). The latter conceptualization refers mainly to the lack of alternatives to sex work, which causes women to turn to prostitution as the most profitable option, rather than being directly coerced or tricked into prostitution by third parties such as pimps, boyfriends, criminal networks and so on. The debate involves discussion of whether a prostitute is selling herself or simply her sex. The former standpoint reflects, according to Doezema (1996), a patriarchal ideology that associates woman’s identity with her sex and that considers virginity and chastity as woman’s highest value. It has been criticized that understanding foreign prostitutes as victims, whether of direct force or of a poor economic situation, is a discursive means to reclaim these women’s honor, and which then indirectly condemns all prostitution as bad and as violation against all women (Wijers 1998). It is argued that this attitude silences those prostitutes who refuse to be victimized and do not feel degraded by the sex work they do. The problems in these debates are the different variations of sex work and conditions under which it is done. It is difficult to fight for or against prostitution since there is no single identity or experience of a sex worker. By analyzing trafficking in women, prostitution and sex work in the context of globalization of the world economy, I do not want to distinguish between forced and voluntary
prostitution, as this is very often an impossible task. I will also use the terms “sex worker” and “prostitute” interchangeably since I do not want to limit the name of “sex worker” to the professional prostitute only. The term “sex worker” allows reference to be made to erotic dancers who differentiate themselves from “prostitutes” and who are a forgotten group in almost all of the discussions on sex work and prostitution (an exception to this is Stark 2006)2. Here I will also use the term “sex-trafficking” in the context of the global sex industry, thus focusing on the operation of sex-trafficking as representing a form of shadow globalization.
