SPEAKING
FREELY Korean sex trade 'victims' strike for
rights By Sealing Cheng
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South
Korean sex workers have been on a hunger strike in front
of the National Assembly building, protesting the new
new anti-prostitution law for more than one and a half
months. On October 7 and November 1, more than 2,000 sex
workers took to the streets of Seoul in protest. Braving
the stigma of prostitution with only sunglasses and
masks, female sex workers have been making the strongest
public statement ever in Korea against threats to their
livelihood and well-being - and those of their families.
But no one is listening. Their hunger strike began on
November 2.
The South Korean government
implemented a new law to "eradicate prostitution" in
September. Both the Ministry of Gender Equality and key
women's organizations claim the new law advances women's
rights. So why are female sex workers going on a hunger
strike and taking to the streets to protest the law? And
why won't the ministry or women's organizations meet
with the strikers? (Hunger strikes usually are carried
out in relays, so that no single woman goes without food
or water for what now would be 50 days.)
The Sex
Trade Prevention Act, at first glance, looks like a
welcome departure from the old law that penalized all
women in prostitution as "fallen women". It offers
protection for "victims" and penalizes all involvement
in the sex trade. While clients, brothel owners, and
pimps can get jail sentences and fines, "victims" are
entitled to shelter, health services, vocational
training, and even alternative-business start-up funds.
This all sounds good.
What could be so wrong
with the new law that those whom it intends to protect
are protesting so vehemently against it? What could they
possibly object to?
They object to the loss of
their livelihoods. They object to police crackdowns that
are forcing them to work clandestinely, exposing them to
great danger, and threatening their well-being and that
of their families (sex workers have families too). They
object to being arrested along with clients, brothel
owners and pimps. For the sex workers, the new law is in
effect an instrument of harassment.
The law
protects only women who want to leave the sex trade but
penalizes those who want to stay. Only "victims" who
have been coerced into the sex trade are eligible for
services. Yet those who cannot prove their victimhood,
such as independent sex workers, could be charged with
violating the law, and penalized.
The underlying
assumption of the law, therefore, is wrong. Not all
women in the sex trade are "victims" who want to be
rescued from the brothels. That they want to be free
from exploitation and abuse does not mean that they want
to be out of a job. Instead, this law is subjecting them
to violence (through police harassment) by assuming that
women could be forced out of prostitution.
The
principles of human rights demand that governments do no
harm to a person and take extra care to promote the
rights of people who are already marginalized.
South Korean sex workers are now publicly
demanding what other workers take for granted: their
right to a livelihood. Their constitutional right as
citizens to pursue happiness with dignity and worth as
human beings. And with that, the recognition of sex work
as a legitimate form of work.
To the sex
workers, the current attempts of the government and
women's organizations to eradicate prostitution are in
effect destroying their lives. Their public petition
eloquently declares:
We feel only forsaken by the good-for-show
policy of the Ministry of Gender Equality that has no
correspondence with our realities. Those who are
wealthy and in lack of nothing seem not even
interested in how difficult and urgent our immediate
realities are. They are drowned in their own illusion,
thinking that they are helping us but in effect they
have pushed us to this cold and bleak
place.
Why are the Korean government and
women's organizations ignoring the voices of the sex
workers? Why the rush to eradicate prostitution after
years of tolerance of this illegal trade?
The
South Korean government has been under relentless
pressure from the United States to demonstrate its
commitment to combat trafficking in women and girls. As
part of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA)
passed in 2000, the US State Department publishes the
yearly Trafficking in Persons Report to monitor world
efforts to combat trafficking. In 2001, it identified
South Korea along with other lowest-ranking countries
such as Sudan and Myanmar. This represented a huge
international embarrassment to the South Korean
government, which has taken pride as a regional leader
in democracy. (Persistent violations can carry sanctions
by the US.)
The South Korean government thus set
out to prove its anti-trafficking commitments. While
"trafficking" refers to the use of force, fraud, and
deception in exploiting labor in all sectors, the US
administration of President George W Bush has
implemented its anti-trafficking policy with a
preoccupation with prostitution.
In this
context, a momentous shift from tolerance to
"zero-tolerance" in the Korean government's approach to
prostitution followed, with a big push from women's
organizations.
The fervor of women's
organizations to eradicate prostitution is rooted in the
conviction that prostitution is the key issue to women's
subordination in South Korea. They believe that
prostitution is a form of male violence against women,
and that no woman engages in prostitution voluntarily.
For well over a month, the hunger strike and mass
protests clearly have disproved this last point - that
no one does it voluntarily.
Women in sex work do
experience violence and discrimination, but this is
because they are marginalized and denied the rights that
everyone should enjoy. Two fires in 2000 and 2002 killed
20 sex workers who had been locked inside their
workplaces by their employers. These tragedies should
never have been allowed to happen. But it would be a
mistake to extrapolate from these bad experiences to
imply that all sex work is violence.
The most
visible sex workers are often the hardest hit by state
persecution in times of a moral panic against
prostitution. The thousands of protesting sex workers
come from red-light districts all over South Korea, the
chief targets of police raids and arrests.
Yet
it is no news that some teenage girls, university
students, and housewives have engaged in the exchange of
sex for material rewards, a phenomenon exclusive neither
to prostitution nor to Korea. The bold suggestion in
their petition, therefore, is a protest not only against
their persecution but also their stigmatization: "Do you
not think that strategic marriages among the families of
large corporations (chaebol) are prostitution?"
Exploitation is a problem faced by all women,
not just prostitutes, and it needs to be tackled at its
roots - in the family, the workplace and schools; class
inequalities and restrictive ideas about sexuality also
need to be addressed, among other issues. Women's
subordination and their impeded access to valuable
resources are entrenched in these social institutions.
Prostitution is only an expression, not the cause, of
such inequalities.
An effective intervention
must be based on sincere interactions with the very
women whom law enforcement and women's organizations are
trying to assist. Those who have good intentions must
realize that dealing with violence in the sex trade does
not mean eradicating prostitution. Prostitution is not
identical to violence or sex trafficking.
Korean
sex workers have refused to be "victims" by speaking up.
If the new law genuinely aims at promoting these women's
rights, then neither the Korean government nor women's
organizations can afford to ignore their voices.
Seling Chang is a Rockefeller
post-doctoral fellow in the Program for the Study of
Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human Rights at Columbia
University, New York. She is an anthropologist who has
been researching on prostitution-related issues in Korea
since 1998.
(Copyright 2004 Seling Chang.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click hereif you
are interested in contributing.
