If we needed a sign that business was getting back to normal after the one-month crackdown on the sex-trade had finished, this is it. This sign appeared at the intersection of the market street I live on and the busiest street in my town. It was placed so that people from all directions could see it, and it is lit up real bright at night, with all four faces loudly crying the same thing: “33 young women always at the ready. Touch or don’t touch. 20,000 won.” The sign is enclosed in a metal cage of some sort to keep it sturdy and protect it from damage. It advertises a place called the ????????? (roughly: “‘Simple’ Village of Beauties”), which is a ???????? (’singing club’) in a basement of a building on that corner, that now appears to be remodelling the building that it is in and expanding. My missus was outraged by the sign on her way to work Monday morning, and intends to do something about it.
Meanwhile, the Korea Times today published the first in a series of four articles looking at anti-prostitution campaigns in Korea. This one was written by two women from the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) in New York City.
It outlines the differences between the Dutch approach to prostitution and the Swedish model:
In 2000, the Dutch government lifted a longstanding ban on brothels and recognized them as legitimate businesses. The government licensed 2,000 brothels and registered as prostitutes the women and girls in them. Brothel owners began to recruit women into prostitution through government-sponsored job centers for unemployed workers.
…
In 1999, [Sweden] passed and implemented legislation that stepped up measures against prostitution not only by directing strong penalties against pimps, brothel owners and other sex industry entrepreneurs, but by also directing criminal sanctions against customers.The law also eliminated penalties against prostitutes, such as the penalty for soliciting. After the passage of the new law, Sweden spearheaded a public education campaign warning sex industry customers that patronizing prostitutes was criminal behavior.
Go and read it to see the differences in approaches, and you can conclude for yourself which path is better for Korea. Speaking for myself, I personally dislike the prostitution industry and think it’s not a good thing for society, but from a utilitarian perspective I was more inclined to support legalisation and regulation in Korea. Until I read this article, and now I am not so sure.
I do believe this for sure though: whatever the law is in Korea, the problem is that police do not enforce it properly. Apart from short-term crackdowns, police are either hampered by lack of will, or lack of resources, or endemic corruption, or a combination of all three. So what to do?
10 Comments
You have to ask yourself why Nevada does not seem to have the problems that the Dutch have.
Regulation works in Nevada.
The problem is always the loose/tight dichotomy.
One one place is loose and others are not the loose place attracts customers from tight areas.
BTW poor girls have been going into prostitution for thousands of years. Sometimes sold by their own families. The answer is to read DeSoto and Hayek. And the emancipation of women.
BTW you will note that Sweden did not solve the problem. It just moved it to other places. If those places become equally tight suply and demand will balance at a price.
The price of course will be a more vicious brand of criminal.
Alcohol prohibition is a pretty good example of the dynamic. For the first year or two there was progress. After that it was all regress.
A few months results tells us nothing.
Point three.
The ladies of the antiprostitution league note that the drivers of prostitution (for the prostitutes) are
1. Child sexual abuse
2. Drug abuse (which is a symptom of child abuse)
3. Poverty
Now if a real attack on prostitution was contemplated (by anyone) rather than cosmetics then the authorities would do something about child abuse. (see my post on pot at this site).
A shorter term solution for part of the problem would be to make drugs cheap by medicalization or legalization. Don’t hold your breath (unless of course you have just taken a rip off the pipe).
Nothing effective will be done. It is much easier to look good than to do good.
As to poverty. Hayek. DeSoto. And the education of women.
As I’ve said before I agree with the bannings. But this new crack down on prostitution may not work in Korea mainly due to the fact that there has no preparations done to help these women out of their ‘jobs’. There are no programs to retrain these women to be empoyable citizens. There are no shelters to house them if they decided to leave the whorehouses. There are no counsellings to help these women into being productive members of the society. And there are no social assistance of any kind for these women. What the government has done is they’ve shut down the red districts and expect these women to leave. But where are they going to go and what are they going to do? If I was a 30 year old whore and I’ve been hooking for 10 years, and have never known any other job and have no other job experience, I’d probably have no choice but to go straight back to prostitution, this time, on the internet.
Government’s fight against prositution is a good ideal, but it’s a bad execution. I don’t think it will work.
m. simon,
yeah, when i lived in seoul, i had trouble sleeping at night because some guy was molesting his daughter every night outside my window (in his own house of course). i hope someone reported him but i doubt it. the worst part was hearing the girl cry.
Well good thing you don’t speak Korean I guess Scarlet. That totally washes your hands of the experience. Did you figure the monkeys down at the Korean police department wouldn’t be able to figure out the word ’sexual abuse’ in a Korean/English dictionary? If your story is true you are an awful person.
When women cannot support their families on wages from the legitimate work avaiable to them, prostitution ends up being, to many, the only alternative to homelessness, the welfare system, and often, then the breaking up of their families.
The only working solution to the problem is to increase the availability and relative compensation for real jobs for young women. If a society is unwilling to figure out a way to do that, and then - still - outlaws prostitution, something is seriously wrong with it.
Because then often prostitutes become victims twice - of both their customers and the state.
The bottom line- people have to eat. Why is that so difficult for some idiot politicians and others to understand?
*They just don’t get it*
hey yeolde,
i guess you never lived in korea or you might understand that foreigners don’t and shouldn’t get involved in korean matters. and yes.. i do speak korean. i attended the defense language institute in monterey. for your information, i talked to the neighbors about it and they told me not to get involved. now quit making snap judgements and making an ass out of yourself, mkay?
Well, it’s not only the oldest profession, it’s also the national pastime of Korea. TONS of Korean ajussis go to dalan joojum, room salons, shady Karaoke norehbang, dahbang, etc etc. Whereas in “advanced” and “progressive” western nations, men can simply go to pickup bars to find the hoochie mama of choice, men in Korea must deal with hypocritical sexual morals. Hence, it has been a time honored Korean tradition for men to seek out the hoochie mama of choice by giving “gifts” to their “part-time” girlfriends. In this way, both men and women justify and rationalize their actions. “I never had sex with prostitute, I had flings with Miss Im from Nallaree Dabang. Sure I gave her some cash, just a little spending money, like I give to my younger sibblings, so she can have fun.” And the women might think the same way—and lo’ and behold we have the Wonjo Gyojeh phenomena.
Korean women on the otherhand, instead of fighting for women’s rights or protecting exploited women, like to bash on the prostitutes for waylaying their poor husbands–the husbands of course, had “no choice” but to drink with their bosses and have intercourse with young pretty 18 year old girls, because they had to sign contracts with business partners by showing comraderie. It’s the classical mother-in-law, daughter-in-law complex showing itself in different ways.
It’s not the promiscuity I mind, but the power imbalance between gender.
Banning prostitution in Korea… we’ve all seen this like every year, kinda like every other geration Korea teachers debate the merits of Classical Chinese education.
Korea really need to legalize prostitution. And while they are at it, they should also legalize the marijuana plants that the government grow in the the National Folk Museum/Park. Are there any ex-pats out there who were brave enough to pilfer this pristine source of Cannabis in Korea?
Pot at the folk village? Where can one see this?