Content area
Full text
Sex work across national boundaries is not new to the world. Donna Guy observes that "foreign prostitutes and pimps were already ensconced in Buenos Aires (Argentina) by 1860" and that between 1889 and 1901, 75 per cent of the registered working women hailed from Europe and Russia (14-16). Between 1865 and 1885, around one quarter of the registered prostitutes in Bologna, Italy, were migrants, and during the 1880s young British women worked in Belgium and other parts of Europe (Gibson; Walkowitz). In India, a number of European women worked as prostitutes in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the majority of whom originated from Central and Eastern Europe, but also among them were English women (Levine). In Russia, in the late 1880s, "non-Russian and foreign prostitutes" comprised around one-sixth of the registered prostitute population (Bernstein 97). During World War II, "haole" (white) women were the majority in brothels in Hawaii. Korean and Thai women were forced to "comfort" the Japanese military, and Cuban and Venezuelan women serviced the Dutch and American navies in Curacao (Bailey and Farber; Hicks; Kempadoo). Specific political, economic and social events shaped the women's involvement in the sex trade at different times, in different places, within the context of a globalizing capitalist system, colonialism, and masculinist hegemony.
In the late 1980s, Licia Brussa estimates that between 30 and 60 per cent of the prostitutes in the Netherlands were from Third World countries, particularly Latin America and Asia. Today the migrant sex working population has been joined by women from Eastern Europe and West Africa. In 1991, around seventy per cent of the sex workers in Japan were reported to be Filipino, and young Afghan and Bangladeshi women worked in prostitution in Pakistan (Korvinus). In the same period, the red light district in Bombay, India, relied predominantly upon migrant female labour, much of which originated in Nepal. By the mid-1990s, Eastern European, Russian and Vietnamese prostitutes were reported to be working in China while Russian women appeared in the Egyptian sex industry, and Mexican women moved into sex work in Japan (BBC World Service, April 28, 1994; New York Times, June 9, 1995; Azize et al.). Besides these trends, research points to Thai sex workers in Australia and Japan, Brazilians and...