Thailand is the most infamous Asian country known for its sex industry, there is virtually every type of sexual deviance that can be bought in the country, such as gay sex, transvestites, pedophilia, and thousands of women working in bars, hotels, massage parlors, and brothels. Thailand is known as the “Brothel of Asia” in which estimates are that one third to one fourth of all young Thai women work in the sex industry. The growth of the sex industry has come with globalization. Globalization intensifies displacement and use of indigenous populations for little pay and therefore has replaced slavery. Liberalization, privatization, deregulation, of economies, the dumping of goods, and the competition brought by big businesses eat out the struggling Thai industries. Therefore, women’s work has been affected, such as factory work in the textile, electronic and food industries. Women have poor working conditions, no voice, and no right to unionize. “Imperialist globalization pushes women into the informal economy.”
Globalization, which makes it easy for international travel and restructuring of industries to cheaper locales, has brought the modern day slavery of prostitution. In Thailand, the poverty was made worse by land conversion and demolition of urban and rural communities. Many fishing villages have been extirpated to make room for industrial plants or roads, this has polluted the rivers and agriculture plunging many rural farmers into poverty. The environment in rural areas has been devastated from deforestation by lumber industries. Natural resources have been abused and farmers have no more fishing grounds. Sometimes these families have no other choice but to sell their children into sex. The average prostitute working in Bangkok makes up to twenty times more than the wages of a domestic worker.
These young girls feel obligated to go into the sex industry because they see it as the only way to earn a living and support their families. In Asian culture it is very important to be an “obedient” daughter and give back to parents, there is less of a sense of self as in Western culture and a high importance is placed on the kinship familial unit. Remittances coming from daughters working in the urban sex sector going to the families living in rural villages is close to US $300 million (Lim). “Women arrive daily in Bangkok from the countryside to swell the huge industrial reserve workforce in the capital. Untrained in any skills, with the basic minimum education, they can get less than the subsistence needs and they have no other ways than to sell their bodies.”
Christina Leano, The Colonization Of The Female Body (2011) [X] (via witchbornwitch)
