Selling Sex Overseas: Chinese Women and the Realities of Prostitution and Global Sex Trafficking

9. The Reality and the Myths: A Critical Analysis of Sex Trafficking

230 > 231 Recruitment According to Kathleen Barry, author of The Prostitution of Sexuality, traffickers usually recruit girls and women mainly through three methods: purchase , deception, or abduction (including force and coercion).1 Were our female subjects recruited in these ways? Purchase None of our female subjects said they had been sold into prostitution, nor did they know anyone who entered prostitution because they had been purchased by someone. In fact, none of them had even heard that women could be purchased for the purpose of putting them to work in commercial sex. In China, girls and women are traded for the purpose of adoption or marriage, but not for the sex trade. Deception In much of the discourse on trafficking, the most frequently mentioned recruiting method is deception. A recruiter is said to approach a woman who is interested in going overseas to engage in legitimate work, and tells her that she can work as a nanny, a waitress, or a model in a foreign country. The potential pay is painted as being very attractive. Alternatively, a woman is promised that she can marry a man when she arrives in the destination country. Selling sex is not mentioned at all, and thus it is the last thing in the mind of the woman being recruited. Only after she has arrived in the destination country does the recruiter tell her that she must work in a sex venue to repay the debt she owes because of the cost of her travel documents, airplane ticket, and other expenditures. The vast majority of our subjects, be they sex ring operators, law enforcement authorities, or xiaojies, said they did not think that women are usually deceived into going overseas to engage in commercial sex. The owner of an escort agency in Taiwan explained why: “We will not force, deceive, or coerce women to sell sex. We also tell the agents to give their women more freedom. It is impossible to force a girl to sleep with a client. Besides, it is impossible to control a person in Taiwan; they can call the police anytime.” The manager of a legitimate massage parlor in Kuala Lumpur concurred: “I believe all mainland women know what they will do after they arrive; all of them are willing to come because they have no jobs and make no money in China. They are highly unlikely to be deceived.” 232 > 233 How in the world could a person be so dumb as to be deceived to come to the United States to work as a prostitute? We are not kids! Besides, we all have some education and there is so much information on the internet where you can learn a lot about the outside world. (Niko, 39, divorced, from Qingdao, a house prostitute in Los Angeles) (130) The second reason offered by our subjects was that even if initially deceived , a person can easily escape, and that was why (they said) nobody would use this method to recruit a woman: “I did not meet anyone like this in Guangdong Province, not to mention Hong Kong. If a woman was deceived and brought here, isn’t it very easy to escape in a place like Hong Kong? How can a person be under control here?” (Chun Chun, 24, single, from Chongqing, a mommy-assisted streetwalker in Hong Kong) (78). The third reason mentioned was that, if they were deceived, they could go after those who had deceived them upon their return to China. Under such circumstances, a recruiter in China was said to be highly unlikely to use deception in the process because he or she would know that there could be repercussions. Our subjects also suggested that since many women were already selling sex in China, it was not possible to deceive these experienced xiaojies into engaging in prostitution overseas without their knowledge. Ah Xue, 37, divorced with a 14-year-old daughter, an independent streetwalker in the Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, reasoned: “Among the more than ten women working on this street, only one or two are like me who worked for a government unit in China. Most of them were xiaojies back in China. If they claim that they were deceived, they are lying. When we fellow sisters are together, who would dare to say that she was deceived?” (17). Some of our subjects also mentioned that women from rural China were unlikely to be deceived...