Sex Industry and Cambodia

Some interesting articles have been appearing lately regarding the sex industry and Cambodia.

To start out, there's a blog post from Ms Greenwood:
Sex Work and Dignity in Cambodia – Not Everyone’s a Victim at That Girly Bar

(I recently disagreed with Ms Greenwood over her article on Chomsky. But that doesn't necessarily mean she's all wrong all the time and I think she's asking the right questions in this blog post.)

The links from her blogpost are interesting to follow as well:
Group struggles for legal distinction between human trafficking and sex work
and from the Phnom Penh Post:
Professional girlfriends: Moving beyond sex work by Heidi Hoefinger.

Which reminded me of another article I had read recently by the same author in South East Asia Globe:
Professional girlfriends and bar girls are creating new meanings of Khmer womanhood by Heidi Hoefinger.

I have my own thoughts on the issue, but they're largely irrelevant since they usually consist of me trying to imagine how a woman views sex, and that's always a dangerous profession for a man to engage in. (You'll notice that all of the above linked to articles are written by women.)

So I'll confine my observations to the obvious:
Human trafficking is a problem in this region. Some of my Khmer friends tell me that even upper middle class women dare not walk the streets alone at night in this country for fear of being abducted into a car and sold across the boarder to a brothel somewhere.

And yet, as Ms Greenwood says, a simple consideration of the economics of the situation should make the appeal of the voluntary sex trade obvious. A Cambodian woman can work in a sweat shop factory from morning to night in appalling conditions for $30 a month. Or she can get that same amount of money for a few hours work in Phnom Penh.

It's no wonder then that, as these articles indicate, a number of these woman don't appreciate being "saved" by religious groups and NGOs and retrained to work in the sweatshop industry.

Putting aside the morality of sex for a minute, from a purely cold classical liberal economic view, one would hope that the high wages available for sexual activity would force other business to push up their wages in an effort to compete for labor.
One would not hope that the it results in woman being taken off the streets and forced into the sweatshops by anti-human trafficking laws, which is apparently what's happening.

Perhaps the fact that sex workers in Cambodia are attempting to unionize and take their future into their own hands can be seen as a positive development.

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