South Korea sex trade revamps after clampdown

Two years ago the government launched an ambitious campaign to stamp out the world's oldest profession in South Korea, putting many sex industry workers, like Lee, in a bind.

Since the clampdown, Lee faces the choice of applying for a government programme to take her out of the sex trade, turning to a broker for an overseas prostitution ring or joining a growing union movement for sex workers seeking to legalise their profession and improve work conditions.

Prostitution has been illegal in South Korea since 1948, but until recently authorities turned a blind eye to the booming sex industry that belies South Korea's reputation as a straight-laced Confucian society.

The government campaign, in which thousands of sex workers and their clients have been arrested, has cut down on the number of brothels and provided a way out of the sex trade for thousands of women.

Striking prostitutes

But it has also made it more difficult for police to crack down on prostitution. With fewer brothels, sex workers have turned to fronts such as coffee shops and karaoke parlours. They rely more on technology such as the Internet to arrange assignations with clients without the authorities being any the wiser. "The new law turns us into criminals and forces us to go underground or abroad where we have no protection of the law," said Lee, 26, who used an alias on an Internet chat site for sex workers.

Lee was one of hundreds of sex workers who put on dark glasses, baseball hats and surgical masks to conceal their identities in one of many strikes by prostitutes in Korea over the past year.

South Korea is known for its protests and labour actions, but unions for sex workers are new. They have attracted the interest of thousands of sex workers and shut down trade in some red light districts for a few hours, but have yet to effect any real change in society, activists said.

The workers want their trade to be legalised, caps set on the number of hours they can work a day as well as standards for working conditions. The best way to accomplish these goals is to set up legal brothels that are highly regulated, they said.

Prostitution is a lucrative industry in South Korea. About 20 percent of adult males in South Korea bought sex four times a month on average while 4.1 percent of women in their 20s made their livings as sex workers, according to the most recent Korean Institute of Criminology survey conducted in 2003.

It found that the sex trade, with Amsterdam-style windowed bordellos and fronts in barber shops, raked in revenue of about 24 trillion won ($25 billion) a year in the world's 11th largest economy.

In 2002, South Korean police arrested 3,500 people in the sex trade. But since the crackdown was launched, some 16,951 prostitutes were arrested in 2004 and 18,508 in 2005, the Ministry on Gender Equality said.

Job training

The campaign has encouraged more than 1,200 people a year to enter a government programme that offers a 7.6 million won ($8,000) grant for job training and other expenses as well as a place at a halfway house to help them leave the profession. The programme also provides interest-free loans of up to 30 million won to help former prostitutes start their own businesses.

"One day I looked at my reflection in the mirror and couldn't stop crying. I realised I had to stop what I was doing," wrote one former prostitute who went into the programme.

The women, who asked not to be identified, said in an interview via email with Reuters that she now works as a beautician. She advised others to follow her path.

"The government alone cannot stamp out the sex trade. But the government and communities have to work together to help and save prostitutes," she said.

USA bound

Some prostitutes scoff at the government programme, saying it offers too little money to help them pay off their debts or start businesses and too little support once they are out, according to postings on Internet sites for the sex workers' labour movement.

"The current government effort to rehabilitate sex workers is in fact driving them underground, especially the majority who are held by debt to brothel owners," said Choi Duk-hyo, a human rights activist.

The campaign against prostitution at home has forced many Korean sex workers to pack up and head overseas, often to the United States where they accumulate huge debts to their traffickers and face a harsh life. In August, U.S. authorities broke up a Korean prostitution ring operating in East Coast cites such as New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington. Korean prostitution rings were also busted in California earlier this year.

"We are not a social evil," sex industry worker Lee said. "Most of the customers at brothels are working-class people. It's not a place for fancy parties."

(REUTERS)