Bangladeshi Girls Treated Like Cattle (Legalized prostitution and exploitation)

[Starry Messenger]

So much for the "legalize it" argument...bolding mine.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/witw/articles/2014/07/10/bangladeshi-girls-treated-like-cattle.html

<snip>

Bangladesh is one of the few majority-Muslim countries in which prostitution is legal, and the minimum age of the workers is 18. But that law is meaningless in a country so poor that parents are forced to sell their daughters for as little as $200, from as young as nine years of age.

That’s where Oradexon, a steroid meant for cattle, comes into the equation. This medicine meant to fatten cows has become the preferred drug among the madams of Bangladesh. They are using the pills to mask the real age of the underage girls working for sex in their brothels by making them appear older and at the same time making the more ‘seasoned’ sex-worker look plum and voluptuous.

The use of this cow steroid amongst prostitutes is Bangladesh is so widespread that the British charity, ActionAid, which has done some of the most extensive research in the field, reports 90% of commercial sex workers are addicted to the drug. Many of them were turned into addicts by their madams.

<snip>

This is a story of a continuous cycle of exploitation: The girls are considered “owned” by their madams, and if they want to get out of the commercial sex business, the girls have to repay their “purchase cost.” The “larger” they get, the more clients they get, inching them closer to freedom. At least that is what they hope, and that’s why many of the sex workers readily take Oradexon. They earn less than 60 cents per client.

<snip>

[Gormy Cuss]

1. Ugh.

When there is poverty so dire that you sell your children like commodities it's not surprising that these poor young women are abused this way.

[Starry Messenger]

2. Exactly.

And without an underlying safety net, even the laws the country has against underage prostitutes doesn't protect the girls.

[Tetris_Iguana]

3. Tragic

Is there any proof this is happening in the legal US brothels?

[Starry Messenger]

4. Which part? The underage trafficking, or the drug addiction?

[Tetris_Iguana]

8. Both

[Starry Messenger]

10. Legalizing has not eliminated child trafficking in Nevada.

The drug that ages little girls to look more like women hasn't seemed to have become a thing here.

[Tetris_Iguana]

11. Well yeah

Unfortunately the sex trade in minors will never end because scumbag perverts will always demand it.

One of the sad realities that makes me wonder if this world is really hell...

[LadyHawkAZ]

5. If Bangladesh criminalized it tomorrow, what do you feel would change?

Is the underlying social order one that would be supportive of the women? Are there other decent jobs they could move easily into, or would they continue in a now-criminal trade? How would they be dealt with by a police force that does not enforce their legal protections as it is, once they ceased to have any legal status at all and became criminals? Will there be medical care available for them to help with their addiction issues?

Female sex workers are the bottom strata of women in any society. How are women in general treated in Bangladeshi culture? How is the sex trade doing in Myanmar next door, where it is criminalized? Are conditions better there, worse, or pretty much the same?

Do you think there might be other cultural causes for this problem than legalization, or do you feel that legalization is the sole cause of the problem?

[Starry Messenger]

6. I am for wrap-around social services, and a safety net that protects women and families.

I feel that stronger punishments for the pimps, not for the girls, would help with the trafficking.

If this were not a rewarding avenue for exploiting women, it would not be pursued in the same way by the pimps.

I am anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, and feel that if these root causes of inequality were addressed, then that prostitution as a "job" would tend to die out.

Do you feel that poverty has cultural causes? I don't understand that avenue of questioning. Could you elaborate?

I don't see how legalizing prostitution helped with any of the issues that you raise.

[LadyHawkAZ]

7. Even other apes trade food for sex. It's not going away

Last edited Mon Jul 14, 2014, 05:37 AM - Edit history (1)

As long as humans have survival needs and sex organs, there will be people willing to barter.

Legalization can't exist in a vacuum. Myanmar next door has created an STD/AIDS hell with criminalization- I can't see how that helped anyone either, yet your post places the full blame for the problem on the legal aspect. That's what all those questions are about. From the article:

“It is the basic right of every citizen to have minimum access to all information related to drugs being sold in open market,” she points out. “Responsible NGOs in this field must be more assertive, to ensure information regarding this particular medicine be accessible to all girls consuming this drug. This is a basic human right.”

Tasmima Hossain, former member of Parliament in Bangladesh and longtime feminist, suggests that the core issue is poverty, which informs every aspect of this problem.

“Poverty pushes women to do anything to survive,” Hossain explains to me. “These pills also suppress the appetite, so the sex workers do not feel how hungry they are.” Hossain contends that this issue is also just one aspect of the much larger issue of women and girls’ oppression in Bangladesh.

“Sex workers are called potita in Bengali, which means ‘the fallen group of society,’” Hossain says. “But the men who sleep with these women are referred to as gentlemen, or Babu, a term of respect given to males. Society creates labels for the benefit of men while degrading women.”

Poverty control, social safety nets, health care, decent jobs to exit into, workplace protections for those who stay in, raising the status of women in general and destigmatizing female sexual activity on a cultural level have to go along with legalization for it to be of any use. These are things we should be fighting for anyway, and are supposed to be fighting for anyway. Why fight for human dignity for women in every other labor field, but not these particular women?

I agree that stronger punishments for traffickers would be a good thing, but that's a lot like an outcry for stronger punishments for rapists- it makes a nice rallying cry and is not a bad thing to rally around, but unless it goes hand in hand with an environment where the authorities are willing to make the arrests and follow through with the prosecution, it's pretty well worthless. That environment does not exist in Bangladesh. They aren't even enforcing the laws they have now. (ETA Google tells me the penalties for sex trafficking in Bangladesh are already pretty harsh with minimum sentence being 10 years and the usual sentence being life in prison)

Yes, poverty has a lot of cultural causes. I don't understand this statement.

[Starry Messenger]

9. "Why fight for human dignity for women in every other labor field, but not these particular women?"

I guess I don't see how trying to raise awareness of 9 year old prostitutes addicted to drugs to make them look older just became me not supporting women and labor?

The main way we get to worker protections is through laws, so...? Is this law that legalizes prostitution working to bring human dignity? Do we say, well, just keep it this way because there is nothing you can do? Why try to reform anything then?

What are the "cultural causes" of poverty? Does one culture tend to create poverty more than some other culture because of some inherent quality of the culture? This sounds odd to me. That is what I was asking for.

Do apes trade their children to be raped for survival? I'd be surprised to find that is the case, except in the most stressed out environment. And if humans were just like apes, we'd never have evolved speech and other forms that make human society unique.

[LadyHawkAZ]

12. Once again: your post placed the blame solely on legalization

without reference to the fact that a) this is the Third World or b) this is an area where women in general are considered lower life forms, prostitutes or not or c) that criminalization in neighboring countries had also failed equally badly.

So I asked: if it were criminalized in Bangladesh tomorrow, what do you feel would change? The answer you didn't give is: nothing, other than making an already hellish existence worse.

Is this law in this country working to bring human dignity? No, because the problem is not with the trade but with the culture, which is so vehemently disrespectful of women that it does not enforce the protections already in place. Trafficking and pimping children is already illegal in that area. Pointing the finger at legalization does nothing to solve that other than ignore the actual problem (and make "rescue" groups wealthy).

Cultural causes... consider Afghanistan, where widowed women didn't used to be allowed to work and wound up begging in the street. That is a cultural cause. The refusal here to raise the minimum wage, because the wealthy view the poor as expendable labor-bots? Cultural cause. The amount of respect for the lowest strata of society shown by the people at the top is the root of that problem, and it varies widely from culture to culture. Make more sense now?

No, other apes don't, afaik. If your point here was that we're better than other apes, that's a fail.

[Starry Messenger]

13. We'll have to agree to disagree.

I don't concede any of those points.