Risky business of sex in the city

• Source: The Global Times
• [20:36 May 20 2009]
• Comments

The Little Match Girl

It was November 2008. Night fell. Penniless and possession-less, Xiao Xue had just been thrown out of her home by her landlord after he had learned she had AIDS. She had tested positive in 2003.

She remembers that night watching a happy family-of-three pass by a well-lit residential building.

“I just felt heartbroken,” she says. “I thought about The Little Match Girl. At least she could light a match for a little hope.

“I had nothing,” she says.

Tears well up again. She fights them back, but finally succumbs. Paper tissue in one hand, she sips lukewarm water out of a white paper cup and continues.

Xiao recalls sitting in a car and bargaining with two clients in 2006. Hours later, she woke up on the side of the road with no bag, no money and no mobile phone.

She recalls a pretty friend of hers kidnapped by two clients on the Fourth Ring Road. She jumped out of the speeding car and broke both her legs.

“We’re afraid to go to the police because we are prostitutes,” she says. “The procedures are too complex and lengthy.”

Legalization, or at least destigmatization, would reduce robberies, murders and rapes, believes the director of the Center for Sex and Gender Research of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of Beijing Forestry University. Deputy professor Fang Gang wrote in an e-mail to the Global Times that health checkups for prostitutes would also increase.

Xiao Xue disagrees.

Legalization would not help sex workers out of their plight, she says. Legalization would only expand the business, making more girls into sex victims, she argues.

“Legalization is simplistic and powerless,” says Xiao. “A sound environment meeting basic living and healthcare needs is much more important.”

China’s prostitution laws have contributed to the rise in harm done to prostitutes, believes Pan Suiming, a professor at the Institute for Sexological Research of People’s University of China in Beijing.

“The legalization of prostitution, at heart, is about how the authorities choose to label these girls,” he wrote to the Global Times via e-mail.

“Authorities should make prostitution a social management issue so that these poor girls will not be treated as enemies or criminals,” he wrote. China probably won’t be ready for that for at least 20 years, he concedes.

A source at the Ministry of Public Security of China in Beijing says he personally advocated legalization for disorganized, petty prostitution offenses, but police still have a duty to crack down on more exploitative prostitution with its links to organized crime.

“China should adjust laws and enable prostitutes to enjoy equality with other professions,” wrote Pan.

Police management of prostitution has long faced a dilemma for two reasons: China’s rigid legal framework and the diverse range of public attitudes – ranging from friendly tolerance to prudish outrage – towards the profession.

“In ancient China, emperors relied on key community leaders to manage social affairs including sexual morality. The government did not interfere in sexual affairs as long as the local people didn’t complain,” Pan Suiming wrote on his blog.

“The Chinese have an increasingly large number of sex problems nowadays. A key reason behind this is the overwhelming central power since 1949 that destroyed the tacit mores and ethics by which society controlled and regulated the sex trade.

“Therefore, when the government began to loosen administrative control in recent years, sex became one of the least-cared-about social problems. Although government keeps calling for improved sexual morality, the improvement is very limited due to lack of community participation at the local level.”

For Xiao Xue, these debates are far from her wasted life, her pathetic story, her imminent death.

“After realizing the true meaning of life, I’d rather live in a remote area without electricity and toil on farmland my whole life,” she says.