Sex Slaves: The Trafficking of Women in Asia [Paperback]

Louise Brown (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2001

The Asian sex trade is often assumed to cater predominantly to foreigners. Sex Slaves turns that belief on its head to show that while western sex tourists have played a vital part in the growth of the industry, the primary customers of Asia’s indentured sex workers and of its child prostitutes are overwhelmingly Asian men. Here are the voices of some of the world’s most silent and abused women—women who have been forced into prostitution by the men they trust. This is their story, including the journey from home to captivity, the horrors of "seasoning" for prostitution, and the hidden life within the brothel.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A trawl through the secret world of the eastern sex trade; from the squalor and slums of Burma to the secret lodging houses and expensive hotel rooms of Japan EVENING HERALD This harrowing study of Asia's sex industry explodes popular cultural stereotypes about the continent's strict family values along with the well-maintained lie that the regional sex trade exists solely for the benefit of Western tourists. It exposes the REBECCA JOHNSON SEX SLAVES highlights, necessarily, the dark side, the hypocrisy and the exploitation- often of children and teenagers- of the trade. ASIAN VOICE

About the Author

Louise Brown is Lecturer in Asian Studies and Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Research in the Humanities at the University of Birmingham.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Virago UK (June 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1860499031
• ISBN-13: 978-1860499036
• Product Dimensions: 4.9 x 0.8 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #922,636 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Annoyingly redundant June 5, 2008

By M. Critchley

Format:Paperback

I was asked to read and give my opinion of this book by a student who is about to embark on a masters course on this same topic. I therefore dutifully slogged through it, although I would have never finished it otherwise.

The topic of the book is primarily about the condition and circumstances of Asian women who have been trafficked into the sex industry for consumption by Asian men. As a book that brings focus on the abject abuse, imprisonment, slavery and torture of women, it is a welcome contrast to the more exploitive (read: crap) books on the market such as "Private Dancer," which tend to deal with the high end of Thai prostitution with western customers, all based more on fiction than on research. Brown's book is looking at the same coin from the opposite side. OK, that's about it for the positive comments I have to make about the book.

On the minus side, this book is so redundant, you need only read the first chapter, "The Market," to learn all you will about what Brown has to say on this subject. In chapters such as "The Management" and "The Law," Brown just spins a few interviews with Calcutta or Thai sex workers to send the same message of how horrible trafficking is and her disgust at the men who perpetuate it. I think she's spot on with her opinion and I had no idea of the depth of the problem, but more complete research might have given her more to write about each topic, and would have allowed me to read more than 4 pages before going to sleep.

As a case in point, there is a chapter titled, "The Customers." I was expecting to read data and observations based on interviews with the people who use prostitutes.... Instead, all you read is more extrapolation of what she thinks men are thinking based on said interviews with the sex workers in Calcutta, the Philippines and so on. Her only published interview of a male seems to be the one young motorcycle taxi driver youth who said he went to brothels because he was "lonely." For this book to have increased substance and power to change and dismantle systems, interviews and insider information from all parties are required. In this same chapter Brown writes, "We should ask what these customers think about prostitution. And why they have to buy sex." Indeed, she should have.

As for her conclusion that prostitution should remain illegal, she ignores all of her evidence that it's precisely because it's illegal that police and other institutionalized corruption completely prevent the dismantling of the system. So which do you want? The unrealistic ideal of ending all prostitution while keeping it illegal at the expense of the continued state of women being kidnapped, cajoled, forced, sold and leveraged into accepting a fate (and by fate, I mean the end of their lives as they know it) of severe mental and physical abuse, confinement, rape and murder? Or do you try to help those suffering the most by legalizing and regulating it as an industry, with the intention of allowing more access of NGOs to inform, educate and help improve general working conditions in non-prostitution industries? This underlying confusion in her argument is really what annoys me the most about this book. I respect her passion for the subject, but she needs to take a reality pill, or at the very least try to draw conclusions that arise from her data.

In summary, as a person who purports to be tackling this as an academic, her research is weak and all of her conclusions seem to be based just on personal opinion and interviews with sex workers. As for her claim that her work is not meant to be sensational, with a title of Sex Slaves in bold red letters, and a cover shot of an Asian woman seemingly about to service some blurry unclothed man, it seems that sex does sell after all. Read more ›

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent overall information, not academic. September 14, 2010

By Carlos Domínguez-Agulleiro

Format:Paperback

I have gone through other readers' reviews and I must agree up to a point, but mostly I disagree. The main problem of this book is that it cannot be used as source for any other report or study. This book neither offers statistical data, nor sociology theories that may be applied to the situation. It is mainly a collection of impressions, interviews with sex workers and helps to provide an accurate state of the human trade for sex in Asia.

I cannot agree with others that this lack of statistics makes it less valuable, though. As a researcher myself, it is easy to dismiss reports lacking hard data, but qualitative reports are as valuable as from-the-desktop graphics making. And in a case that this one, it is more so. I can access easier to the figures provided by different NGOs and international organizations than visiting low end brothels in Bangladesh or the Manila's casas. And there is where this book offers added value.

The book describes a real situation accurately, if not scientifically. It might be better a journalistic report, and it lacks many aspects, but it provides a good overview.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Would have been a great magazine article January 30, 2010

By C. Mancini

Format:Paperback

This book is simply not good. There is little academic rigor on display, plenty of emotional invective, and a thinly veiled contempt for the Asian male, some of which could be forgiven, if it wasn't so exasperatingly repetitive, cloying and one-dimensional. I just spent several minutes looking for one of my favorite lines, whereby the author suggests that some wildly gratuitous assertion be "taken as axiomatic". Sadly, I couldn't find it, but I am sure you'd have shared my bewilderment. Want axiom? The author's understanding of "Asia", or at least that which is found in the pages of this book, is as pedestrian and imbalanced as any on display. The problems with the book don't diminish the importance of the topic, but don't expect to be enlightened within its pages.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars very informative February 13, 2006

By Heather L. Grantham

Format:Paperback

I worked with trafficked women in the Philippines for one year and this book laid the groundwork for so much of the things I came to know while working with these women.

This book is so amazing and you should read it!

4.0 out of 5 stars I wish more people would read it & especially in Asia May 14, 2011

By Babycakes

Format:Paperback

I was both horrified and informed by this book.
Read it yesterday and went to sleep thinking about it, thinking how lucky I am as a British woman with rights and freedom.
Some of these Asian women are treated as commodities.
A heart breaking book. I think the author has done an amazing thing in researching, writing and highlighting the sad state of affairs that exists.
A girl who had been to Cambodia said this book was on sale in many places, which I'm glad about. Plus some of the proceeds go to the the centres that help the women.
If more people read the book, perhaps attitudes would change.
Seems to me that the Asian attitude to sex is extremely hypocrital and needs addressing, as it's the vulnerable in society, the women and CHILDREN, who are treated badly because of it.
This business of 'not losing face' in Asia is also at the heart of the problem.
Anyone who nit picks about this or that in the book, says it seems far fetched or quibbles about the way it's written should get a grip and think - how would you like to be in that situation?
Would you really want to work as a prostitute, but not get the proceeds? To be starved, tortured and then to die of AIDS?