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The Internet and the Global Prostitution Industry

The Internet has become the latest place for promoting the global trafficking and sexual exploitation of women and children. This global communication network is being used to promote and engage in the buying and selling of women and children. Agents offer catalogues of mail order brides, with girls as young as 13. Commercial prostitution tours are advertised. Men exchange information on where to find prostitutes and describe how they can be used. After their trips men write reports on how much they paid for women and children and give pornographic descriptions of what they did to them. New technology has enabled an online merger of pornography and prostitution, with videoconferencing bringing live sex shows to the Internet.

Global sexual exploitation is on the rise. The profits are high, and there are few effective barriers at the moment. Because there is little regulation of the Internet, the traffickers and promoters of sexual exploitation have rapidly utilized the Internet for their purposes. The pornographers and other promoters of sexual exploitation are the Internet leaders in the developing privacy services, secure payment schemes and online data base management. The standards and values on the Internet are being set by the sex industry and its supporters and users. This economic and electronic globalization has meant that women are increasingly “commodities” to be bought, sold, traded and consumed.

Newsgroups and Web Sites for Men Who Buy Women and Children

The oldest forum on the Internet for promoting the sexual exploitation of women is the newsgroup alt.sex.services (later renamed alt.sex.prostitution). Its "aim is to create market transparency for sex related services." Postings from this newsgroup are archived into a World Wide Web site called The World Sex Guide, which provides "comprehensive, sex-related information about every country in the world" (Atta and M., World Sex Guide, July 1996). The guide includes information and advice from men who have bought women and children in prostitution. They tell others where and how to find and buy prostituted women and children in 110 countries from seven world regions (Africa, Asia, Oceania, Europe, North America, Central America and the Caribbean, and South America).

Details of the men’s reports of their prostitution tours and buying experiences include: information on where to go to find prostitutes, hotel prices, telephone numbers, taxi fares, cost of alcohol, the sex acts that can be bought, the price for each act, and evaluations of the women’s appearances and performances. One man includes a rating scale on the likelihood of getting mugged in that neighborhood. The men go on to describe, often in graphic detail, their experiences of using women and children. The scope and detail of this exchange is without precedent. The women are completely objectified and evaluated on everything from skin color to presence of scars and firmness of their flesh. Women’s receptiveness and compliance to men buyers is also rated.

The men buying women and posting the information see and perceive the events only from their self interested perspective. Their awareness of racism, colonization, global economic inequalities, and of course, sexism, is limited to how these forces benefit them. A country’s economic or political crisis and the accompanying poverty are advantages, which produce cheap readily available women for the men. Often men describe how desperate the women are and how little the men have to pay.

This rapid publishing electronic medium has enabled men to pimp and exploit individual women. Now, men can go out at night, buy a woman, go home, and post the details on the newsgroup. By morning anyone in the world with an Internet connection can read about it and often have enough information to find the same woman. To my knowledge this is completely unprecedented. The implications for this type of public exchange in a fast-publishing easily accessible medium like the Internet are very serious for the sexual exploitation of women in the future.

Prostitution Tours

Centers for prostitution tourism are also the sources of women trafficked for purposes of sexual exploitation to other countries. For centers of prostitution tourism in European countries, women from poor countries are imported legally and illegally to fill the brothels. One of the largest sources of trafficked women today is the countries of the former Soviet Union. Advertisements for prostitution tours to these sights appear on the Internet, usually described as "romance tours" or "introduction tours."

Prostitution tours enable men to travel to "exotic" places and step outside whatever community bounds may constrain them at home. In foreign cities they can abuse women and girls in ways that are more risky or difficult for them in their hometowns.

As prostitution has become a form of tourism for men, it has become a form of economic development for poor countries. Tourism was recommended by the United Nations, the World Bank and United States advisory boards as a way to generate income and repay foreign debts (Lee, 1991). Nation states set their own tourist policies and could, if they chose to do so, prevent or suppress the development of prostitution as a form of tourism. Advertisements for prostitution tours first appeared on the Web in mid-1995, when Alan J. Munn, New York City, USA, launched PIMPS ‘R’ US. He arranged prostitution tours to the Dominican Republic and Nevada, USA.

Bride Trafficking

Mail order bride agents have moved to the Internet as their preferred marketing location. The Internet reaches a prime group of potential buyers-men from Western countries with higher than average incomes. The new Internet technology enables Web pages to be quickly and easily updated; some services claim they are updating their selection of women weekly. The Internet reaches a global audience faster and less expensively than any other media. One mail order bride agent explained why he preferred operation on the Internet.

"So when the World-Wide Web came along, I saw that it was a perfect venue for this kind of business. The paper catalogs were so expensive that their quality was usually very poor; but on the Web you can publish high-resolution full-color photos which can be browsed by everyone in the WORLD" (Toms, Santa Barbara International 1996)

The agents offer men assistance in finding a "loving and devoted" woman whose "views of relationships have not been ruined by unreasonable expectations." The agencies describe themselves as "introduction services," but a quick examination of many of the Web sites reveals their commercial interests in bride trafficking, sex tours and prostitution.

One mail order bride trafficker complained that the Philippines government banned the operation of sex tour and mail order brides agents in the Philippines. He said, "The Philippines government is......definitely working against the interests of their own people. These girls want and need to leave that country." The same agent also complained that the U.S. government will not allow his youngest "brides" on offer into the country. "The service itself is not restricted by the American government, although they are real picky about getting your bride into the states-they won’t give a visa to a bride under age sixteen" (World Class Service, 1996).

The bride traffickers sell addresses to men. Later they offer to arrange tours for the men to go to meet the woman with whom they have been corresponding, or to meet as many women as possible. Men can pay for these services over the Internet with their credit cards.

There are some catalogues which list women with young children. One web site asks if men want women with or without children. On another Web site there are pictures of naked children playing. I think children are being trafficked also in this way. The men are being subtly shown ways of acquiring women and children-all in one package.

Live Videoconferencing

The most advanced technology on the Internet is live videoconferencing, in which live audio and video are transmitted over the Internet from video recorder to computer. This advanced technology is being used to sell live sex shows over the Internet. Real time communication is possible, so the man can personally direct the live sex show as he is viewing it on his computer.

The only limitation on this type of global sex show is the need for high-speed transmission, processing and multimedia capabilities. The software required is free, but the most recent versions of Web browsers have these capabilities built into them. As more men have access to high-speed multimedia computer and transmission equipment, this type of private sex show will grow. There are no legal restrictions on live sex shows that can be transmitted over the Internet. As with all Internet transmissions, there are no nation-state border restrictions. With Internet technology a man maybe on one continent, while directing and watching a live strip show, a live sex show, or the sexual abuse of a child on another continent. There have been several documented cases of live transmission of the sexual abuse of children through live videoconferencing.

Who buys women over the Internet? According to the Internet Entertainment Group (IEG), the largest pimp on the Web, the buyers for live strip shows are 90 percent male, 70 percent living in the United States, and 70 percent are between ages 18 and 40. The buyers are young men in college, and businessmen and professionals who log on from work. This information was obtained from analysis of credit card usage (Wired, December 1997).

Growth of the Commercial Prostitution Industry on the Internet

In the mid-1990s, the hottest place for commercial development was the Internet. In early September 1995 there were 101,908 commercial domains on the Web, which was 26,055 more than the end of July, and 72,706 more than the end of 1994. The sex industry was leading the way.

At the beginning of 1995, there were just 200 businesses on the World Wide Web selling "erotica services" and products, from condoms to pornographic videos (Strangelove, Internet Business Journal, January 1995). I did a search on Yahoo, a popular search engine, in August 1995 and August 1996. In August 1995, the category Yahoo: Business and Economy: Companies: Sex had 391 listings for phone sex numbers, adult CD-ROMS, X-rated films, adult computer software; live videoconferencing, sex tours, escort services and mail order bride agencies. In August 1996 there were 1676 listings - a four fold increase in one year (Yahoo, August 1996).

The popular mainstream pornographic magazine Playboy was quick to jump on the Web. In 1994, Playboy made its debut. Playboy’s Web site content differed from the print magazine. The content of the Web site was designed to appeal to a younger, wealthier audience, the majority of which (75 percent) did not subscribe to the print Playboy magazine (Runett, Playboy, October,1998). In 1996, Playboy magazine’s site was the 11th most visited site on the Web (Simons, August 1996). In 1997, the Web site generated US$2 million in advertising revenue. Many of the advertisers are exclusive to the Web site and do not buy advertising in the print publication. In mid 1998, Playboy’s CyberClub had 26,000 subscribers paying US$60 per year (Runett, Playboy, October 1998).

In April 1996, another popular pornographic magazine, Penthouse went online. Its web site recorded the highest number of visits for publication sites on the Web in that month (Nielson, Wired, December 1997). A 1996 survey found that 20 percent of the users of the World Wide Web said they regularly visited pornographic sites (Simons, U.S. News and World Report, August 1996). By 1998, another survey indicated that 30 percent of American households with Internet access visited online sex industry sites at least once per month (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 1998). In the same year, one report estimated that the Web had 600 commercial pornography sites, which were expected to generate revenues of US$51.5 million. This does not include the amateur sites, or those that have free sites, but make money only by advertising. Only computer products and travel exceeded pornography sales on the Internet (Simons, U.S. News and World Report, August 1996).

At the end of 1997, the online sex industry was estimated to be making US$1 billion a year, just in the United States (Said, San Francisco Chronicle, November 1998). In findings from a 1997 survey, Inter@ctive Week magazine reported that 10,000 sex industry sites were bringing in approximately US$1 billion per year (Chicago Sun Times, June 1997). A midsize site that was accessed 50,000 times per day and made approximately US$20,000 each month. Established sex industry sites could expect to make 50 to 80 percent profits (The Guardian, May 1998). A Sacramento, California firm that handles online credit card transactions said that in 1997, the largest sex industry sites had revenues of US$1 million per month; while the smaller sites took in approximately US$10,000 per month (Said, November 1998).

Regulation

Expressions of concern or condemnation of forms of sexual exploitation of women and children on the Internet are minimized by claims that pornographers have always been the first to take advantage of new technology-first photography, then movies, then VCRs, now, the Internet. Those concerned about the use of the Internet for sexual exploitation are chastened with history lectures on new technology and pornography. The solution that is being promoted is software programs that will screen out sexually explicit material. President Clinton just announced that he supported a rating system on the Internet, so pornography would be rated and software programs will screen it out. This is seen as a way to protect children. Most adults are only concerned that their children may see pornography on the Internet. They aren’t concerned about the women who are being exploited in the making of the pornography. In any search for a solution to pornography and prostitution it is crucial to remember that sexual exploitation starts with real people and the harm is to real people.

The European Union defines trafficking as a form of organized crime. It should be treated the same way on the Internet. All forms of sexual exploitation should be recognized as forms of violence against women and human rights violations, and governments should act accordingly. Although the Internet offers open communication to people throughout the world, it should not be permitted to be dominated and controlled by men’s interests or the interests of the prostitution industry, at women and children’s expense.

dhughes@uri.edu

Donna M. Hughes is Education and Research Coordinator for The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women