RIGHTS-TIBET: Warped Development Provokes Sex Trade

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Jan 13 2004 (IPS) - Disproportionate development is leading to increased prostitution in Tibet, an independent investigation report says.

“An increasing number of Tibetan women from rural areas, particularly in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), are working as prostitutes,” says a report by Tibetan Information Network (TIN), a London-based non-governmental organisation that gathers and disseminates information from Tibet.

“This study was based on about six months of investigation,” TIN director Thierry Dodin told IPS. Five persons were involved in the investigation, he said.

The report links the growth in the sex trade to development models focused on urban areas.

“Whereas economists express serious doubts about the sustainability of the economic growth in Tibet, which is artificially fuelled by heavy subsidy from Beijing, there is little doubt that it has generated higher levels of disposable income in a few urban centres while leaving the vast majority of Tibetans who live in rural areas in a state of stagnating poverty,” the report says.

“At the same time, the aggressive consumerism propagated in rural areas by the increasing penetration of the state controlled media has raised expectations impossible to fulfil locally,” it says.

The report says rural Tibetans are not only poorer, their extremely low level of education makes their chances of getting a steady and lucrative job in the cities as good as nonexistent.

“This discrepancy between high expectations and the sheer impossibility of fulfilling them appears to lead young female Tibetan migrants into prostitution, the only realistic quick route to a better standard of living,” the report says.

The report says Tibetan sex workers are mostly at a disadvantage compared to their Chinese counterparts. “Although there are real prospects for Tibetan prostitutes to better their material lot, they benefit less from prostitution than Chinese sex workers in Tibet, and they face more social difficulties,” the report says.

Since the early 1990s prostitution has expanded exponentially in the TAR, the report says. “Though it is still officially illegal in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in the major urban centres much of the commercial sex trade is carried out in sites owned or leased by the government, the Communist Party or the military.”

Despite the increase in Tibetan prostitutes, the majority of prostitutes in the TAR are still Chinese, the TIN investigation points out.

Virtually all Tibetan prostitutes are reported to come to the cities from villages or remote nomadic areas. “They come into contact with prostitution while visiting entertainment establishments and turn to it themselves when other work possibilities do not materialise.”

Nangma bars (a popular Tibetan style of music venue) and karaoke clubs are reported as the most common contact with prostitution, but many Tibetan sex workers also move to prostitution after working in beauty parlours.

A sex worker in one of the better bars in a town in south Tibet is reported as saying that every year before the roads become blocked by snow she travels south to work in a “beauty parlour” in Kathmandu or as a call girl in Delhi.

One sex worker mentioned that she came to Tibet because the conditions of work are far better than in India and the business more lucrative.

In Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, a large number of Tibetan prostitutes are reported to work from higher-class entertainment venues and bars or as call girls, while the average sex trade is more in the hands of Chinese sex workers. But this distinction is said to be much less pronounced outside Lhasa.

Tibetan prostitutes in Lhasa charge on average 12 dollars, of which they give half to the bar owners, the report says. They also pay about 22 dollars a month in tax which includes a health and a commercial tax. In south Tibet, they charge about half this per client.

“In a land where people are deprived of fundamental rights, women are being pushed into this trade to survive,” Kesang Takla, representative of the Dalai Lama in London, told IPS. The Dalai Lama who is based in Dharamsala in India is the political and spiritual leader of the Tibetans.

“I hope that organisations that concern themselves with human rights and women’s issues pay more attention to this problem,” she said. “It needs more recognition, and the women need more support.” The women need help from outside “because in the given situation in Tibet it is very difficult for people there to do something.”

Takla said it is “very sad that this is happening more and more in Tibet.” Given the restrictions on free speech “it is difficult to get first hand information, but there is no doubt that this activity is on the rise in Tibet.”

Tibet is a disputed land. It was a virtual protectorate of China with its own administration until Chinese forces took over in 1950-51. The Dalai Lama has been leading the demands of about five million Tibetans for independence or at least a degree of autonomy.