Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition

The book exmines a variety of issues in the area of sex work - theoretical approaches to sex work; migration of women for sex work; sex tourism; sex workers' organizations; and issues of AIDS prevention and sex workers' empowerment. The chief virtues of the book are twofold: first, its global perspective is refreshing, in a debate that has so often centered on the experiences of sex workers in the west; and second, the focus on sex workers' organizations themselves. Much that is written about prostitution ignores the voices of women involved in sex work, and it is good to see that trend being countered in this book.

Countires discussed in the book include Japan, Cote d'Iviore, Cuba, the Caribbean countries, Thailand, Ecuador, South Africa, Mexico, India and Malaysia, to name some. The book will be of interest to anyone interested in sex work, though it is probably of most use to academics and activists.


very informative   April 13, 2001
doris (norfolk, VA USA)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful

if you want to learn a little about how prostitution is done in the world, what types of prostitutes are desirable in each part of the world, what conflicts and problems prostitutes faced whether cultural or international, and how prostitutes live, this is the book for you. i gained a lot of knowledge from this book, especially about prostitution in south america. highly recommended


A bright shining lie   January 2, 2007
Seth J. Frantzman (Jerusalem, Israel)
3 out of 11 found this review helpful

This book claims to want to show the 'nuance' of the sex trade, so therefore it must use complicated words such as 'debt bondage' to in fact describe what is an inhuman situation where people are threatened with death and beaten and raped in order to be forced to sell thier bodies to pay off a non-existent death. Essay after essay encouraged prostitution as 'sex work' and claims that if only all prostitution were legal there would be no sex-slave trade in young girls and no forced prostitution. This is strange becuase in the Netherlands, where prostitution is legal, it turns out there is just as much sex-slavery and beatings and rape. This book also tries to claim all the talk against prostitution and the sex slave trade is 'racist'. But how it is racist when Thai girls are sent to 'work' in Japan and Russian girls sent to Saudi Arabia and Columbian girls to Spain is not clear. It is racist in the sense that rich Europeans, Arabs and Japanese are the buyers, but that is not what the authors wrote.

As typical of anything that is examined by academia this text has to dry all things down so nothing is ever what it seems. A woman who is raped at the age of 11 by wealthy 'clients' and kept chained to a bed for five years until she gets AIDS, this is called 'western sensationalism' and in addition is described as 'sex work' and 'debt bondage'.

It is too bad that none of the authors of any of the essays experienced sex work first hand as one of trafficked people.

Seth J. Frantzman