When this admittedly off-beat description of the humid, grid-locked, vibrant hell that is Thailand's capital city appeared in the 1993 edition of Longman's English Language and Culture Dictionary, most Thais were incensed. Demonstrations were held outside the British Embassy, copies of the book were publicly burned, and the publishers rapidly agreed to withdraw the edition from circulation. When, a few weeks later, `Time' featured a lurid cover shot of a half- naked Thai bar girl next to the caption "Sex for Sale", Thais were even angrier. More recently -- in March, 1994 -- the United States placed Thailand at the top of a list of countries accused of violating women and children's rights.

According to US Secretary of State for Human Rights John Shattuck, about 800,000 women under the age of 18 are employed in Thailand's sex trade -- a charge which the Thai authorities were quick to condemn as "grossly exaggerated". A tradition of prostitution? Of course, it is easy to understand why Thais become irritated -- nobody enjoys having their dirty linen washed in public. The Thais, a people renowned for their good humour, hospitality and sense of fun, are genuinely distressed. Surely, they ask, there are prostitutes in Europe and America? Sex is for sale just about everywhere except (perhaps) in North Korea, so why does Thailand always get singled out for more than its fair share of the blame?

The trouble, is, Thailand really does have a larger sex entertainment industry than most other countries. And, as a matter of fact, they are not doing badly at all. Thai Aids awareness campaigns are carefully implemented throughout the country, from Bangkok to the remotest hill tribe village. Condoms are universally available and increasingly widely used, so that unusually for Asia -- population growth is well under control. Even so, it is plain that the implications of an unchecked Aids epidemic for Thailand remain truly frightening, especially in the North. One effect of this new view, Sappasit suggests, is "looking at every thing with speculator's eyes, looking at people as if they are sex objects, buying sex, selling sex until there's just a lot of sex and violence everywhere".

To be sure, there is come truth in this view -- a conception which seems to be shared by the great majority of Thais. This process has been continued by sex tourism and the emergence of lurid night life centres like Patpong, Pattaya and Phuket's Patong Beach -- all well-known in the West. Other areas, too, have tarnished Thailand's image elsewhere in the world. This, then, is the noisier, better-publicised aspect of Thai night life. But it is also just the tip of an iceberg. For the Thai men themselves have long been inveterate brothel users. Estimates vary as to the number of prostitutes in the country, with the Public Health Department pitching in at a low 200,000 and others, such as Sappasit Kumprapan, putting the figure nearer two million.

In reality, there seems little point in arguing about numbers. American "R&R;" and international sex tourism can hardly be held responsible for this state of affairs. Clearly, a large part of the problem must be domestic. To bear this out, the Public Health Ministry recently released figures showing that 75 per cent of Thai men sleep regularly with prostitutes, while 44 per cent of teenage boys pay for their first sexual experience. Today most informed Thais would probably agree that the domestic sex industry is big, dangerous, corrupt and responsible for seriously damaging Thailand's image abroad. Fewer, perhaps, realise just how old Thailand's tradition of prostitution is, how deeply grained and therefore how difficult to reform.

Despite Ma's whimsical style, readers should be assured that this is not, and never has been, a traditional Thai custom. While there are no direct indications that the "men of China" paid for the privilege, one can fairly assume that this is an early record of prostitution (and of procurers) in Thailand. When, some 200 years later, European vessels began regularly to visit Siam, prostitution certainly existed. Bangkok's Don Muang International Airport will instantly recognise. Quoting further passages of this kind is really not necessary. The point is not that medieval Siam was to blame for having prostitutes -- London, Amsterdam, and indeed any port in Europe were undoubtedly much the same. Rather, what is significant is that Thai society has long had a tradition of prostitution, and it is both misleading and ultimately self-defeating to blame this exclusively on the West.

Turning to the 20th century, Western soldiers first came to Thailand in serious numbers in the wake of the Japanese surrender at the end of the Second World War. In 1945 one such young American was Jorges Orgibet, at that time a press officer with the US Office of War Information. Later Orgibet would go on to become a distinguished Bangkok-based journalist and co-founder of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand. He remained in Thailand for 37 years and was, at all times, an exceptionally good friend of this country. Orgibet remembers his arrival in Bangkok, one of only 50 Americans in the country at the time, with affection. There were 85 cabarets scattered across the city with names like Great World, Happy World, Venus Club and (shades of Sampeng) Green Lantern. The greatest concentration was on one block of Nares Road, "with something like 2,000 `hostesses' for the asking". Ban Moh houses a Thai film studio devoted entirely to blue movie production.

Once a victim has a record, it’s harder for them to escape their exploitative situation. Because our work is criminalized, many sexual assault survivors face difficult choices when deciding whether to report a crime. Like most sex workers, I fear arrest - or worse - if I call the police. The stakes are much higher for sex workers of color, street-based sex workers and transgender women who face a disproportionate amount of harassment, arrests and violence - especially at the hands of police. MeToo movement, workplaces are grappling with how to respond to sexual violence, but sex workers remain incredibly vulnerable.

Sixty percent of sex workers in a 2014 study reported experiencing some form of violence while working. Thirty percent reported a physical attack and 29 percent reported being sexually assaulted. When I was assaulted last year, I didn’t file a police report because I had seen cops scrutinize members of my community in the past. I thought my chances of achieving justice were slim, and the likelihood that reporting the violence would turn into more trouble for me seemed too high to risk. SB 233 would change that. It’s good policy for survivors, workers and all Californians. Condoms should be evidence that someone wants to protect themselves from pregnancy and sexually-transmitted infections - nothing more. Everyone must be able to carry condoms without fear that they will be confiscated or used to criminalize them.

OSLO (Reuters) - Nordic steps to tighten the laws on buying sex are winning adherents around Europe, but feedback from the sex workers they were drawn up to protect suggests the regulations may be making their work more dangerous. But interviews with charities, women’s rights activists and prostitutes themselves indicate that for many sex workers, the effect of the law has not been positive. “The law is pushing prostitution more underground,” said Jaana Kauppinen, who heads a charity that helps sex workers in Helsinki and Tampere in Finland. Sweden was the first to introduce a ban on buying sex in 1999, following a campaign started by women’s rights advocates who believed that buying someone’s body for sex was morally wrong.

In the final proposal to criminalize the buying and not selling of sex, Stockholm focused on the vulnerability of the women and their right to “peace” and protection. Finland followed in 2006 with a partial ban, making it illegal to buy sex from a person who was trafficked or pimped. Since then, France, England and Wales have all adopted Finland’s partial ban. A deal was struck by the ruling coalition parties in December to do the same in Germany. Ireland is considering a Swedish-style law. In February, the European Parliament voted in favor of Sweden’s law, on the basis that it considered prostitution constituted violence against women.

The vote was not binding. Some sex workers applaud the laws. “It is good the customers are scared,” said Tina, 24, from Romania, waiting for clients in the streets in central Oslo. She declined to give her last name. But the majority of sex workers interviewed in Finland, Norway and Sweden said the new laws made their working conditions more dangerous. “Now women have to go to the customers’ homes, which is one of the most dangerous ways to work: you don’t know what you walk into,” said Pye Jakobsson, 45, a retired sex worker living in Stockholm. Silvia, a 35-year-old from Bulgaria working as a prostitute on the streets of Norway, agreed the new secrecy posed problems.

“Before we did not go far with the customer: we would go to a car park nearby. But now the customer wants to go somewhere isolated because they are afraid,” she said. “I don’t like it. Police deny that the laws have made prostitution more dangerous. “It is dangerous to be a prostitute, whether in a country that has legislation like the sex purchase act or not,” said Kajsa Wahlberg, a detective superintendent at Sweden’s National Police Board and the national rapporteur on human trafficking. “I have asked this question to police, to social services for 15 years and we have not seen an increase in violence after the act was introduced,” she said. The acts do appear to have had an effect on human trafficking, police said.

“Bringing the women to Sweden is now more time-consuming and takes more resources than before” and it is more difficult for traffickers to pimp prostitutes on the street, Wahlberg said. Some sex workers interviewed in Finland said they believed the law had increased demand for local prostitutes while cutting it for foreign ones as clients believed local women were less likely to have been trafficked or pimped. “I haven’t seen any decline in my business,” said Diva Miranda, the nom de guerre of a Finnish dominatrix based in Tampere, who sees an average 10 to 20 clients a week. She is concerned, however, that her work would become more hazardous if the law was changed to be like Sweden’s.

“Some of the more law-abiding citizens would probably stop using my services. And that is not a pleasant thought. I am not really looking forward to that,” she said. Police say the increase was a result of more funding for investigations, not a result of the law. The moral and ethical questions around prostitution complicate law-making on the issue. In Norway, the center-right Conservatives and the populist Progress Party - the parties ruling the country since October - have said they want to overturn the law as they believe it infringes on free choice. But they face a revolt from within their own parties on the issue.

“I was not in favor of introducing the law, but I am worried about sending the wrong signal if we abolish it now,” said Trude Drevland, the mayor of Bergen, Norway’s second-largest city. Marie Johansson, who runs a counseling service in Stockholm to help men to stop going to prostitutes, said she supports the law. “I think it is a good step to say that as a society it is not okay to buy someone else’s body,” she said. Efforts to extend the ban in Finland to include all forms of sex purchase were recently defeated, but Finnish justice minister Anna-Maja Henriksson told Reuters she would continue to try to make the current regime tougher. Jakobsson, the retired prostitute living in Stockholm, said she thought the law was patronizing toward women. “On one end, some women are exploited, but on the other you have women who do it as a hobby and enjoy it. And you have everything else in between,” she said.

Prostitution is the world’s oldest profession. It’s also one of the world’s most lucrative. But since prostitution is illegal in most parts of the civilized world, people have had to get creative with how they run a prostitution business. That creativity has led to some remarkably profitable and influential businesses that you may have never known about. Here are the top 10 prostitution rings in American history. The glitz and glamour of Hollywood might not seem like a profitable place to form a prostitution ring, but Heidi Fleiss proved otherwise when she put together one of the most powerful "madame" services in U.S. The especially provocative thing about her prostitution ring was her clientele: rich, famous, successful movie stars and celebrities. The Dumas Brothel was America’s longest running house of prostitution, doing big business from 1890 to 1982 when it closed down to become a museum.

Located in Uptown Butte, Mont., the brothel is so well known in the region that it has been listed as a National historical landmark. The girls at the Dumas Brothel were well known for working hard, partying hard, and often dying hard. Many report that the Dumas Brothel is haunted by its former patrons and working girls. The Mustang Ranch made prostitution so acceptable and profitable, that a majority of the rest of the counties in the state soon legalized prostitution after the Mustang Ranch opened. Located in Storey County, Nev., just outside Reno, the Mustang Ranch thrived in the 1970s as one of the largest live-in brothels in the world. After its owner was convicted of federal sex charges, the brothel was forfeited to the federal government and auctioned off.

It has since reopened and continues to thrive under new management. A well-organized prostitution ring catering to the Houston elite was run like any other business by a husband and wife pair. With two websites and a huge list of contacts, the couple were entrepreneurs in every sense of the word: only the product they were selling was illegal. The couple even hired administrative staff to run their website call system — a feat many legitimate businesses can’t match today. The working girls were said to be intelligent, driven, and well-trained. Known as the "D.C. Madame," Deborah Jeane Palfrey established a well known "sex fantasy" service that went under the moniker "Pamela Martin & Associates." When https://www.2nd-circle.com/escorts-benidorm/ caught wind of her operation, they charged her with various prostitution-related crimes.

Palfrey was the ultimate businesswoman, requiring her "gals" to sign contracts stipulating that no sex would be involved in an appointment, requiring a dress code, and insisting on punctuality. All working girls had to have college degrees and day jobs in order to work for the agency. Palfrey lost her court battle, and ultimately took her own life — a tragic end to a story straight out of Hollywood. Any ZZ Top fan will know of the town of La Grange where the Texas Chicken Ranch is located. Broadway fans might know it better as "the best little whorehouse in Texas." Yes, it’s a real place, and an old one at that.

Prostitution was legal, and even institutionalized in the mid 1840s, and the Texas Chicken Ranch was the preeminent brothel of its time. It continued to operate until the early 1970s when concerns about the Chicken Ranch’s ties to organized crime led to its shutdown. However, the circumstances of the shutdown and the alleged link to organized crime are controversial, and many believe that the Chicken Ranch should never have been shut down at all. Few prostitution rings can boast the high-rolling prices charged by High Class NY, a prostitution ring catering to the elite Wall Street traders of New York City.