There’s
a little-known fact the MAHA coalition would prefer to keep quiet:
pesticides are essential to protect public health and ensure abundant
food supplies. Without access to these low-risk, regulated chemistries,
our quality of life would suffer in ways most people can’t imagine
because they’ve never experienced a world without widespread pesticide
use. By protecting crops from pests, weeds, and diseases, pesticides
help prevent malnutrition and hunger—conditions that weaken immune
systems and increase vulnerability to serious illness.
Beyond agriculture, pesticides combat vector-borne diseases, such as
malaria and dengue, by targeting mosquitoes and other disease-carrying
insects. Experts recognize that controlled pesticide use has
significantly reduced the incidence of these illnesses, saving millions
of lives. Moreover, pesticides reduce the risk of foodborne illnesses by
controlling pathogens and toxins that can contaminate crops.
Critics are quick to retort that pesticide use increases the risk of
serious disease without providing any compensating benefit. But these
claims are often rooted in bad science and amplified by activists who
don’t know any better—or who deliberately mislead the public. Scientists
routinely correct their false allegations, yet the critics consistently
spread the same baseless fearmongering year after year.
The problem is amplified by sensationalized reporting that promotes
unverified findings designed to attract readers, even if it badly
misleads and leaves them unnecessarily fearful of benign chemicals that
protect their health in a variety of ways.
The philosophy of biology is a subfield of philosophy of science, which deals with epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical
issues in the biological and biomedical sciences. Although philosophers
of science and philosophers generally have long been interested in
biology (e.g., Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant),
philosophy of biology only emerged as an independent field of
philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s, associated with the research of David Hull. Philosophers of science then began paying increasing attention to biology, from the rise of Neodarwinism in the 1930s and 1940s to the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 to more recent advances in genetic engineering.
Other key ideas include the reduction of all life processes to biochemical reactions, and the incorporation of psychology into a broader neuroscience.
Overview
Philosophers
of biology examine the practices, theories, and concepts of biologists
with a view toward better understanding biology as a scientific
discipline (or group of scientific fields). Scientific ideas are
philosophically analyzed and their consequences are explored.
Philosophers of biology have also explored how our understanding of
biology relates to epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics
and whether progress in biology should compel modern societies to
rethink traditional values concerning all aspects of human life. It is
sometimes difficult to separate the philosophy of biology from theoretical biology.
"Are there laws of biology like the laws of physics?"
Ideas drawn from philosophical ontology and logic are being used by biologists in the domain of bioinformatics. Ontologies such as the Gene Ontology are being used to annotate the results of biological experiments in model organisms
in order to create logically tractable bodies of data for reasoning and
search. The ontologies are species-neutral graph-theoretical
representations of biological types joined together by formally defined
relations.
A prominent question in the philosophy of biology is whether biology can be reduced
to lower-level sciences such as chemistry and physics. Materialism is
the view that every biological system including organisms consists of
nothing except the interactions of molecules; it is opposed to vitalism.
As a methodology, reduction would mean that biological systems should
be studied at the level of chemistry and molecules. In terms of epistemology,
reduction means that knowledge of biological processes can be reduced
to knowledge of lower-level processes, a controversial claim.
Holism in science
is the view that emphasizes higher-level processes, phenomena at a
larger level that occur due to the pattern of interactions between the
elements of a system over time. For example, to explain why one species
of finch survives a drought while others die out, the holistic method
looks at the entire ecosystem. Reducing an ecosystem to its parts in
this case would be less effective at explaining overall behavior (in
this case, the decrease in biodiversity). As individual organisms must
be understood in the context of their ecosystems, holists argue, so must
lower-level biological processes be understood in the broader context
of the living organism in which they take part. Proponents of this view
cite our growing understanding of the multidirectional and multilayered
nature of gene modulation (including epigenetic changes) as an area
where a reductionist view is inadequate for full explanatory power.
All processes in organisms obey physical laws, but some argue
that the difference between inanimate and biological processes is that
the organisation of biological properties is subject to control by coded
information. This has led biologists and philosophers such as Ernst Mayr and David Hull to return to the strictly philosophical reflections of Charles Darwin to resolve some of the problems which confronted them when they tried to employ a philosophy of science derived from classical physics. The old positivist approach used in physics emphasised a strict determinism
and led to the discovery of universally applicable laws, testable in
the course of experiment. It was difficult for biology to use this
approach. Standard philosophy of science seemed to leave out a lot of what
characterised living organisms - namely, a historical component in the
form of an inherited genotype.
Philosophers of biology have also examined the notion of teleology in biology.
Some have argued that scientists have had no need for a notion of
cosmic teleology that can explain and predict evolution, since one was
provided by Darwin. But teleological explanations relating to purpose or
function have remained useful in biology, for example, in explaining
the structural configuration of macromolecules
and the study of co-operation in social systems. By clarifying and
restricting the use of the term 'teleology' to describe and explain
systems controlled strictly by genetic programmes or other physical
systems, teleological questions can be framed and investigated while
remaining committed to the physical nature of all underlying organic
processes. While some philosophers claim that the ideas of Charles
Darwin ended the last remainders of teleology in biology, the matter
continues to be debated. Debates in these areas of philosophy of biology
turn on how one views reductionism more generally.
Sharon Street claims that contemporary evolutionary biological theory creates what she calls a “Darwinian Dilemma” for realists.
She argues that this is because it is unlikely that our evaluative
judgements about morality are tracking anything true about the world.
Rather, she says, it is likely that moral judgements and intuitions that
promote our reproductive fitness were selected for, and there is no
reason to think that it is the truth of these moral intuitions which
accounts for their selection. She notes that a moral intuition most
people share, that someone being a close family member is a prima facie
good reason to help them, happens to be an intuition likely to increase
reproductive fitness, while a moral intuition almost no one has, that
someone being a close family member is a reason not to help them, is
likely to decrease reproductive fitness.
David Copp responded to Street by arguing that realists can avoid
this so-called dilemma by accepting what he calls a “quasi-tracking”
position. Copp explains that what he means by quasi tracking is that it
is likely that moral positions in a given society would have evolved to
be at least somewhat close to the truth. He justifies this by appealing
to the claim that the purpose of morality is to allow a society to meet
certain basic needs, such as social stability, and a society with a
successful moral codes would be better at doing this.
Other perspectives
One
perspective on the philosophy of biology is how developments in modern
biological research and biotechnologies have influenced traditional
philosophical ideas about the distinction between biology and
technology, as well as implications for ethics, society, and culture. An
example is the work of philosopher Eugene Thacker in his book Biomedia. Building on current research in fields such as bioinformatics and
biocomputing, as well as on work in the history of science (particularly
the work of Georges Canguilhem, Lily E. Kay, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger),
Thacker defines biomedia as entailing "the informatic
recontextualization of biological components and processes, for ends
that may be medical or non-medical...biomedia continuously make the dual
demand that information materialize itself as gene or protein
compounds. This point cannot be overstated: biomedia depend upon an
understanding of biological as informational but not immaterial."
Philosophy of biology was historically associated very closely
with theoretical evolutionary biology, but more recently there have been
more diverse movements, such as to examine molecular biology.
Scientific discovery process
Research in biology continues to be less guided by theory than it is in other sciences. This is especially the case where the availability of high throughput screening techniques for the different "-omics" fields such as genomics,
whose complexity makes them predominantly data-driven. Such
data-intensive scientific discovery is by some considered to be the
fourth paradigm, after empiricism, theory and computer simulation. Others reject the idea that data driven research is about to replace theory. As Krakauer et al. put it: "machine learning is a powerful means of
preprocessing data in preparation for mechanistic theory building, but
should not be considered the final goal of a scientific inquiry." In regard to cancer biology, Raspe et al. state: "A better
understanding of tumor biology is fundamental for extracting the
relevant information from any high throughput data." The journal Science chose cancer immunotherapy as the breakthrough of
2013. According to their explanation a lesson to be learned from the
successes of cancer immunotherapy is that they emerged from decoding of
basic biology.
Theory in biology is to some extent less strictly formalized than
in physics. Besides 1) classic mathematical-analytical theory, as in
physics, there is 2) statistics-based, 3) computer simulation and 4)
conceptual/verbal analysis. Dougherty and Bittner argue that for biology to progress as a science,
it has to move to more rigorous mathematical modeling, or otherwise risk
to be "empty talk".
In tumor biology research, the characterization of cellular
signaling processes has largely focused on identifying the function of
individual genes and proteins. Janes showed however the context-dependent nature of signaling driving cell
decisions demonstrating the need for a more system based approach. The lack of attention for context dependency in preclinical research is
also illustrated by the observation that preclinical testing rarely
includes predictive biomarkers that, when advanced to clinical trials,
will help to distinguish those patients who are likely to benefit from a
drug.
The Darwinian dynamic and the origin of life
Organisms that exist today, from viruses to humans, possess a self-replicating informational molecule (genome) that is either DNA (most organisms) or RNA
(as in some viruses), and such an informational molecule is likely
intrinsic to life. Probably the earliest forms of life were likewise
based on a self-replicating informational molecule (genome), perhaps RNA or an informational molecule more primitive than RNA or DNA. It has been argued that the evolution of order in living systems and in particular
physical systems obey a common fundamental principle that was termed the
Darwinian dynamic. This principal was formulated by first considering
how macroscopic order is generated in a simple non-biological system far
from thermodynamic equilibrium, and subsequently extending
consideration to short, replicating RNA molecules. The underlying
order-generating process was concluded to be basically similar for both
types of systems.
Forced prostitution, also known as involuntary prostitution or compulsory prostitution, is prostitution or sexual slavery that takes place as a result of coercion
by a third party. The terms "forced prostitution" or "enforced
prostitution" appear in international and humanitarian conventions, such
as the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,
but have been inconsistently applied. "Forced prostitution" refers to
conditions of control over a person who is coerced by another to engage
in sexual activity.
Legal situation
Forced prostitution is illegal under customary law in all countries. This is different from voluntary prostitution which may have a
different legal status in different countries, which range from being
fully illegal and punishable by death to being legal and regulated as an occupation.
While the legality of adult prostitution varies between jurisdictions, the prostitution of children is illegal nearly everywhere in the world.
In 1949, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others.
This Convention supersedes a number of earlier conventions that covered
some aspects of forced prostitution, and also deals with other aspects
of prostitution. It penalizes the procurement and enticement to
prostitution as well as the maintenance of brothels. As at December 2013, the convention has only been ratified by 82 countries. One of the main reasons it has not been ratified by many countries is
because the legal term 'voluntary' is broadly defined in countries with a
legal sex industry. For example, in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Greece and Turkey some forms of prostitution and pimping are legal and regulated as professional occupations.
The Thirteen Amendment abolished slavery in the United States of
America. "We see forced prostitution and slavery intertwining because
they are similar. When slavery was illegal, they were forced into hard
labor, and we see women being forced to perform sexual activities for
their 'masters' or 'pimps.'"
If a procurer forces anyone to engage in prostitution across state lines, they may be charged under both the Mann Act and the Travel Act.
Child prostitution is considered inherently non-consensual and
exploitative, as children, because of their age, are not legally able to
consent. In most countries child prostitution is illegal irrespective
of the child reaching a lower statutory age of consent.
State parties to the Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography
are required to prohibit child prostitution. The Protocol defines a
child as any human being under the age of 18, "unless an earlier age of majority is recognized by a country's law". The Protocol entered into force on 18 January 2002, and as of December 2013, 166 states are party to the Protocol and another 10 states have signed but not yet ratified it.
The Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999 (Convention No 104) of the International Labour Organization (ILO) provides that the use, procuring or offering of a child for prostitution is one of the worst forms of child labor. This convention,
adopted in 1999, provides that countries that had ratified it must
eliminate the practice urgently. It enjoys the fastest pace of
ratifications in the ILO's history since 1919.
In the United States, the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000
classifies any "commercial sex act [which] is induced by force, fraud,
or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not
attained 18 years of age" to be a "Severe Form of Trafficking in
Persons".
In poorer nations, child prostitution remains a serious issue; tourists from the Western world travel to these countries to engage in child sex tourism. Thailand, Cambodia, India, Brazil and Mexico have been identified as leading hotspots of child sexual exploitation.
Trafficking of women and children (and, more rarely, young men) for
prostitution is a violation of human rights, but labor trafficking is
probably more widespread.
Evidence can be found in field studies of trafficking victims across
the world and in the simple fact that the worldwide market for labor is
far greater than that for sex. Statistics on the "end use" of trafficked
people are often unreliable because they tend to overrepresent the sex
trade.
Human trafficking, especially of girls and women, often leads to forced prostitution and sexual slavery. In some cases, a pimp may exploit a person who suffers from a mental illness to engage in prostitution. According to a 2007 report by the UNODC, internationally, the most common destinations for victims of human trafficking are Thailand, Japan, Israel, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Turkey and the United States. The major sources of trafficked persons are Thailand, China, Nigeria, Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine. Victims of cybersex trafficking are transported and then coerced to perform sexual acts and or raped in front of a webcam on live streams that are often commercialized.
A 2010 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
report estimates that globally, 79% of identified victims of human
trafficking were trafficked for sexual exploitation, 18% for forced
labor, and 3% for other forms of exploitation. In 2011, preliminary European Commission
in September 2011 similarly estimated that among human-trafficking
victims, 75% were trafficked for sexual exploitation and the rest for
forced labor or other forms of exploitation.
Due to the illegal nature of prostitution and the different
methodologies used in separating forced prostitution from voluntary
prostitution, the extent of this phenomenon is difficult to estimate
accurately. According to a 2008 report by the U.S. Department of State:
"Annually, according to U.S. Government-sponsored research completed in
2006, 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across national borders,
which does not include millions trafficked within their own countries.
Approximately 80% of transnational victims are women and girls and up to
50% are minors, and the majority of transnational victims are
trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation." A 2014 European Commission report found that from 2010 to 2013, a total of 30,146 people were registered as victims of human trafficking in the 28 member states of the European Union; of these, 69% were victims of sexual exploitation.
In 2004, The Economist claimed that only a small proportion of prostitutes were explicitly trafficked against their will.
The Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (also referred to as the Palermo Protocol) is a protocol to the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime
and defines human trafficking as the "recruitment, transportation,
transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or
use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction,
of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of
vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to
achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for
the purpose of exploitation." For this reason, threat, coercion, or use of force is not necessary to
constitute trafficking, the exploitation of an existing vulnerability –
such as economic vulnerability or sexual vulnerability – is sufficient. Sigma Huda,
UN special reporter on trafficking in persons, observed that "For the
most part, prostitution as actually practiced in the world usually does
satisfy the elements of trafficking." However Save the Children
see explicit trafficking and prostitution as different issues: "The
issue [human trafficking] however, gets mired in controversy and
confusion when prostitution too is considered as a violation of the
basic human rights of both adult women and minors, and equal to sexual
exploitation per se. From this standpoint then, trafficking and
prostitution become conflated with each other".
Attitudes towards whether prostitution can ever be voluntary
With regard to prostitution, three worldviews exist: abolitionism (where the prostitute is considered a victim), regulation (where the prostitute is considered a worker) and prohibitionism (where the prostitute is considered a criminal). Currently all these views are represented in some Western country.
For the proponents of the abolitionist view, prostitution is
always a coercive practice, and the prostitute is seen as a victim. They
argue that most prostitutes are forced into the practice, either
directly, by pimps and traffickers, indirectly through poverty, drug addiction and other personal problems, or, as it has been argued in recent decades by radical feminists such as Andrea Dworkin, Melissa Farley and Catharine MacKinnon, merely by patriarchal social structures and power relations between men and women. William D. Angel finds that "most" prostitutes have been forced into the
occupation through poverty, lack of education and lack of employment
possibilities. Kathleen Barry
argues that, "there should be no distinction between "free" and
"coerced", "voluntary" and "involuntary" prostitution, since any form of
prostitution is a human rights violation, an affront to womanhood that
cannot be considered dignified labour". France's Green Party
argues: "The concept of "free choice" of the prostitute is indeed
relative, in a society where gender inequality is institutionalized". The proponents of the abolitionist view hold that prostitution is a
practice which ultimately leads to the mental, emotional and physical
destruction of the women who engage in it, and, as such, it should be
abolished. As a result of such views on prostitution, Sweden, Norway and Iceland have enacted laws which criminalize the clients of the prostitutes, but not the prostitutes themselves.
In contrast to the abolitionist view, those who are in favour of
legalization do not consider the women who practice prostitution as
victims, but as independent adult women who had made a choice which
should be respected. Mariska Majoor, former prostitute and founder of
the Prostitution Information Center, from Amsterdam,
holds that: "In our [sex workers'] eyes it's a profession, a way of
making money; it's important that we are realistic about this ...
Prostitution is not bad; it's only bad if done against one's will. Most
women make this decision themselves." According to proponents of regulation, prostitution should be
considered a legitimate activity, which must be recognized and
regulated, in order to protect the workers' rights and to prevent abuse.
The prostitutes are treated as sex workers who enjoy benefits similar to other occupations. The World Charter for Prostitutes Rights (1985), drafted by the International Committee for Prostitutes' Rights, calls for the decriminalisation of "all aspects of adult prostitution resulting from individual decision". Since the mid-1970s, sex workers across the world have organised, demanding the decriminalisation of prostitution, equal protection under the law, improved working conditions, the right to pay taxes, travel and receive social benefits such as pensions. As a result of such views on prostitution, countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and New Zealand have fully legalized prostitution. Prostitution is considered a job like any other.
In its understanding of the distinction between sex work and forced prostitution, the Open Society Foundations
organization states: "sex work is done by consenting adults, where the
act of selling or buying sexual services is not a violation of human
rights".
Legal discrimination
Sexual discrimination happens to those who work both in sex work and forced prostitution. Historically, crimes involving violence against women and having to do with prostitution and sex work have been taken less seriously by the law. Although acts such as the Violence Against Women Act
have been passed to take steps toward preventing such violence, there
is still sexism rooted in the way that the legal system approaches these
cases. Gender based violence is a serious form of discrimination that
has slipped through many cracks in the legal system of the United
States. These efforts have fallen short due to the fact that there is no constitutional protection for women against discrimination.
There is often no evidence, according to police, that when men
are arrested for soliciting a prostitute that it is a gender based
crime. However, there are large discrepancies between the arrests of
prostitutes and the arrests of men caught in the act. While 70% of
prostitution related arrests are of woman prostitutes, only 10% of
related arrests are men/customers. Regardless if the girl or woman is either underage or forced into the
exchange, she is still often arrested and victim blamed instead of being
offered resources. The men who are charged with engaging in these
illegal acts with woman who are prostitutes are able to pay for the
exchange and therefore are usually able to pay for their release while
the woman may not be able to. This generates a cycle of violence against
women, as the situation's outcome favors the man. In one case, a
nineteen-year-old woman in Oklahoma was charged with offering to engage
in prostitution when the woman was known to have previously been a
victim of human sex trafficking. She is an example of how the criminalization of prostitution often
leads to women being arrested multiple times due to the fact that they
are often punished or arrested even when the victim of a situation. Young women and girls have a much higher likelihood of getting arrested
for prostitution than boys in general, and woman victims of human
trafficking often end up being arrested upon multiple occasions, being
registered as a sex offender, and being institutionalized. The lack of
rehabilitation given to women after experiences with human sex trafficking contributes to the cycles of arrests that most woman who engage in prostitution face.
The ERA or Equal Rights Amendment is a proposed amendment to the U.S Constitution that has not yet been ratified. It would guarantee that equal rights could not be denied under the law on account of sex. With this amendment in place, it would allow for sex workers and
victims of human sex trafficking to have legal leverage when it comes to
the discrepancies in how men and women (customers and prostitutes) are
prosecuted. This is due to the fact that there would be legal grounds to
argue the unequal legal treatment on account of sex, which is not
currently outlawed by the U.S. constitution. Although there are other
acts and laws that protect against discrimination based on a variety of
categories and identities, they are often not substantial enough,
provide loopholes, and do not offer adequate protection. This connects to liberal feminism
and the more individualistic approach that comes with this theory.
Liberal feminists believe that there should be equality between the
sexes and this should be gained through equal legal rights, equal
education, and women having "greater self value as individuals". This theory focuses on equality at a more individual level as supposed
to rethinking legal systems themselves or systems of gender, just as the
ERA works for the equality of sexes within an existing system.
Global situation
Europe
In Europe, since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1991, the former Eastern bloc countries such as Albania, Moldova, Bulgaria, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine have been identified as the major source countries for trafficking of women and children. Young women and girls are often lured to wealthier countries by the
promises of money and work and then reduced to sexual slavery. It is estimated that two thirds of women trafficked for prostitution worldwide annually come from Eastern Europe and China,three-quarters of whom have never worked as prostitutes before. The major destinations are Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Turkey, the Middle East (Israel, the United Arab Emirates), Asia, Russia and the United States.
Americas
Mobster Charles "Lucky" Luciano was convicted of compulsory prostitution and running a prostitution racket in the US in 1936.
In Mexico, many criminal organisations lure, and capture women and
use them in brothels. Once the women become useless to the
organisations, they are often killed. Often, the criminal organisations
focus on poor, unemployed girls, and lure them via job offerings
(regular jobs), done via billboards and posters, placed on the streets.
In some cities, like Ciudad Juárez,
there is a high degree of corruption in all levels on the social ladder
(police, courts, ...) which makes it more difficult to combat this
criminal activity. Hotels where women are kept and which are known by
the police are often also not raided/closed down by police. Nor are the
job offerings actively investigated. Some NGO's such as Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa A.C. are trying to fight back, often without much success.
In the US, in 2002, the US Department of State repeated an earlier CIA
estimate that each year, about 50,000 women and children are brought
against their will to the United States for sexual exploitation. Former Secretary of StateColin Powell said that "[h]ere and abroad, the victims of trafficking toil under inhuman conditions – in brothels, sweatshops, fields and even in private homes." In addition to internationally trafficked victims, American citizens
are also forced into prostitution. According to the National Center for
Missing and Exploited Children, "100,000 to 293,000 children are in
danger of becoming sexual commodities."
In prison
Transgender
women in male prisons deal with the risk of forced prostitution by both
prison staff and other prisoners. Forced prostitution can occur when a
correction officer brings a transgender woman to the cell of a male
inmate and locks them in so that the male inmate can rape her. The male
inmate will then pay the correction officer in some way and sometimes
the correction officer will give the woman a portion of the payment. The prisoners serving as customers for these women are informally
referred to as "husbands". Trans women who physically resist the
customer's advances are often criminally charged with assault and placed
in solitary confinement, the assault charge then being used to extend
the woman's prison stay and deny her parole. This practice is known as "V-coding", and has been described as so
common that it is effectively "a central part of a trans woman's
sentence".
Middle East
Eastern European women are trafficked to several Middle Eastern countries, including Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Until 2004, Israel was a destination for human trafficking for the sex industry.
A high number of the Iraqi women fleeing the Iraq War
turned to prostitution, while others were trafficked abroad, to
countries like Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates,
Turkey, and Iran. In Syria alone, an estimated 50,000 Iraqi refugee girls and women, many of them widows, had become prostitutes. Cheap Iraqi prostitutes helped to make Syria a popular destination for sex tourists before the Syrian Civil War. The clients come from wealthier countries in the Middle East. High prices are offered for virgins.
Asia
In Asia, Japan is the major destination country for trafficked women, especially from the Philippines
and Thailand. The US State Department has rated Japan as either a 'Tier
2' or a 'Tier 2 Watchlist' country every year since 2001, in its annual
Trafficking in Persons reports. Both these ratings implied that
Japan was (to a greater or lesser extent) not fully compliant with
minimum standards for the elimination of human trafficking trade. As of 2009, an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 people are trafficked through Southeast Asia, much of it for prostitution. It is common that Thai women are lured to Japan and sold to Yakuza-controlled brothels where they are forced to work off their price. In Cambodia at least a quarter of the 20,000 people working as prostitutes are children with some being as young as 5. By the late 1990s, UNICEF estimated that there are 60,000 child prostitutes in the Philippines, describing Angeles City brothels as "notorious" for offering sex with children.
In Southern India & eastern Indian state of Odisha, devadasi is the practice of hierodulic prostitution, with similar customary forms such as basavi, and involves dedicating pre-pubescent and young adolescent girls from
villages in a ritual marriage to a deity or a temple, who then work in
the temple and function as spiritual guides, dancers, and prostitutes
servicing male devotees in the temple. Human Rights Watch
reports claim that devadasis are forced into this service and, at least
in some cases, to practice prostitution for upper-caste members. Various state governments in India
enacted laws to ban this practice both prior to India's independence
and more recently. They include Bombay Devdasi Act, 1934, Devdasi
(Prevention of dedication) Madras Act, 1947, Karnataka Devdasi
(Prohibition of dedication) Act, 1982, and Andhra Pradesh Devdasi
(Prohibition of dedication) Act, 1988. However, the tradition continues in certain regions of India, particularly the states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.
History
Forced prostitution has existed throughout history. It is said to be the oldest form of slavery.
Slavery and prostitution – the example of Phaedo of Elis
Phaedo of Elis was a native of the ancient Greek city state of Elis and of high birth. He was taken prisoner in his youth, and passed into the hands of an
Athenian slave dealer; being of considerable personal beauty, he was forced into male prostitution. Luckily for him, Phaedo made an acquaintance with Socrates, to whom he attached himself. According to Diogenes Laërtius he was ransomed by one of the friends of Socrates. He prominently appears in Plato's dialogue Phaedo which takes its name from him, and later became a major philosopher in his own right.
The case of Phaedo got special attention due to these exceptional
circumstances. Countless other slaves, male and female, were less lucky
and lived out their lives in perpetual prostitution. The institution of
slavery left a master with no need to ask a slave's consent for sex.
Masters could and often did force their slaves into sex, but also had
the option of forcing the slave into lucrative prostitution. Not only
did the slaves have no choice about it, but they did not benefit from
the payment clients made for their sexual services – it went into the
master's pocket.
In the Islamic world, sex outside of marriage was normally acquired
by men not by paying for temporary sex from a free sex worker, but
rather by personal sex slave called concubine, which was a sex slave trade that was still ongoing in the early 20th-century.
Traditionally, prostitution in the Islamic world was historically
practiced by way of the pimp temporarily selling his slave to her
client, who then returned the ownership of the slave after intercourse.
The Islamic Law formally prohibited prostitution. However, since Islamic
Law allowed a man to have sexual intercourse with his personal sex slave,
prostitution was practiced by a pimp selling his female slave on the
slave market to a client, who returned his ownership of her after 1–2
days on the pretext of discontent after having had intercourse with her,
which was a legal and accepted method for prostitution in the Islamic
world. This form of prostitution was practiced by for example Ibn Batuta, who acquired several female slaves during his travels.
War of Canudos in Brazil
The War of Canudos (1895–1898) was an unequal conflict between the state of Brazil and some 30,000 inhabitants of a rebel community named Canudos in the northeastern state of Bahia. It marks the deadliest civil war in Brazilian history, ending with mass atrocities. After a number of unsuccessful attempts at military suppression, it
came to a brutal end in October 1897, when a large Brazilian army force
overran the village and killed nearly all the inhabitants. Men were
hacked to pieces in front of their wives and children. In the aftermath,
some of the surviving women were taken captive and sent to brothels in Salvador.
German military brothels were set up by the Third Reich during World War II throughout much of occupied Europe for the use of Wehrmacht and SS soldiers. These brothels were generally new creations, but in the West, they were sometimes set up using existing brothels as well as many other buildings. Until 1942, there were around 500 military brothels of this kind in German-occupied Europe. Often operating in confiscated hotels and guarded by the Wehrmacht, these facilities used to serve travelling soldiers and those withdrawn from the front. According to records, at least 34,140 European women were forced to
serve as prostitutes during the German occupation of their own countries
along with female prisoners of concentration camp brothels. In many cases in Eastern Europe, the women involved were kidnapped on
the streets of occupied cities during German military and police round ups called łapanka or rafle.
In World War II, Nazi Germany established brothels in the concentration camps (Lagerbordell) to create an incentive for prisoners to collaborate, although these institutions were used mostly by Kapos,
"prisoner functionaries" and the criminal element, because regular
inmates, penniless and emaciated, were usually too debilitated and wary
of exposure to Schutzstaffel
(SS) schemes. In the end, the camp brothels did not produce any
noticeable increase in the prisoners' work productivity levels, but
instead, created a market for coupons among the camp VIPs. The women forced into these brothels came mainly from the Ravensbrück concentration camp, except for Auschwitz, which employed its own prisoners. In combination with the German military brothels in World War II, it is estimated that at least 34,140 female inmates were forced into sexual slavery during the Third Reich. There were cases of Jewish women forced into such prostitution - even though German soldiers having sex with them thereby violated the Nazis' own Nuremberg Laws.
Young women from countries under Japanese Imperial control were
reportedly abducted from their homes. In some cases, women were also
recruited with offers to work in the military. It has been documented that the Japanese military itself recruited women by force. However, Japanese historian Ikuhiko Hata stated that there was no organized forced recruitment of comfort women by the Japanese government or military.
The number and nature of comfort women servicing the Japanese
military during World War II is still being actively debated, and the
matter is still highly political in both Japan and the rest of the Far East Asia.
Many military brothels were run by private agents and supervised
by the Korean Police. Some Japanese historians, using the testimony of
ex-comfort women, have argued that the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy
were either directly or indirectly involved in coercing, deceiving,
luring, and sometimes kidnapping young women throughout Japan's Asian colonies and occupied territories.
