Modern white slavery, as with women sold into sex-slavery, was largely kick-started or got a large boost with the UN stationing of troops in Bosnia. And perhaps it is not so surprisingly that when a large number of young men is put in a stressful situation far from home and with a lot of idle time, then the local brothels will see a surge of activity.
Isn’t it better to keep these activities within the military, to try to ensure some better control and monitoring with these activities? To help make sure, for instance, that the girls go into it willingly and freely, that they are not cheated of their pay or have their profit stolen by middle men, that disease is kept down, etc.
Indeed. The whole business should be brought out of the shadows, regulated and taxed. There would still be abuses but they’d be more controllable and the girls and clients would be safer.
Prostitution is legal around here. But I think the combination of a lot of young men in a stressful/boring situation, far from home and with the lawlessness that abounds in war-zones, failed states, etc. this creates an especial fertile ground for things like abuse and sex-slavery.
Not taxed. Don’t want the state to profit from the trade, like some giant pimp.
Many deployed locations have high speed internet, and fleshlights exist. I’m not saying it’s pretty, but being deployed now isn’t as rough on the junk as it was in the early 90s.
Surely the fall of the Iron Curtain and the sudden free movement from relatively impoverished eastern European nations to wealthy western European nations was the main catalyst, not a couple thousand troops stationed in the middle of the Balkans. Obviously, the lawlessness of the region, mixed with occupying soldiers led to a huge bloom in human trafficking but it seems odd to blame this on the UN when greater historical trends were happening. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, though, if someone has a good cite or article about this.
Didn’t the Japanese Imperial army and the Nazis already try this? The problem is that no one would sign up for this punishing and degrading experience willingly. The only people to do this have to be truly desperate and poor (mostly women from the third-world) or coerced in some manner. Both of which raise disturbing moral and ethical questions.
You are right, of course, that the status quo is perhaps no more ethical. We purposefully look the other way and out-source the servicing of our armed forces to third-world nations like the Philippines and Thailand. I don’t know what the correct answer is, but surely institutionalizing this brings even bigger problems.
How exactly are you planning to populate this brothel arm? I would expect you’d get a much larger male volunteer group than female, certainly too large for the ratio of male:female combat troops. Are they going to be trained by the military? Do they have to go through basic training?
…and of course with DADT potentially gone, you will need to fund lesbian and gay prostitutes. How politically viable do you think that would be in America, the Terrified of Anything Different?
I think prostitution is less of an ideal occupation than selling cigarettes or booze. YMMW, but this is another discussion.
No, I don’t think so. The collapse a few years earlier provided the material. The lawlessness in Bosnia together with the market of UN soldiers provided the first large-scale experience with trading girls and sex-slavery and created the first routes and organisations that profited from these. I looked into it a few years back, and the first cases I could find were from Bosnia. There was also a UN report that stated that UN troops had been heavily involved in the trade.
No. The Japanese girls were not volunteers, or at least not those of Korean or Dutch origin you hear about. Don’t think the Nazis had anything like it at all. And I think the whores should come from the same country as the military, but even so I cannot see why it should especially difficult to get girls to sign up. There have never been a lack of whores doing the same, but under less controlled and safe circumstances, in every major and minor city.
It’s irrelevant how many I personally know. What is relevant is that lesbian prostitutes exist and that women do seek them out. I think this is actually worse than arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a 1948 Zenith osmium record stylus, as the odds of the military having a brothel arm are slightly worse than that of Eleanor Clift becoming our next President.
We all know it’s not going to happen so there is no need to plan it in detail. The primary thing is that the girls should be voluntary and in no way coerced to sign up. I also think it is important that they are from the same naton. For the rest I suppose they can enter into the military on the same terms as the many other civilians already there; I hesitate to say chaplains, but nurses for instance.
To the same extent that heterosexual or homosexual male soldiers seek out prostitutes, and thus create the demand the OP says should be managed by the military? I doubt it.
That’s certainly true, for a lot of reasons.
Another aspect of this is if the military decided to implement officially subsidized prostitution, and outsourced it to the indigenous population. In any kind of a war situation, there is too much of a power differential between the military and civilians for this to be anything but coercive - the Korean “comfort women” of WWII Japan, for example.
Presumably remote controlled drones could be developed for the purpose. Horny soldiers stationed in Iraq having sex with drones controlled by bored[sup][/sup] airmen stationed in Las Vegas.
[sup][/sup][sub]I assume they’re bored, because if they’re into that sorta thing, they wouldn’t be allowed in the military in the first place.[/sub]
I can see it now! The NEW US Army prostitute corps…the 69th Division (Motto: “we serve and screw you”).
Emblem: a bed.
Question: would the army award any special decorations to this elite group?
