CARNAL NATION

This week, military news outlet Stars and Stripes ran a story on U.S. soldiers' current involvement in South Korean prostitution. Many of the "juicy bars" suspected of selling sex are crowded around U.S. military bases and staffed by Philippine women, raising the same concerns of forced prostitution that accompany most countries' immigrant sex workers.Although the Department of Defense forbids facilitation of sex trafficking by military officials and keeps a list of no-go zones, many juicy bars haven't made the list of prohibited establishments. Bar owners have gone as far as to protest the threat of U.S. sanctions and criticized military customers for courting employees with marriage promises. Korean officials are hesitant to address or even investigate the issue for fear of stirring up trouble not only among the politically powerful bar owners but with the U.S. military as well.

In 2004, inspired by Bush's anti-trafficking crusade, the DoD affirmed a "zero tolerance" policy not only with regard to military personnel failing to recognize trafficking, but also for patronizing (non-trafficked) prostitutes. While prosecuting military men who hired prostitutes was already an option within the Uniform Code of Military Justice, this renewed interest in trafficking was intended to elevate the offense—primarily, it seems, to deter prostitute solicitation rather than actually penalize the act should it occur.

The severity inherent in a professed "zero tolerance" mindset is less evident now, several years later, in the reaction of a civilian misconduct specialist who says of the juicy bar issue that the military doesn't "authorize" prostitution taking place in locations frequented by soldiers, and so such locations are promptly deemed "off limits." (As understood in relation to, say, drug policy, "zero tolerance" translates to harsh, quantifiable penalties. In this case, it translates to an order to "stop going there.") In spite of what officials currently avow, or what they claimed in 2004, there's far more evidence of military forces organizing and propagating prostitution than discouraging it.

South Korea has a particularly sensitive history in this area given its abuse during World War II at the hands of the Japanese Imperial Army. In what is certainly the most notorious instance of militarized prostitution, Japan abducted and enslaved thousands of Korean, Filipina, Chinese, and Thai women, among others, to serve as "comfort women," often trafficking women around Asia to station them in whatever area troops were underserved.

Earlier this year, a group of South Korean prostitutes accused their government of providing women to U.S. troops protecting the nation from North Korea, acting in complicity with the American military to test and treat STDs to keep the troops and prostitutes disease-free from the 1960s to the 1980s.One woman claimed, "Our government was one big pimp for the U.S. military."

And perhaps not much has changed. When these accusations came to light in January 2009, the U.S. military command in Seoul replied that the military "does not condone or support the illegal activities of human trafficking and prostitution," a lukewarm response echoed by official quoted in the recent Stars and Stripes piece. There's little doubt that patronizing prostitutes >is tolerated, allowed, and sanctioned by our military, regardless of wooden declarations to the contrary. Just earlier this month, Reuters covered the two-year-long abuse of a gay soldier whose colleagues first suspected his sexual orientation after he refused to participate in prevalent practice on his base: sleeping with a prostitute.

Nor is this the first instance of Filipina women serving U.S. troops; during World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam War, the Philippine cities of Angeles and Olongapo offered a variety of sexual services, from more straightforward physical acts to sex shows to "foxy boxing." Although troops ostensibly left the islands in 1991 after the U.S. military base agreement was not renewed by the Philippine government, they returned again ten years later, after President Bush identified the Philippines as America's "second front" in combating terrorism. In an attempt to stem the myriad abuses committed by U.S. troops, the Philippine Senate has only recently begun to call for nullification of the Visiting Force Agreement, an agreement that renders servicemen immune to Philippine prosecution for crimes committed on the nation's soil. (The Status of Forces Agreement, in effect in Japan and South Korea, has also prompted outrage in host countries for a similar clause.)

As Rhode Island draws ever nearer to criminalizing indoor prostitution, due in a large part of disingenuous capitalization on trafficking hysteria, the time is ripe for a serious consideration of our country's schizophrenic relationship to sex work—whose interests are served, and in what way, when prostitution is state-controlled or criminalized. Even the most cursory of analysis should indicate that there's something quite wrong with a nation who criminalizes the behavior of willing adult individuals while coercing and forcing similar behavior out of others. How strange it is to think that if Rhode Island's prostitutes would like to keep working, they may have better luck serving their fellow Americans in a foreign country.