I am very surprised with the tone of many of the posts here. Now I understand why the DR is plagued by sex tourism. I am not endorsing this study, but it raises publicly a concern about prostitution (beyond its effects on tourism) that I think is far too understated in the DR.
The comments I have read lead me to post the following thoughts:
(1) On why people don?t stop working, once they get other opportunities (i.e. job or foreign benefactor):
Has anyone stopped to think about the uncertainty of money earned through the sex trade? Now combine that uncertainty with the uncertainty of money earned in other trades? Now take a even a cursory look at the workforce in the DR, which includes (A) a disproportionate numbered of unskilled workers to unskilled jobs and (B) a significant social stigma connected with certain unskilled work (namely that performed by Haitians)?a stigma that is not connected with being a sanky panky as this ?job? is easily masked as having a ?novio/a extranjero/a?
Maybe these factors explain why your sanky panky picks up his Western Union remittance, while simultaneously working on another gringa. In my admittedly limited (short-term) experience working with sex workers (in which category I include garden variety prostitutes and the DR specific ?sanky panky?) of both sexes in Las Terrenas de Samana, I found an equal number of individuals who claimed to have earned their living as they did because of lack of other opportunities as those who claimed to find the job easy and most lucrative. But my conversations with all of them illustrated that until the prostitute/sanky panky has a ring on his/her finger, ?papeles en mano,? and a ticket to [fill in the blank country] there is no certainty that the foreign remittances will continue. No one who truly follows the Dominican sex worker phenomenon has not heard at least some variation on the story of the gringo husband who disappears back to the US/Europe never to be heard of again. (She got the ring but not the papers.)
One sex worker (the most frank and open) I befriended eventually told me that among the first tips he was given was to have as many gringas as possible because it increased his chances of hitting the jackpot. He later explained that, since every sanky panky has ?sell by date,? he could not afford to put all his eggs in one basket. So even when he had one girlfriend sending him money, he was always looking for another.
(2) On relapse after leaving:
From the 35+ sex workers I informally interviewed as a part of a different project, I was led to and met about 10 former sex workers living abroad and in the DR, who had hit the ?Pretty Woman? jackpot and had left the game permanently. By the same account, I met probably an equal number who had blown their ?Pretty Woman? chance due to substance abuse problems developed while in the sex trade. One example is the a male who sent his foreign remittances home, but had acquired a serious cocaine habit to deal with a particularly unpleasant part of the job--having sex with men despite being heterosexual. To support his habit he began prostituting himself on the side, and was caught when his foreign boyfriend began checking up on him in the local expat community.
I also met several prostitutes who had returned to prostitution after being fired from other work or upon being unable to make ends meet on the salary being paid to them. Though the sex workers I talked to claimed the firing was more severe of a problem for Haitians than for Dominicans.
In any event these are all equally plausible explanations for why--as has been so meanly stated here-- "you can take the wh### out of the barrio, but you can't take the barrio out of the wh###." Indeed, they sound more plausible than "I'm too lazy to do any real work" (Otherwise, 90% of the world's population would be sex workers, and from what I hear--at least emotionally but maybe physically too--sex for $$ is not all that easy.)
(3) On sex workers as predators:
What struck me most about many of the comments was the dismissals of all sex workers as ?whores? who get what they are asking for AND are actually the perpetrators of their abuse/cause of their own problems. I find that fishy.
Personally, I?m not ready to pass judgment on either group (though sex tourists have made my life considerably more difficult as a non-Dominican attempting to integrate into Dominican?rather than expat?communities). But I find it appalling that so many of the comments here have not even queried the responsibilities of the ?clients,? many of whom are tourist- and expat- men/women (again, based on my limited experience in Las Terrenas) engaging in behavior that is not only illegal in their home countries but patently morally unacceptable (e.g. sex with minors, physical violence) rather than just morally ambiguous (e.g. sex in exchange for money). What role do those individuals play in the decision-making process of the sex worker? There would be no sex trade without johns/janes, right? (It takes (at least) two to exchange sex for money.)
(4) As for the claim that ?It would be intellectually irresponsible NOT to question a so-called 'scientific' study whose validity can be contradicted with outright personal experience, especially if that experience can be verified with actual proof.?
Have you ever conducted a scientific study? In particular, have you ever conducted a ?qualitative? (vs. quantitative) scientific study. Again, I am not endorsing this study, but you cannot contradict the validity of a study because you (or anyone) has had personal experiences (even those verifiable by actual proof) that do not support the findings. Does the study make proclamations about ALL prostitutes in the Dominican Republic. Just as I have had to limit my experience to about 35 sex workers in Las Terrenas, the study limits its experience to 100 prostitutes in a few particular areas. From that, it makes a claim as to a trend seen in those areas.
Also, since the study has made no differentiation among type of prostitute (i.e. it does not appear to indicate whether they targeted prostitutes serving ?high class?, ?foreign?, ?lower class,? etc. clientele or whether that was not a control factor of the study), you cannot determine whether your prostitutes?the ones from your verifiable personal experience?were similarly situated to those in the study. Given the point of the study, I cannot say that I think this is a failing of the study, though it does make it hard for Brezin convincingly to criticize the study in the way he?d like.
Most important, as my comments above should make blaringly obvious one?s personal determinations about an individual?s options really have no bearing on the validity of a scientific study. I.e. just because YOU have concluded that a prostitute ?could? leave the game when he/she gets a ?Western Union gringo/a? does not mean that the prostitute in question has evaluated the situation in the same fashion. Nor does it mean he/she should calculate the risks as you have. I?m hardly saying that Brezin (or AZB, though brash and abrasive and seemingly a jerk) is WRONG, my 35+ verifiable experiences are insufficient for me to begin drawing scientifically defensible conclusions. However, it is equally incorrect to say the study is wrong because it did not challenge the meaning of ?could? (or more accurately ?querer abandonar el comercio sexual,? which is ostensibly the question asked in the study.)
I have toyed with expanding and formalizing my own study on Dominican sex workers and publishing my findings in an academic periodical, but this thread confirms my fears that my time would be wasted. People on DR1 are all up in a roar when the smallest thing happens to a foreigner (though, I grant that the hullabaloo is usually more even-sided, which is why I normally feel no need to post), but post a study claiming that 68% of Dominican (and maybe some Haitian) prostitutes are abused and nobody gives a crap. A study indicating the 94% would rather do something else (stats, which by the way are comparable to US/European numbers) and people call it a lie. In fact I think the point of the OP was to cast doubt on the study. That is very sad.
