Prostitution: The Skin Trade

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On Saturday nights, as many as 300 young women line the margins of E55, a Czech highway near the German border. Their costumes vary: light frocks, skimpy red dresses, glow-in-the-dark Spandex pants. They speak a babel of languages: Czech, Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, German. But they have only one thing to sell: sex.

For the truckers and migrant workers who ply the main road between Berlin and Prague, this particular seven-mile stretch of E55 is the "Highway of Cheap Love," the longest brothel in the world, a smorgasbord of lust. Travelers can pause at rest stops, munch on french fries and sausages and, for just $30, pick up a girl -- maybe one as young as 15 -- for half an hour in the bushes or in a truck cab or shabby motel. For the men, the encounters are alluring, if seedy, interludes at a bargain price.

For the young women, the story is different. Many have been coerced into sexual servitude. Some, abducted by con men, are raped and psychologically pummeled into submission. As they strut their wares, their pimps lurk in cars in the shadows, calculating the night's take. But not all the pimps are gangsters. Often it is Father who sits in the backup car or Mother who negotiates the deal for her daughter. Little Brother may appear with a sponge and a pail of soapy water to wash a client's car for an extra $5.

Desire has cash value; the market has no rules, possesses no scruples. From Eastern Europe to the Himalayas, from Tokyo to Tegucigalpa, transaction by sordid transaction has created a multibillion-dolla r sex trade. It is encouraged by massive socioeconomic movements: the collapse of the Soviet empire, the increase in global mobility, the wrenching disparity of worldwide incomes. But its effect is most devastating on an individual level. Poor women and children are commodities traded on the street, products bartered, haggled over, smuggled and sold as hedges against hunger or as cruel but quick routes to profit. Souls do not count, only bodies, debased over and over, unmindful of social cost or disease.

Few corners of the earth are immune to the corrupting influence of the burgeoning sex trade. Eastern Europe, once prudishly communist, is pockmarked with streetwalkers and whorehouses. Poverty has forced many of its young people to prostitute themselves in the fleshpots of the West. In Nepal's Himalayan hill villages, some 7,000 adolescents are sold each year to slave traders for the sweat-drenched brothels of Bombay. In Brazil an estimated 25,000 girls have been forced into prostitution in remote Amazon mining camps. In Italy, Nigerian streetwalkers are flooding into Bologna, while in Belgium, the neon-bright windows of Antwerp's red-light district are filled with Ghanaians in lacy underwear. Around Miami, massage parlors owned by Cuban immigrants import prostitutes from Colombia, Nicaragua and Canada.