China Watch: Of Sex Worker Abuse and Porn Watcher Abuse

CHINA—Two stories out of China highlight the country’s strange and troubling way of dealing with commercial sex work. One, in the Washington Post yesterday, reports on the charge levied by a rights group that “police in China frequently beat, torture and arbitrarily detain suspected sex workers, often with little or no evidence that they engaged in prostitution.” The other widely reported story is about a local news interview that went viral that showed the “strange (and quite possibly libido-numbing) demands” placed on officials in charge of censoring pornography for the southern province of Hunan who are tasked with watching hundreds of porn DVDs a week.   So, on the one hand the police are dealing with the apparent popularity of the commercial sex trade in Beijing by, according to Human Rights Watch, engaging in arbitrary arrests and detentions, police brutality, coerced confessions and the torture of sex workers who primarily “engage in sex work on the streets, in public places such as parks, and in massage parlors and hair salons.” On the other hand, officials in Hunan are giving interviews complaining about spending “years of staring through all manner of graphic scenes,” and the story of the porn-abused Chinese officials is picked up by media outlets around the world. In fact, the two stories connect and commingle. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, “Official crackdowns are ordered up each year, an especially brutal routine for sex workers and one that has recently been criticized by international human rights groups. During the crackdowns, porn hawkers are arrested en masse and their wares swept up by the thousands. And, as tough as the job may be, someone has to go through all the DVDs and see what's on them.” By brutal, let us repeat, they mean that the police “frequently beat, torture and arbitrarily detain suspected sex workers, often with little or no evidence that they engaged in prostitution.” Just wanted that to be clear. Image: (r.) Sex workers publicly humiliated, and (l.) one of the harried official porn censors.