United Nations Prostitution Corps

NPR had a segment on prostitution today. The guest speaker was revealing the ugliness of the sex trade and how women from poor countries are lured into leaving home where they are drugged and beaten into submission. He made the claim that many of the Ukrainian prostitutes in Istanbul are originally lured there to work in hotels. They are then kept in a basement where they are forcibly given heroin until they are addicted and will do anything to get their drug.

It's a pretty wild claim. It would be a diabolical way to force the young women into submission, then keep them under control.

But whether or not there is heroin involved, no one can deny that there are several evil men running brothels filled with trafficked women who are de facto sex slaves.

So, the guest today on NPR was shocked and upset when he went to Kosovo and discovered that the UN peacekeepers there solicit the prostitutes that the pimps have abducted from their homelands or nearby villages. He was enraged and shocked by the behavior of the UN troops. He was angry that they were supposed to be maintaining the peace and protecting civilians but instead there they were exploiting the poverty of the locals.

Well, there is a simple solution to UN peacekeepers visiting civilian prostitutes: establish a UN prostitution corps. (In fact, establishing such a prostitution corps for US soldiers would also have the same benefits. There's a questionable liaison between US soldiers and Okinawan women every now and then.)

And why not? Is it a terrible idea? Soldiers, like most people, desire sex, and the chances are quite high that someone is going to make sex available to those interested soldiers. If one assumes that men and women of sound mind and body enter prostitution as a career choice, then it would be logical to have a group of these prostitutes available to UN soldiers. It would be important to recruit these women from all countries to avoid repeating the institutionalized sexual exploitation of non-Japanese women by Japanese soldiers in WWII. The UN prostitutes would have the same rights as other members of the UN mission and would travel as a group to areas of need. Forbidding sexual liaisons between soldiers and local civilians would be much better tolerated and accepted if there was a legal outlet for the troops' sexual tension.

I'm sure that while a United Nations Prostitute Corps (UNPC) (imagine the insignia!) would decrease the likelihood that the USA will ever pay it's debt of membership dues to the UNO, it would encourage US soldiers to join UN peacekeeping missions.