Koreas Commercial Sex Trade

Abstract

South Koreas commercial sex trade industry is one of the largest in the world, with anywhere from 500,000 to over a million women and girls working within it. Hundreds of thousands of men purchase sex each day, and despite strict law prohibiting the trade, the government has reported an increase in the size of the industry as of 2016. In comparison to its population of just around 600,000 people, Jeju Island has a thriving industry. With all of these numbers floating around, the question of why arises. While much of the literature on prostitution addresses female sex workers and their position in the industry, the men who make the purchases go largely unnoticed. This thesis seeks to understand why Korean men continue to pour billions of dollars into the illegal sex trade via a case study of Jeju Island. Through this, I propose a new analytical framework for understanding the phenomenon through a feminist lens.