KWDI Korean Women’s Development Institute

Research on Measures to Improvethe Survey on Sex Trade

 

Mijeong Lee
Jae-Seon Joo
Jaeyoung Cheon
Mi-Rye Jung

 

According to Article 4 of the Act on the Prevention of Sexual Trafficking, a survey is implemented every three years for the policy to prevent sex trade. However, the policy application of the survey data does not meet expectations. This research places the 2016 survey in front, inspects problem points of the existing survey, and intends to seek measures of improvement to increase the utilization of the survey.

For this research, we examined the existing survey and evaluation reports from the National Statistical Office, etc., that were used for that survey. We implemented face-to-face consultation meetings with related experts.

The survey is implemented every three years, but in order to consider prostitution and forms of solicitation as an emergency, it is necessary to conduct the survey each year, and due to this, it is necessary to amend Article 4 of the Act on the Prevention of Sexual Traffic. A one-year survey cycle secures flexibility on the choice of what to research in relation to prostitution, and therefore the responsiveness of policy can be raised. Also, in order to concretely revise the content presented on the survey, in Article 2 Paragraph 2 of the same law's enforcement regulations, it has to be made possible to secure data on emergency phenomena related to prostitution in order to make effective policy responses.

The following measures for improvement in research on prostitution areas are presented: improvement of survey questionnaire items, utilization of data from the police and local governments, research into exploitative situations of female prostitutes, research into the course of the decline and closure of sex-trade areas that have declined or have been reduced, research into small-scale recruitment areas, reexamination of businesses that have changed their classifications, ways of changing camptown surveys, coffee shop area classification and discussion of the survey method. Also presented through points of improvement are helpful results and ways, etc. of establishing a policy to close concentrated areas of prostitution and escape prostitution.

The following is presented about the survey of the actual situation of working prostitution and related measures for improvement: Instead of a nationwide sample survey, we have to seek research that can actually give help to sex-trade prevention policy through a tailored, in-depth survey that focuses on the issues.