Stories from other parts of Asia are not greatly different. In India while child labour is declining as a rule, a marginal increase can be seen in the services sector. Like children, women also have always been victims of tourism development. Not surprisingly, responses of several civil society organizations in Asia critiquing contemporary mass tourism practices and its various avatars such as eco-tourism, heath tourism, sustainable tourism etc, to UNWTO’s theme of ‘tourism opens doors for women’ and Frangialli’s statement have been less than welcoming.(October,11,Singapore, Sri Lanka Guardian) With Sri Lanka as a host, the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) marked 27 September as World Tourism Day, on the theme “Tourism opens doors for women”. UNWTO Secretary General Francesco Frangialli’s message for the Day reflected the positive note of the theme with an affirmative statement that "Tourism is a sector of the economy that not only employs significant numbers of women, but provides enormous opportunities for their advancement."
The statement invoked memories of a visit to a village in Thailand called Loo Voo in the early years of the new millennium. The purpose of the visit was to understand the activities of the “Life quality Development Project” of the Phyad Center to prevent child sexual abuse, supported by YMCA, Japan, for children rescued from the sex markets aged 8-13. A play on the evils of child prostitution enacted by the children had the plot woven around trafficking, rape and suicide with the helpless parents at one end and a tourist at the other. I was told that parents are forced to sell their children for commercial sex due to poverty. The information was hardly surprising.
Stories from other parts of Asia are not greatly different. In India while child labour is declining as a rule, a marginal increase can be seen in the services sector. Like children, women also have always been victims of tourism development. Not surprisingly, responses of several civil society organizations in Asia critiquing contemporary mass tourism practices and its various avatars such as eco-tourism, heath tourism, sustainable tourism etc, to UNWTO’s theme of ‘tourism opens doors for women’ and Frangialli’s statement have been less than welcoming.
Some of the major civil society organizations in Asia, responsible for creating an oppositional space to challenge the hegemonic ideology of mass tourism, the EQUATIONS, Bangalore (India), Ecumenical Coalition of Tourism (ECOT), Chiang Mai (Thailand) and Tourism Action Group (TAG), Manila (The Philippines) issued separate statements critiquing Frangialli’s optimism and the unrestrained market fundamentalism that underlies UNWTO’s approach to the question of women’s opportunities in tourism. TAG’s statement argues that “with the booming sex trade, trafficking in women and girls for sex work in major tourist destinations has been spreading all over the Asian region. Often, the traffickers use coercion, force, deceit, fraud, debt bondage or abuse of authority to place the victims in slavery-like conditions, forced labour or servitude and deprive them of their fundamental human rights.” ECOT categorically argues that tourism that is associated with prostitution and the human trafficking that accompanies it increasingly, in no way `opens doors for women'. EQUATIONS in their statement urge “governments, policy makers, industry, civil society and the UNWTO to engage in more systemic ways with the challenge of women's empowerment in tourism”.
These voices from different parts of Asia share some basic concerns regarding the nature and scope of opportunities that tourism offers to women in Asia. There is an accumulated academic and activist literature pointing to the ways in which eroticization of labor and feminization of low income jobs in the entertainment industry exacerbate vulnerabilities of marginalized women rather than tending to ‘empower’ them. Studies carried out by international agencies such as International Labor Organization (ILO) have documented the circumstances in work environments that lead to sexual victimization of both women and children in the services industries. Civil society critique of tourism practices in the last two decades has consistently anchored itself on the position that the expansion of women’s’ roles in the economic spheres through increased work participation is an unsatisfactory indicator of gender equality in tourism. A tourism that fails to enhance women’s status socially and culturally would reinforce or worsen societal hierarchies involving gendered power relations. Studies have also shown that the seasonal and part-time low skilled jobs that characterize women’s employment in the tourism industry tend to mirror the social roles of women in patriarchal societies. Not surprisingly, the doors of tourism do not open to equal opportunities for women but to scary worlds of inequities and exploitation.
Francesco Frangialli’s statement for the tourism day and civil society’s responses to its oversimplifying economic narrative provide an opportunity to rethink the question of gender structuring in tourism and its perilous consequences. The complexities of modern tourism, manifested in the ways in which it commoditizes space, inflicts on communities a sense of cultural loss, accentuates depravation by destruction of livelihoods through enclosures, perpetuates exploitative commercial sex, incorporates regions into slavish economic dependence and manipulates national and regional policies leading to alienation, displacement and disempowerment of local communities are profound questions that civil society organizations have been trying to foreground in the discussion on the impacts of tourism in Asia.
The responses from EQUATIONS, TAG and ECOT clearly show the willingness of these organizations to initiate dialogues and participate in democratic discussions on the theme suggested by UNWTO. In fact EQUATIONS’ statement is co-issued by other civil society initiatives such as Alternatives (Goa), Council for Social Justice and Peace (Goa), and Sakhi Resource Centre for Women (Kerala). These are organizations that joined together “to debate issues of women and tourism on the occasion of World Tourism Day”.
Unfortunately, the UNWTO has not reciprocated this gesture for informed debate.
However, it is also profoundly significant that the oppositional voices are still few and far between. More importantly, the whole set of events around the annual ritual of the tourism day celebrations of UNWTO has revealed a near total absence of any critical tourism groups building up debates and social action in countries in South Asia other than India. Countries like Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in particular, with a tradition of politically influential civil society initiatives, do not appear to have produced powerful social groups interested in probing the socio-economic impacts of mass tourism practices. Their voices are yet to be heard.
The statement invoked memories of a visit to a village in Thailand called Loo Voo in the early years of the new millennium. The purpose of the visit was to understand the activities of the “Life quality Development Project” of the Phyad Center to prevent child sexual abuse, supported by YMCA, Japan, for children rescued from the sex markets aged 8-13. A play on the evils of child prostitution enacted by the children had the plot woven around trafficking, rape and suicide with the helpless parents at one end and a tourist at the other. I was told that parents are forced to sell their children for commercial sex due to poverty. The information was hardly surprising.
Stories from other parts of Asia are not greatly different. In India while child labour is declining as a rule, a marginal increase can be seen in the services sector. Like children, women also have always been victims of tourism development. Not surprisingly, responses of several civil society organizations in Asia critiquing contemporary mass tourism practices and its various avatars such as eco-tourism, heath tourism, sustainable tourism etc, to UNWTO’s theme of ‘tourism opens doors for women’ and Frangialli’s statement have been less than welcoming.
Some of the major civil society organizations in Asia, responsible for creating an oppositional space to challenge the hegemonic ideology of mass tourism, the EQUATIONS, Bangalore (India), Ecumenical Coalition of Tourism (ECOT), Chiang Mai (Thailand) and Tourism Action Group (TAG), Manila (The Philippines) issued separate statements critiquing Frangialli’s optimism and the unrestrained market fundamentalism that underlies UNWTO’s approach to the question of women’s opportunities in tourism. TAG’s statement argues that “with the booming sex trade, trafficking in women and girls for sex work in major tourist destinations has been spreading all over the Asian region. Often, the traffickers use coercion, force, deceit, fraud, debt bondage or abuse of authority to place the victims in slavery-like conditions, forced labour or servitude and deprive them of their fundamental human rights.” ECOT categorically argues that tourism that is associated with prostitution and the human trafficking that accompanies it increasingly, in no way `opens doors for women'. EQUATIONS in their statement urge “governments, policy makers, industry, civil society and the UNWTO to engage in more systemic ways with the challenge of women's empowerment in tourism”.
These voices from different parts of Asia share some basic concerns regarding the nature and scope of opportunities that tourism offers to women in Asia. There is an accumulated academic and activist literature pointing to the ways in which eroticization of labor and feminization of low income jobs in the entertainment industry exacerbate vulnerabilities of marginalized women rather than tending to ‘empower’ them. Studies carried out by international agencies such as International Labor Organization (ILO) have documented the circumstances in work environments that lead to sexual victimization of both women and children in the services industries. Civil society critique of tourism practices in the last two decades has consistently anchored itself on the position that the expansion of women’s’ roles in the economic spheres through increased work participation is an unsatisfactory indicator of gender equality in tourism. A tourism that fails to enhance women’s status socially and culturally would reinforce or worsen societal hierarchies involving gendered power relations. Studies have also shown that the seasonal and part-time low skilled jobs that characterize women’s employment in the tourism industry tend to mirror the social roles of women in patriarchal societies. Not surprisingly, the doors of tourism do not open to equal opportunities for women but to scary worlds of inequities and exploitation.
Francesco Frangialli’s statement for the tourism day and civil society’s responses to its oversimplifying economic narrative provide an opportunity to rethink the question of gender structuring in tourism and its perilous consequences. The complexities of modern tourism, manifested in the ways in which it commoditizes space, inflicts on communities a sense of cultural loss, accentuates depravation by destruction of livelihoods through enclosures, perpetuates exploitative commercial sex, incorporates regions into slavish economic dependence and manipulates national and regional policies leading to alienation, displacement and disempowerment of local communities are profound questions that civil society organizations have been trying to foreground in the discussion on the impacts of tourism in Asia.
The responses from EQUATIONS, TAG and ECOT clearly show the willingness of these organizations to initiate dialogues and participate in democratic discussions on the theme suggested by UNWTO. In fact EQUATIONS’ statement is co-issued by other civil society initiatives such as Alternatives (Goa), Council for Social Justice and Peace (Goa), and Sakhi Resource Centre for Women (Kerala). These are organizations that joined together “to debate issues of women and tourism on the occasion of World Tourism Day”.
Unfortunately, the UNWTO has not reciprocated this gesture for informed debate.
However, it is also profoundly significant that the oppositional voices are still few and far between. More importantly, the whole set of events around the annual ritual of the tourism day celebrations of UNWTO has revealed a near total absence of any critical tourism groups building up debates and social action in countries in South Asia other than India. Countries like Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in particular, with a tradition of politically influential civil society initiatives, do not appear to have produced powerful social groups interested in probing the socio-economic impacts of mass tourism practices. Their voices are yet to be heard.
(The writer is an Assistant Professor, Communication & New Media Programme ,Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences ,National University of Singapore. Email-sreekumartt@gmail.com .)
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