Dubai is home to 4 million people out of 10 million people in the UAE, but the share of citizens is only about 5% of the population, which is much lower than in the rest of the United Arab Emirates. Dubai is a haven for a very large number of expatriates and tourists, so in 2019 Dubai was visited by 19 million guests. According to the French daily Le Monde, prostitution, officially banned but de facto tolerable, has made Dubai a favorite place for sex tourism in the Persian Gulf.
The pearl of globalization
Dubai’s bid for impressive integration into globalization has been particularly successful even after the 2008 financial crisis, which forced the Emirate to develop its services sector, focusing on tourism. For example, the use of alcohol is allowed in hotels, bars, restaurants and nightclubs with a license, but still remains prohibited in public places. Usually sex workers look for a potential client in such places. So, hiring escort girls during your stay in the Emirate is quite simple. The invisible hierarchy considers Chinese, Filipino or Indian prostitutes less valuable than their Central Asian counterparts, who are still less valuable than European women, whether of other nationalities.
The number of active prostitutes in Dubai is sometimes estimated at 45,000. Of course, it is impossible to establish this number precisely, as it is based on a complex system of assessments in which citizens of the Emirates, authorized to “sponsor” the entry of a number of foreigners on visas, transfer these sponsorship rights to intermediaries, sometimes without knowing the real purpose of future arrivals. migrants. “
The residence permit system, despite the 2016 reform, still allows for such manipulations, while the liquidated networks tend to concern the lower segment of the prostitution market. The agreement, often concluded without intermediaries, creates the illusion of a lack of pimping, although it is impossible to offer such services in Dubai without reliable protection. In 2017, the UN published testimony from a “sex slave” from Uzbekistan who, after an 18-month nightmare in Dubai, preferred to allow Emirati police to arrest themselves for deportation. Victims of this type of human trafficking have recently been exposed in Bangladesh, seduced by false promises of employment in Dubai.
Confirmation from Israel
The peace treaty signed between Israel and the United Arab Emirates last September was accompanied by the opening of direct air services between the two countries. More than a hundred thousand Israeli tourists have already visited Dubai, where the ostentatious hospitality towards them contrasts with the “cold reception”, so far it has been recorded for Israeli guests in Jordan and Egypt. But the Israeli press has also covered several scandalous reports on forms of sex tourism in Dubai. The daily newspaper “Yedioth Aharonoth” described catalogs of real prostitutes with transactions that take place around the pool of a large hotel. The Mako website has asked Israeli mobsters to contact an “escort agency” in Dubai, while recreating screenshots of exchanges that could be considered pimping, and the daily Haaretz even published an article entitled “A Trip to Dubai to stand on the brink of gang rape. ”Proponents of normalizing Israeli-Emirati relations protested against such outrageous behavior and viewed the importance of the evidence presented, which they considered unrepresentative.
In any case, it seems that sex tourism in Dubai as a whole will continue to develop. For several years now, the US State Department’s annual report on human trafficking, despite encouraging remarks, states that “the United Arab Emirates government fully adheres to minimum standards for the eradication of human trafficking.”