Dinner date plus

• Source: Global Times
• [01:58 August 19 2010]
• Comments

Illustrations: Peter C. Espina

By Lin Meilian   

Prostitution may be the world's oldest profession but in Hong Kong, a growing number of young girls have reinvented the trade and prefer to call it compensated dating.

Take Tabo (alias) for instance, who wrote about her encounter with a man on her online blog. Her description at first appeared as if she was referring to her new boyfriend but the man was a paying customer.

"It was a lovely evening. We had a wonderful dinner and drank a little wine to relax," said Tabo. "It was not my first time to sleep with strangers, but this time is different. It is a job."

She said she could earn up to HK$4,000 ($514) per date.

Compensated dating originated in Japan in the 1990s and has caught on in many other Asian cities including Hong Kong and Taiwan. The term means paying a woman, or a young girl, to be an escort, and usually sex is involved.

Most prostitutes do it for the money but these girls say they do it to make cash to buy material things they normally could not afford. For example, one girl in Hong Kong wanted to buy a pricey mobile phone strap that cost several thousand Hong Kong dollars.

Some are from troubled families but others just like the quick money.

Concerns were raised in 2008, when a client killed and beheaded a 16-year-old girl named Wong Ka-mui. The killer, Ting Kai-tai, 25, was sentenced to life imprisonment last July.

Even though police and social workers in Hong Kong say compensated dating is just another fancy phrase for prostitution, most of these girls do not consider themselves to be prostitutes because they feel they can walk away from it at any moment.

A different class

Tabo believes prostitutes are not allowed to select their clients. She enjoys more power to pick which clients to meet for dinner, wine or sex.

Like other girls in the profession, Tabo finds her clients through the Internet and she prefers well-educated men with a stable job who are between 30 and 40.

"Honestly, if you ask me when I am going to stop it. I could tell you that when money is so easy to make, you don't feel shame anymore. Quite the opposite, I feel kind of lucky that I have a beautiful body to sell," she wrote in her blog.

There are no figures on the number of girls involved in the industry. However, a survey conducted by non-governmental organization Hong Kong Christian Service last year found that 34 percent of about 600 girls between 12 and 20 said they would consider being a compensated dating girl.

About 60 percent said they would sell their bodies for the quick money, and 28 percent said they do it because they enjoy sex.

More than 40 percent feel that compensated dating is different from prostitution because "sex is not necessarily involved and they have feelings for their clients."

Tse Kei-leung, a social worker at Yang Memorial Methodist Social Service, told the Global Times that they first stumbled upon the phenomenon in 2006 after some teenage girls told them that they had older boyfriends.

"We thought we were out of date and that maybe young girls dating older men was a new trend. However, when we further asked why they wanted to date older men, they told us they did it for a fee," Tse said.

Risky business

The organization studied 21 compensated dating girls since 2006. They found the girls did not necessarily come from poor families, but some have problems with their parents.

The girls usually earn HK$500 to HK$3,000 per client depending on the service. A casual dinner without physical contact may cost HK$500. On some occasions, the girls are willing to negotiate with the clients on whether or not they use a condom.

"Even though they do not consider themselves as prostitutes, selling their bodies twists their values about love, responsibility and commitment," Tse said.

Despite moral values, being a compensated dating girl is risky. Tse said 70 percent of the girls that turned to them for help were diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease.

"In an extreme case, a girl who quit compensated dating six months ago found out she had four different types of sexual diseases at the same time," he said. "Some are curable, but some might cause long-term trouble."

Tabo also shared some concerns.

"I am scared all the time. What if he is someone that I know? What if he is a cop? A pervert? What if they take naked pictures? And what if they don't pay afterward?" she wrote.

Compensated dating is not clearly defined in the law. The city's crime ordinance states that any person who solicits for any immoral purpose or loiters for the purpose of soliciting for any immoral purpose is committing an offense.