Prostitution in Vietnam is illegal and considered a serious crime. Nonetheless, Vietnam's Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA) has estimated that there were 71,936 :prostitutes in the country in 2013. Other estimates put the number at up to 200,000.
Sex workers' organizations report that law enforcement is abusive and corrupt.
MOLISA reported that in 2011, 750 prostitutes and 300 pimps were arrested. 251 businesses had their business licenses revoked for involvement in the sex trade that year.
History period
It is unclear when prostitution and other forms of sex work first appeared in Vietnam. One of the well-known depictions of female sex work in Vietnamese literature appears in The Tale of Kiều (), an epic poem written c. 1800 by the celebrated Vietnamese writer Nguyễn Du. The poem's story centers on the life of Thúy Kiều, a young woman living in mid-sixteenth-century Ming China, who sacrifices herself to save her family. To prevent the imprisonment of her brother and father, she sells herself into marriage, unaware that her new husband is a pimp who forces her into sex work. Despite the poem's focus on forced sex work, it remains popular and moving even for present-day readers, suggesting that sex work is not strictly taboo in Vietnamese society.
The poem is set during the reign of the Jiajing Emperor of Ming China, when was politically independent from China but asserted its membership in a shared, Confucian cultural world alongside China. The poem depicts a form of sex work that resembles Chinese courtesan culture. The protagonist, Kiều, is not just a provider of sexual services but also an entertainer, a performer, and a potential lover. This view of female sex work in , though fictional, complicates the assumption that sex work is necessarily or has always been a transactional exchange of sex for money. The poem reveals a 19th-century understanding of sex work in Vietnam that is rooted in performative and affective, not just sexual, labor. Its continued resonance suggests that this understanding of sex work persists in the present.
Apart from the depiction of female sex work in The Tale of , scholars have found scant mention of the topic in other documents and texts from the period of Vietnamese history. This lacuna suggests that even if sex work was present, it was treated ambiguously by the rulers. To illustrate, the 1812 legal code promulgated by Emperor Gia Long of the Nguyễn dynasty, the most well-known of pre-colonial legal documents from Vietnam, does not contain any explicit prohibition of sex work, but it does include a provision for punishing male court officials who visit singing houses, which have a reputation as historic sites of female sex work coupled with courtly entertainment.
Colonial period Overview
During the colonial period, female prostitution and other forms of sex work were not banned but instead heavily regulated by French authorities. The regulations focused heavily on encounters between the colonizing and the colonized (i.e., European men and Vietnamese women), leaving other kinds of sexual encounters and other forms of sex work, including ones involving native men or European women, unregulated. Even then, there was plenty of clandestine or "black market" sex work that took place outside of the regulation system in the colonial period. This situation is akin to that of the pre-colonial period, when sex work was regulated, albeit more loosely, and clandestine sex work also took place outside of the regulation system.
The regulation of female sex work did not exist in a vacuum. Instead, it was part of the colonial government's general system of regulating carnal encounters between the European and the Vietnamese populations. As anthropologist-historian Ann Laura Stoler observes, sex work came to be seen as increasingly permissible when concubinage began falling out of favor with the government in the early 20th century. Concubinage, both in Indochina and much of Southeast Asia, was initially seen in the late 19th century as more conducive than sex work for stabilizing racial hierarchies and preserving public health, because it provided European men in the colonies with an opportunity to build interracial relationships outside of marriage that are stable and do not risk the spread of venereal diseases. However, concubinage produced mixed-race () progeny whose identities were seen, increasingly in the early 20th century, as threatening to blur the boundary between colonizer and colonized and, thus, undermine racial hierarchies. In that context, another historian notes that to colonial authorities, sex work became permissible or even preferable to concubinage, because it was seen as a loveless transaction; as such, it was highly regulated but not prohibited outright.
Both colonial records and contemporary native reportages () tend to frame female sex work in colonial Vietnam as a problem that was not only morally and medically improper but was also a microcosm of some larger problem or fear, whether it had to do with the ineffectiveness of French colonial governance or the decline of Vietnamese society. A clear example of this framing can be found in , a classic of sex work in colonial Hanoi, written in 1937 by Vũ Trọng Phụng, a renowned journalist and author of modernist Vietnamese literature. The work was initially published in a local newspaper () in a serialized format, before it was published as a book later in 1937.
’s detailed study of the sex industry was only possible because Hanoi's officials wanted to showcase the city's ostensible success in dealing with sex work to journalists and writers like , which gave him and his contemporaries unprecedented access in 1937 to the municipal dispensary () where sex workers were treated for venereal diseases. However, sex work was by no means hidden from public view at the time, nor was the ’s first foray into writing about sex work, as he had just published a novel in 1936 () with a fictionalized account of how an upper-class woman becomes a sex worker, written in the style of social realism. ’s view is not simply that sex work was immoral, but that the outsize presence of sex work in Hanoi was a symptom of larger problems—such as exploitative or ineffectual colonial policies, materialistic attitudes, poverty, and the spread of venereal diseases—which stood in stark contrast to French claims that Vietnam was prospering under colonial rule.
On the other hand, the academic scholarship on the colonial period generally presents a view of female sex work as more than just an object of colonial regulation in the name of dealing with moral or medical impropriety, but also as an indication of the sex workers’ agency and a metaphor for the gendered and racial hierarchies that are at the heart of the colonial enterprise. Many sex workers chose this line of work because they wished to escape rural poverty, and the sex industry provided a viable professional opportunity for them to uplift themselves economically. This sense of agency also compelled sex workers to ply their trade in the black market, outside of onerous regulatory requirements and the state's taxation regime. At the same time, sex workers did not always make the choice of entering the profession freely; they might have turned to sex work out of sheer economic desperation or fallen victim to indenture or trafficking schemes. The fact that sex work was even a viable pursuit at all—that European men would patronize Vietnamese female sex workers—also had to do with the gendered and racial order in place at the time, which frequently cast Vietnamese women, in literary, visual, and epistolary depictions, as sexual objects for the European male gaze and desire.
Regulations Historians have generally observed that regulations pertaining to sex work in colonial Indochina frequently echoed and influenced similar regulations in France, as described and analyzed by French historian Alain Corbin.
Tonkin
Shortly after the establishment of Tonkin as a French protectorate, in 1888, the Hanoi Municipal Council put in place formal regulations on prostitution in the city. (Similar regulations had also been introduced in Haiphong in 1886.) The 1888 regulations include a provision for the official licensing of brothel houses; these licensed brothels () were the only places where sex work was permitted. At the same time, sex workers had to register their names, ages, places of origin, and place of employment with the municipal police, who maintained an official register of sex workers. Registered prostitutes were known in French as or (i.e., they have submitted to the regulatory regime), or in Vietnamese as . The regulations also establish a municipal dispensary to screen sex workers for venereal diseases and house them for treatment if necessary—the same institution that would come to occupy the attention of in 1937. In addition, the regulations expressly forbid the act of procuring and dictate that only a woman can be the proprietor of a brothel.
The Hanoi regulations were not set in stone: A modified set of rules, promulgated in 1891, permitted independent sex workers () to be licensed to work at a location of their own choosing rather than only at a licensed brothel. In 1907, municipal authorities created a separate "vice squad" or () in the police force to deal with all matters relating to sex work, including the registration of brothels. Eventually, an extensive, uniform law governing sex work in all of Tonkin was promulgated by the protectorate's (resident superior) in 1921. Besides instituting requirements for registration and regular health checks, and mandatory treatment if a venereal infection were to be discovered, the 1921 law also taxes sex workers’ incomes.
The 1921 law, though ostensibly uniformly applied throughout Tonkin, was, strictly speaking, in force only in the French concessions—the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong, provincial capitals, and military bases—because the French indirectly ruled the rest of the protectorate through the Vietnamese emperor of the dynasty (Emperor Khải Định at the time). (It has also been suggested that the special attention paid to military bases reveals that protecting the health of soldiers in the colonies was a key objective for regulating sex work and preventing the spread of venereal diseases in Tonkin.) This patchwork legal situation created many spaces of non-regulation that sex workers would flock to if they did not wish to submit themselves to a regulatory system that they deemed onerous and oppressive, thus creating a thriving black market for clandestine sex work in Tonkin in the interwar years. The presence of this black market was something that colonial officials frequently worried about, owing to fears about the possibility, in their minds, of an uncontrolled spread of venereal diseases among the buyers and sellers of clandestine, unregulated sex.
Cochinchina Much less research has been done on the history of sex work during the colonial period in central and south Vietnam, compared to north Vietnam (Tonkin). Whatever details that have been uncovered by historians about the regulation of sex work in Cochinchina suggest great similarity with the situation in Tonkin. There exist provisions in a 1878 ordinance for the regulation of licensed brothel houses (), the registration of sex workers either as attached to specific brothels or as independent , and regular checks for venereal diseases () at the municipal dispensary, especially in Saigon and Chợ Lớn (which would merge with Saigon to form a single city in 1931). Just like in Tonkin, the regulatory system was run by a specialized "vice squad" or of the municipal police forces.