Prostitution in Vietnam is illegal and considered a serious crime. Sex workers organizations report that law enforcement is abusive and corrupt. It is unclear when prostitution and other forms of sex work first appeared in Vietnam. 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. 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. 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.
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. In general, historians have 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.
Shortly after the establishment of Tonkin as a French protectorate , in , the Hanoi Municipal Council put in place formal regulations on prostitution in the city. Similar regulations had also been introduced in Haiphong in 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.
