"My parents put me into prostitution when I was 17," Li Zhou said. "As a girl, I was a burden to them. For my parents, the only valuable part of me was my body, so they used it to pay for my brother's education."

A "hairdresser" waits for clients in Beijing's Lidu area.

After attempting to leave her job in the sex trade twice, Zhou has twice had to return to using sex to make enough money to feed herself and send money back home to her family. Having received only one year of schooling, she has no formal education or work experience to allow her to succeed in anything except prostitution.

Zhou's story is not uncommon. The World Health Organization estimates in a 2009 report that there are 4 to 6 million sex workers in China. With recent crackdowns gaining momentum, skepti-cism is being raised as to whether closing down places offering sexual services with no follow-up plans for the displaced employees will actually be of any benefit to those exploited by the trade.

Crackdowns a short solution

When asked about the effectiveness of the crackdowns earlier this summer, Li Yinhe, one of China's most prominent sexologists and a sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said she believed there was a need to open schools for uneducated women from the sex trade. "Crackdowns cannot work in the long term," Li said, and suggested that a more comprehensive approach was necessary to effectively present women with better options.

Most are poorly educated and come from rural environments with sub-standard living conditions, said researchers with the International Journal of Nursing Studies. These deficiencies mean the women have little, if any, opportunity to join the legitimate workforce and must exploit themselves, or be exploited by their families or others, in order to earn wages.

Xie Min, an ex-sex worker, said that she moved to Beijing when her sister and brother-in-law sent word that they had found her a job in a massage parlor. Once she arrived, Xie discovered that the couple had actually sold her to a brothel to pay off their family debt.

After being forced to work in the brothel for two years, she became a mistress to one of her customers and moved in with him and his wife. Here Xie told of various abuses, to the extent of having her life endangered when forced to abort a child in the sixth month of an accidental pregnancy.

Lucky exception

To escape, Xie convinced the man that her mother was dying and that she needed to return to care for her. "He believed me and took me to the train station," she remembered. "That was the last time I ever saw him. I got on the train, rode it three stops away, got off, and caught the next train back to the city. Then I got help." When she returned, a fellow sex trade worker put her in touch with a group that helped women escape prostitution and obtain mainstream employment.

"I was lucky," said Xie, "If [the group] had not been there to help me, I would have had to return to prostitution." After her rescuers provided a safe haven and two-and-a-half years of intense emotional and psychological counselling to overcome the trauma of her experiences, Xie now holds a regular job, is married and has become the proud mother of a healthy baby boy. Unfortunately, her story is the exception, not the rule.

While the group that helped Xie wished to remain anonymous, their founder, Xi Shumin(pseudonym), said that the center may be the only one of its kind on the Chinese mainland.