Tourism and prostitution: sleeping with the enemy?

International tourism is often alleged to cause or exacerbate female prostitution, and tourism in Swaziland is said to have been based on ‘the export of vice’. However, prostitution was considered a ‘problem’ in that country decades before the tourist industry developed and juvenile ‘immorality’ was investigated in two important reports in 1956 and 1970. Prostitution was primarily associated with westernization and modernity, especially with migrant labour to the mines of the Republic of South Africa, with the growth of the cash economy and with the development of urban centres. As tourism developed, prostitution shifted from mining areas to hotels but, in so far as tourists of different types became clients of prostitutes, such relationships were but one form of behaviour banned in the Republic of South Africa and there is little evidence that Swazi tourism is based to a significant extent on prostitution of any kind.