Download the full PDF here. In the s, the city of Baghdad was a shell of its former self. During the six weeks of the Gulf War from January to February , nearly 60, US and coalition bombing sorties targeted Iraqi urban centers, focusing heavily on Baghdad. An estimated 75 percent of Baghdadis lost access to clean water. Water sanitation ceased to function in Baghdad, and sewage overflowed in homes and public sewer systems.
The economic disruptions of the sanctions that followed the Gulf War had their own debilitating effects. Sanctions devastated the Iraqi economy and led to the devaluation of its currency. For example, an estimated 12, teachers stopped reporting to work, crippling the public education system. One consequence of the economic and social disruptions of war and sanctions was a rising wave of crime in the s as some people turned to illegal means to supplement their withered paychecks.
I argue here that economically-motivated crimes, including commercial sex work, had important political effects. Behind the scenes, the diminished capacity of the state meant that officials relied more heavily on citizen informants and neighborhood-level surveillance to identify criminals. This chapter focuses on gendered experiences of crime and punishment in the capital city of Baghdad, where the government enjoyed a relatively high level of control in contrast to the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in the North, or to the southern provinces that had rebelled during the Intifada in Commercial sex work occupied an uneasy standing in Iraq throughout the 20 th century.
When the British first established its mandate in Iraq, it opted to legalize and regulate the practice of prostitution, but outlawed it shortly after, bowing to domestic pressures to end the legalization of prostitution throughout its empire. Gendered anxieties at the end of the Iran-Iraq War about the destabilizing influence of returning veterans and the rise of female-headed households prompted the regime to revisit its policies towards prostitution. Relatedly, the government encouraged women to bear more children through a new national fertility campaign designed to offset the high casualty rates Iraq suffered during the Iran-Iraq War.
Viewed in this light, prostitution was antithetical toβor at least a distraction fromβthe successful promotion of marriage and reproduction for young Iraqis.
