SAMANA, Dominican Republic. -- Some tourists travel to the Dominican Republic for more than a beachside vacation. They come to explore fantasies and escape their routines. They come for a good time. They come for sex.
Berenise Nuñez, 23, Yoleidi Martinez, 20, and Chabeli Mejia,15, have been best friends for several years. They met as children in a neighborhood just steps away from Samaná’s tourist-packed waterfront.
Now grown, they earn money through sex; their clients are American and European men who come to the island looking for young Dominican girls. All three women are single mothers and work together for money and resources to support their children.
There are about 100,000 sex workers in the country of 9.4 million people, according to the Center for Integral Orientation and Investigation, a Dominican reproductive health non-governmental organization (NGO). The clients, mostly from North America or Europe, pay as little as $20 to have sex with a Dominican woman.
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Santo Rosario, director of the NGO, said the sex work industry reveals a misogynistic culture that prevails in some regions of the country.
”They see the woman as an object,” Rosario said. “Not just in sex but in society. She is sold as a type of good, not as a human being who has values and rights.”
Chabeli started having sex for money when she became pregnant at 13 and her parents gave her three days to get out.
She moved in with her boyfriend. He used a lot of drugs, she said. One evening he came home drunk and beat her, so she left, homeless and pregnant.
She met a 60-year-old man who rented a house for her. In exchange for sex, he paid for her medical bills during pregnancy. But after giving birth, she couldn’t do it any more.
“The man looked like my grandfather,” she said.
Now Chabeli lives in a one-room concrete house with her daughter. She doesn’t bring her clients there.
Though they have their own homes, Berenise, Yoleidi and Chabeli live collectively, often cooking, eating and parenting at Berenise’s house. Like the tourists who come and go, the fathers of their children have left, leaving the women to raise their children alone.
Berenise is a high school graduate and has taken a few nursing classes. She’s been a sex worker since she was 15 and has two sons. She also acts as a mother to the younger moms, especially Chabeli, who has been forced into a mangled adulthood.
“She doesn’t have a lot of experience with raising a child,” Berenise said of Chabeli, “but she is learning. She is a child who has a child.”
The women often look for clients together. Sometimes they find work on their own, other times they go through pimps who find the clients and take a portion of the money the women earn.
There is no shortage of men looking for sex. Men visit with the idea that Dominican women live to please. When asked why he likes to vacation in Samaná, one Canadian tourist said, “This is a paradise for men. These Dominican women just love to have sex.”
The three women say it is only a job, and nothing more.
“When we are having sex, I only think about him finishing quickly, so he can give me my money and leave,” Chabeli said. “Because it is something very unpleasant to have a man on top of you, kissing you, and you don’t love him. It is something terrible.”
Berenise, Yoleidi and Chabeli don’t find romance, pleasure or personal gain in the sex they sell. They do it for their children, and their makeshift family, the only people they truly love.
In the Dominican Republic, prostitution is a legal gray area. It’s neither prohibited nor regulated, putting young and desperate girls like Chabeli at risk for HIV, rape and abuse, according to Jacqueline Montero, a former sex worker turned politician and activist. And as youth and beauty fade, clients offer less and less money.
"I tell the women that if you don’t leave sex work, it’ll leave you,” Montero said.
Berenise, Yoleidi and Chabeli say they want to find a way out. They could get work as maids for wealthy families in the area. But domestic work wouldn’t pay as much, and sex work allows the women to spend daylight hours with their children. They don’t like their jobs, and they aren’t proud of what they do. But they will do anything for their kids.
“What is the worst part? This job isn’t good in any sense,” Chabeli said. “The only good thing on my mind is the money."
