Under green and blue strobe lights, the dusty dance floor quickly fills with fifteen couples as a popular bachata song by Romeo Santos queues up. It is a weeknight at La Bodega, an open-air night club in the heart of Las Terrenas, a resort town on the northeastern coast of the Dominican Republic.
To the untrained eye, the energy on this dance floor would appear to be nothing more than an organic gathering, one of the few places in the small Dominican seaside town where tourists and Dominicans can be found in equal numbers.
But everything is not as it seems: nearly all the Dominican women here are sex workers. The majority of hotels, villas and restaurants hire employees seasonally during the winter months or high season, he says, and then lets them go.
Cesar Rodriguez, a doctor who moved to Las Terrenas 30 years ago. The unpredictability of work, as well as the seemingly flashy life of tourists, is especially difficult for the youth. This is compared to somewhere between a sixth to a third of a percent in United States, based on data estimated by various NGOs, though a true approximation is nearly impossible to quantify in the U.
The typical profile of a Dominican sex worker is a young woman in her early twenties with a low level of education, up to three children and no financial support from a partner.
