According to the British writer Christopher Hale, due to the practice of polyandry in Tibet, many women were unable to find a husband and moved to villages and towns, where they fell into prostitution.
[2] Tibetan lawyer Lobsang Sangay recognizes the existence of prostitution before the arrival of the Chinese, but he says that the phenomenon was minimal compared to its current extent.
[5] According to the French sociologist and religious historian Frédéric Lenoir writing in 2008, the traditional commercial quarter of Lhasa, capital of Tibet Autonomous Region, contained at that time karaoke bars, gambling houses and brothels.
[7] The former village of Shöl, whose area stretched to the south of Potala, is said by the 2008 Lonely Planet Tibet guide book to have been Lhasa's red-light district.
[3] In 1962, Choekyi Gyaltsen, 10th Panchen Lama claimed in his 70,000 Character Petition that anyone in Tibet who expressed his religious faith publicly was subject to persecution and accused of superstition.
Tibetan teenagers, believing they were joining the People's Liberation Army, were reported to have suffered multiple rape, resulting in pregnancies for which they underwent forced abortions.
In his book Sky Burial: The Destiny of Tibet, published in 1998, he wrote: "In the West, the persecution of Tibetans by the Chinese communists is greatly exaggerated.
[1] In an article in The Independent newspaper in 1996, journalist Mike Dempsey observed that prostitution in Lhasa had become "more brazen than in most other Chinese cities" and that "every street is full of bars and video arcades and brothels".
[20] In 2003, French documentary-maker Marie Louville visited Tibet in secret and filmed the documentary The Sidewalks of Lhassa which described the practice of prostitution in Lhasa.
[22] In a report presented in 2009 to the United Nations Human Rights Council, the Association of Tibetan Women claimed that the previous decade had seen an increase in prostitution in some major cities of Tibet.
These include organizations close to the Tibetan Government in Exile, the documentary filmmaker Ngawang Choephel, the academic Frederic Lenoir and the writer and historian Patrick French.
[37] In 2007, the Dalai Lama claimed that Beijing was using the recently completed Qingzang railway between China and Tibet to sending uneducated young girls from the countryside to be "inducted as prostitutes" in Lhasa which "is increasing the danger of AIDS".
[43] The travel comparator website Easyvoyage mentions that the western part of Lhasa looks like all modern Chinese cities with its concrete architecture, shops, karaoke and even prostitution.
"[44] However, as Mike Dempsey comments: "most observers of Tibet doubt it is official Chinese policy to promote gambling and prostitution in order to undermine the exiled Dalai Lama's spiritual hold".
[18] The view of professor Barry Sautman of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology is that "Emigrés try to attribute the 'vices' found in the towns of Tibet to the harmful cultural effects of the Han presence there.
The Director of the International Campaign for Tibet has expressed "concern that more and more young Tibetans are exposed to the temptations of the worst aspects of Chinese culture".
Asked about discos and nightclubs in Lhasa, the Vice-President of the Tibet Autonomous Region justified them as part of the "western way of life," adding that they contribute to the diversity of local Tibetan and Han culture.
Sautman argues that the 'vices' in Tibet denounced by émigrés are mostly also present in religious centers such as Dharamshala and Kathmandu and not uncommon amongst Buddhist monks in some countries".