Re: Prostitutes in Pakistan...
The book taboo addressed the question of why prostitution happens in heera mandi.
Whilst avoiding poverty was one of the reasons, a lot of women are in it for the pride of continuing the tradition of their ancestors. Meaning they do it becuase it's the way their mother lived, their grandmothers lives, their great-grandmother.. etc. They see themselves as the inheritors of a tradition that they are keeping alive.
Oh, and various Pakistani government over the years have tried to crack down. But every effort focuses on the whores supplying the service, rather than the men demanding the service. Crackdowns in the past simply caused the "industry" to go underground, rather than diminishing it in any way.
One of the consequences of Zia's crackdown was that men found it harder to go to Pakistani prostitutes, and so mafia imported Bangladeshi girls with the prospect of jobs as maids and forced them into prostitution slavery in pakistan instead.