Police in Kyrgyzstan say they are powerless to stop the growth of a lucrative local online sex chatroom industry that has got moralizing vigilante groups hot under the collar.  

Speaking at a recent roundtable in Bishkek, police representative Azamat Dzhanaliyev said there is no criminal legislation under which the female performers can be punished. And targeting the studios responsible for the webcam networks is next to impossible too, he said.

“Most of these studios are located in large mansions with CCTV cameras. They are difficult to verify,” said Dzhanaliyev, whose exact position was not disclosed in a report by local media outlet Kaktus.

The webcam girls phenomenon is nothing new in many parts of Asia, but it seems to be relatively recent to Kyrgyzstan, perhaps emerging as late as the last couple of years. The appearance of identifiably Kyrgyz girls masturbating online for paying viewers has predictably riled conservatives, some of whom have engaged in shaming campaigns, sources with experience working in the industry told Eurasianet.  

According to the sources, who requested anonymity, Kyrk Choro – a group that has achieved infamy for its raids on karaoke clubs frequented by Chinese businessmen and Kyrgyz prostitutes – is identifying and posting pictures of the webcam girls on social media websites.

Given the risks involved then, the question arises as to why the young women go for it.

As noted by the article on Kaktus, many of the rooms where the action takes place are not visible from Kyrgyz IP addresses. This is not because the websites are banned by internet service providers, but because the performers themselves request blocks on IP addresses originating in their home country. Using VPN apps makes this block easy enough to get around, however.

The amount of money involved appears to make it worth the gamble. According to one Eurasianet source, who shunned a job offer from an international organization to work for a studio as a chatroom operator over the summer of 2017, performers typically earn between $700 and $1,500 per week, working six-hour shifts, five or six days a week in the rooms. That is a 25-30 percent cut of one average room’s overall take.

The operators, who speak English and facilitate connections between the girls and mostly Western spectators, take around 15-20 percent of the money, which leaves half or more to the studios that oversee the network of rooms.

For those women whose rarer talents bring in over $2,500 per week in tips from spectators on sex chat websites like Chaturbate.com, the cut went up to 35 percent, the source said. 

That would mean a salary of over $3,500 per month, or close to 20 times the national average salary.

The source, whose account was broadly corroborated by two other sources with experience working as operators — all of them graduates from one of Bishkek’s top universities — stressed that fees may have gone up since he stopped working there in 2017.

“One guy who opened another [studio] at the time increased the percentages by 5 percent to attract the best people from other studios,” the source said.

The studios can in theory be shut down under a law prohibiting the mass distribution of pornography. But as Dzhanaliyev noted at the roundtable, the fact that studios are streaming live rather than distributing recordings makes it difficult to gather evidence.

At any rate, the Kyrgyz police’s exact role in regulating this sort of thing is open to question.

When parliament last year banned landlords from letting out flats on an hourly and daily basis, one of the rationales behind the move was combating pimping and prostitution in residential locations. 

But cynics suggested the real motivation was to protect more established brothels on the police payroll. Prostitution itself is not technically illegal in Kyrgyzstan, although related activities, like operating a brothel and pimping are.

Former chatroom operators who spoke to Eurasianet had all heard of studio bosses and webcam girls being shaken down by police.

“You know our police,” one of the former operators said. “Sometimes they were the ones who blackmailed the girls [by threatening to publicly shame them] too.”