lundi 22 décembre 2014

In a room full of men conversing, eating, and drinking, the dek-dek, or kids, looked as if they were up past their bedtime. They didn't look like the older prostitutes sitting in the establishment's garishly lit foyer, most of whom wore dresses, high heels, and buttons with numbers. But the kids were for sale.
One of the children, Noi, had on a T-shirt, tan pants, and plastic sandals. She told her story to two American researchers, posing as customers, who paid the brothel proprietors 2,500 baht ($100) for Noi's time. The researchers, both women, briefly interviewed her in one of the brothel's bedrooms with the help of a Thai-speaking American journalist who was allowed to make introductions. This reporter and a friend of the women waited downstairs.
Noi - a pseudonym - had come from her home in the northeastern part of Thailand a week earlier and said her mother knew where she was. She had serviced eight clients, three of whom had been "rough." She wanted to leave but said the proprietors "will not allow it." She insisted she was 17, but looked a couple of years younger. Thai customers paid $52 for her, of which she kept $8.
She seemed aware of the risk of infection from HIV, the virus associated with AIDS, and had some condoms with her. She purchased her own birth control pills.
While Noi was being interviewed, a girl who looked to be about 12 years old appeared at the "kid's" table. She seemed listless and distraught. Older, apparently more experienced girls stayed with her and one of the proprietors tried to cheer her up.
Staff members of the Center for the Protection of Children's Rights, a Thai nongovernmental organization that crusades against child prostitution, later speculated that the young girl might have been recovering from one of her first sexual experiences. Concerned about Noi and the other child prostitutes, CPCR members organized a police investigation of the brothel several days after the interview.
The plan was for a CPCR staffer and me to enter the brothel first to confirm that the two girls were there. He would use a cellular phone to contact another staff member waiting with police. The police were not to be told the name of the brothel until the last minute, in order to minimize the chance of a corrupt officer tipping off the brothel proprietors.
The staffer and I entered the brothel and spotted Noi sitting at the "kid's" table, but not the younger girl. As the police were on their way, Noi went upstairs, apparently without a customer. The CPCR staffer attempted to call off the raid as police entered the establishment. They were in street clothes, but the haircuts and physiques of some of them might as well have been uniforms.
As they walked in, a lone child prostitute sitting at the table quickly went upstairs. The officers sat down, had some drinks, and then left.
"There was a terrible lack of planning," conceded the CPCR staffer after the raid. He asked for anonymity in order to preserve his ability to participate in future investigations.
It is impossible to tell whether the brothel owners were warned by corrupt police.
But on July 1, the CPCR worker returned to the brothel, again posing as a potential customer. A waitress told him that the establishment used to offer child prostitutes, but no longer.

A CAUSE FOR CONCERN: THE CONDEMNABLE CRISIS OF CHILD PROSTITUTION IN THAILAND

Robert Hart
A CAUSE FOR CONCERN:
THE CONDEMNABLE CRISIS OF CHILD PROSTITUTION IN THAILAND
The world’s oldest profession has become one of the world’s largest problems as Human Rights have come into the forefront of international unease. And as a prominent character in the international sex business, Thailand might very well be the most notorious hive of paid sex. The problem, as many see it, is however multifaceted. Not only does the country itself suffer from internal pressure of economic prosperity in rural areas, but there is also a horrific percentage of prostitutes who come into Thailand seeking work. (Renton) In addition, policies and laws regarding prostitution are crafted in such a way that does not help the poor and desperate prostitutes, but rather serve to render them criminals. As global pressures1 such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and ECPAT (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes) express significant concern about, among other various Human Rights violations, prostitution, I seek to find out just what has been done to counteract this abominable business. How is it that people continue to put themselves in this dangerous and filthy position, despite the horror stories from those who actually made it back home? And in this world of growing concern for venereal disease, why would (often married) men subject themselves to the base and scary risks associated with such a ‘business?’ Along with this, I intend to investigate the ways that the prostitutes themselves have or are handling there own lives in the self-perpetuating and self-destructive cycle of prostitution. This specific research project is targeted at child prostitution, which is, in this context, children 17 and under. By analyzing print sources, academic articles and web pages, as well as an investigative report from Dateline, I will answer these questions, and make my own conclusions about the mentality of the sex culture.
Background
The term sex culture itself is a rather telling formulation, turning what is often thought of as private into a public act of international scrutiny. From a strictly moral stance, it is not difficult to understand why this practice is frowned upon, but I am more concerned with the intricacies of the system. I am seeking how prostitution takes place, and what kinds of frames help to legitimate it in its context. Also, I am very interested in the actual dynamic between pimp and prostitute; how this relationship becomes more of an exploitation process than a partnership. By examining some of the actions and options of child prostitution in Thailand, we can start to get of sense of how this system works, and then, consequently, how to undermine it.
The role of women in Thailand specifically must be seen in light of the social conditions in which the women exist. In most of Thailand, a Buddhist country, the philosophy exists that “sons provide for the life beyond, and daughters provide for this life.” (Sacrifice) In this way, women are seen as keepers of the home, constrained by stereotypical duties of child rearing and the like. They are intentionally placed on a lower social status than men, who can go on to become monks or hold higher government positions. Furthermore, the significantly lower rates of literacy of women compared to men are only a microcosm of how uneducated women are in general in this area. Poverty and poor education are two of the most influential factors of the degradation of rural women (most evident in these predominantly Buddhist or Islamic centers of Thailand).
The other huge driving force that cannot be overshadowed by the environmental factors is the essential fact that prostitution is a big business, organized and systematic. It is smart to recognize that even in as base an activity as prostitution and human trafficking, “vested interests are at hand, often supported by powerful entities.” (Muntabhorn, 12) There is a very marginal percentage of Thailand’s GDP that comes explicitly from tourism (in particular, sex tourism).
People come from literally all over the world to meet exotic Thai girls who can presumably fulfill their fantasies. It is true that sixty percent of Thailand’s visitors in 2003 were East Asian, most prominently from Japan; there are even ‘Japanese-only’ clubs and streets in Bangkok, which re-enforces their presence. This does not negate the figure of nearly one million men who come from affluent western countries for, as the managing director for strategic intelligence at the Bangkok-based Pacific Asia Travel Association puts it, either the sex or the golf. (Renton) It is true that some people even take part in what are known as sex-tours in Thailand. These tours provide an interesting glimpse into the sex culture, wherein people pay a large sum of money to be accompanied by an escort to ‘see the sights’ of Bangkok. (Peterson) The consequent blending of prostitution and sightseeing is just another way to conceal the dirty fact that people come to Bangkok for sex. It would seem that there is a certain discretion within this sex culture which seeks to conceal the business, often disguising prostitutes as employees at beauty salons, in massage parlors or even as caddies on a golf course. (Renton)
There may be something settling about seeing the prostitute as a normal functioning part of society who works a ‘real’ job instead of just selling her body. Some of these men even develop close emotion bonds to their Thai hookers and maintain correspondences across thousands of miles. They are emotional feel a sort of emotional comfort in their foreign lovers, and the practically illiterate Thai girls sometimes receive monetary support from their farang boyfriends. (Peterson) This also is a very complicated case of problems with translation and more precisely, issues with language. There is even an entire market for scribes who perform the literary tasks of reading and writing for the illiterate prostitutes. This harkens back to one main concern or particular environmental factor that contributes to the condition of child prostitutes (or prostitutes in general), and that is the problem of education.
Without proper education, most people are subjected to menial, low-level jobs in the industrial workforce, which can often create a situation of crisis for those without the necessary means of achieving more in their working lives. As in most rural villages in the north of Thailand, rice is seen as the “single most important factor” in a family’s prosperity. (Potter, 52) A family’s economic stasis can often then be entirely dependant on the crop production during the harvest season. If, by some chance, the harvest may not be as plentiful as expected, it is possible for a family to quickly find themselves in need of an additional source of income. In the case of one young Burmese girl, children are guilted by relatives to “show their gratitude” and help out financially. (Sacrifice) Thitsa makes a very compelling argument by stating that “because of the large industrial reserve workforce and the complicity between foreign investors and native companies to hold down the rates of pay for female labour, women arriving in the city from the country are often forced into the prostitution business, and even sold into it by their parents to relieve economic hardship.” He goes on to assert that most young girls turn almost all of their money over to their families, and he insists that “the low wages in other sectors (such as conventional work apart from prostitution), also have their effect, making conventional respectability a difficult option.” (Thitsa, 11) It is clear to see that women especially are susceptible to this form of degradation, and considering the general youth of many of these girls, it is only more and more lucrative for pimps and prostitution rings.
There is a high demand for child prostitutes, fueled by an enormous cliental of international businessmen2 who flock to this “brothel of the world.” (Renton) In Khin Thitsa’s 1990 analysis of Buddhist women in Thailand, he asserts that some 800,000 women engaged in prostitution are under 18. It is important to consider that in the sex culture, “breaking a girl’s virginity is highly prized,” and so they can be sold for much higher prices. (Thitsa, 11) As early as eleven or twelve, young girls are sold off to the highest bidders in what is commonly known as “unveiling ceremonies.” At this point, prices for prostitutes are at their highest, and they only decrease from there. One prostitute acknowledged that she was sold as a virgin three times, once for 1000 dollars3, then for 800, and then for 400. After that her pimp would sell her several times a day for prices of 12, 8 and 6 dollars. (Sacrifice) Interestingly enough, this prostitute claimed that she never saw any money, but, as so often is the case, it gets divided up among the many people who organized or consented to the goings-on.
There is a broad misconception that these girls are always pure and virginal, and one might assume that this preconceived notion of innocence and youth wins out over the reality that these girls are prostitutes in a brothel, at least in the minds of the men who frequent them. “They think that we are pure…that we are untouched,” claims a prostitute from Sacrifice, “(they) come into these places under the impression that the girls are clean, but they take sickness home to their wives who cannot refuse them.” In fact, Thitsa makes the claim that some two thirds of these women have venereal diseases – and that was in 1990, almost two decades ago.
As shocking as this seems, the clear and present danger of such interaction does not hinder these men in their sometimes frequent trips to Thailand. They are sometimes thought to be “bored with their lives (or) wives, and want a change,” or are brought along by friends who encourage them to partake. (Sacrifice) So they venture into the brothels and hotels of ill repute searching for the young and delicate treasures of the East. These cultural boundaries between West and East provide just the strategic exoticism that attracts those who desire deviation from the mundane and enter into the world of the profane.
Method
Many young women who leave their homes to become prostitutes do not have the initial intention of seeking that line work, but rather have aspirations of working in laundromats or restaurants. But as their voyage reaches its destination in Thailand, the allures of Bangkok take hold and most are swindled or forced to take up work as prostitutes. Many stories are told of the attraction of Bangkok, with its lights and hustling, bustling city life, tall buildings and opportunities. (Sacrifice) However the catch is quite simply that the opportunities are mostly sex related; receptionists, laundromats, massage parlors, golf caddies, etc. This subtle underlying element of sex permeates the society, making it seem more like a socially acceptable line of work. But the actual prostitutes who are bought and sold through human trafficking do not have such an acceptable reputation, and reputation is not something that is taken lightly. In traditional Thai villages, there is a familiar double standard of sexual promiscuity, wherein men gain status if they have “seduced many women,” but the women are looked down upon for similar acts, embarrassing their family and significantly reducing their chances for marriage. (Potter, 108) This image of value systems contrasts sharply with the idea of leaving one’s family and prostituting one’s self.
But the stakes are high for poor families who need financial help in a desperate way. One woman from the documentary Sacrifice told a story about having to ‘go to work’ to support her child. She began to sell herself and send money back under the pretense of having another job, but when her mother finally discovered what was going on, her only response was, ‘It’s your life, do what you want.” Without much opposition, the woman continued her work, and continued to send money back home to support her child. Such is the sad and unoriginal case of poverty that occurs inside and outside of Thailand proper.
Burma especially is a target area for brothel owners to scour in search of young girls to recruit for prostitution. These remote areas are so ideal because of how removed they are from venereal diseases, and virgins especially are envied for this reason and that they offer the promise of a higher price. (A Modern Form…, 3) Some girls are enticed by promises of “jobs as waitresses or dishwashers, with good pay and new clothes,” but the services they perform are purely sexual. And once they make it as far as the brothels, it is virtually impossible to escape because of the monetary struggle that is set up by the owners. When they are accepted into the brothels the owners sometimes make a large payment to the family of the child that has been taken in. At this point, it becomes the child’s duty to sell her body to pay off this ‘debt’ that has been paid by the owner to the family. (A Modern Form…, 3)
There are many filters that payment goes through before the girl receives any amount from her own prostitution – the pimps claim a certain percentage for the food and shelter and electricity and water that are provided at the housing units that resemble Nazi barracks in concentration camps, the police take a certain percentage for allowing it to take place, and sometimes even the hotel managers will charge a fee. (A Modern Form…, 4) After all these parties take their cut, very little is actually left for the prostitutes, who are trying desperately to earn enough money to buy their way out of this modern form of slavery. In the end, these girls can wind up spending years with out being able to escape, but instead are confined by their own ignorance and laws against prostitution that render them objects of negative attention from police as opposed to the positive help they really should be getting from the law.
Sacrifice4
This is a documentary of a few Burmese girls who worked in brothels of Thailand. Their cold and clinical recollection of their own traumatic stories opened up my eyes to the realistic horrors of human trafficking and how terrible and ugly the system truly is. There is a haunting maxim that prevails as the embodiment of the kind of lives these poor women lead; “Each man is one man closer to home.” This really puts the idea of why these girls do what they do; it all comes back to the family, home. The sorry fact that the law serves to intimidate these young girls is never more apparent than in the way the poor girls are treated by customers and pimps alike. It is a very big problem as well that the Thai prostitutes themselves are made particularly helpless by the system that is intended to protect them; the law. The amount of “shame and contamination” attributed with prostitutes discourages parties to help them, so rather than receiving a fair judgment, it is said that they get what they deserve. (Thitsa, 13)
“Some customers are terrible, saying ‘I’ll do this or that to you, I can do whatever I want to you. You can’t escape, I’ll tell the police to catch you.’”
During police raids on the brothels, sometimes the girls would be found. This was a serious imposition on both the girls and their owners because it put them both out of business and neither could make any money. This anguish was only further expanded because the girls had no money to give the cops. Instead, the girls are kept by the police in mass holding cells, and the policemen take their turns having their ways with the women. Eventually, the best girls are bought back from the police, while the sick ones are not. This is the end of the road for most of the girls, who either die of sickness or are unable to escape their new literal prisons.
One of the girls in the brothel wasn’t eating anything for days, and had to sleep all the time. Finally, her owners took her to a doctor he told her that she was six months pregnant – she was shocked. Initially she wanted him to ‘take the baby out,’ but according to the doctor it was too late for that, unless she had a lot of money. The mamasan (the woman who runs the brothel) wouldn’t pay for it, but she said that she would take care of the baby and that the prostitute wasn’t allowed to have an abortion. But the girl didn’t want the child, she didn’t want a baby from selling her body. The mamasan said she would feed the baby until it was big, and “then daughter, like mother, will sell her body.” The girl was afraid so she took some pills to kill the baby. She passed out and the next morning her “stomach was flat.” When she asked the doctor what had happened he said they took the baby out. It was a girl, and it was dead. The girl was pleased because if it had survived she would have been born into the same cyclical enslavement. And in a few days time she had to go back to the brothel and sell her body right away. When she was with a customer, he sucked on her breast, and milk came out. When he asked her what it was, she said she didn’t know and to ask someone else.
The girl who went through so much trauma with being pregnant also recounted her experiences of being sold as a virgin three times (quoted earlier in this research). She admitted that she had been working as a prostitute for at least six years that she could remember, and she knew that she had had about a thousand customers a year, but the most disheartening part of her story was when she said to the interviewer, “You can do the math and figure out how many people I’ve slept with. But I can’t do math, so I have no idea.” This telling truth struck a chord by literally connecting prostitution with poor education. It is hard to hear the true stories of these girls who were brought across the Burmese borders, some times against their will, to forcibly sell themselves under the pretense of doing good for their families.
Lannie5
We must, at a certain point, stop and wonder what is happening to help put an end to this kind of abuse and treatment. It is scary enough to imagine these East Asian girls getting swept up in the tidal forces of mass prostitution and human trafficking, but it becomes even more disturbing to think of it happening to our sons and daughters. In a riveting story of heroism, two American men took on the daunting challenge of tracking down their Filipino niece who had been swallowed by a Malaysian prostitute ring.
There were few leads to aid Troop Edmunds on his quest to find Lannie, his young niece who had traveled from her home in the Philippines to Malaysia following a job offer of being a hotel singer. After a detailed and rigorous method of searching, the few bits of evidence congealed into a cohesive track which could be followed, leading Edmunds and his former FBI friend Jerry Howe to rescue Lannie as well as indirectly helping 15 others to escape the horrible future that awaited them. Along the way the two men discovered many other truths about the system, including the unbelievable living conditions in which these girls, and boys, were forced to live in, the harsh resistance they faced to elicit information from a doctor who was in charge of keeping the women healthy and fit for service, and most incredible the inability for the police to differentiate between the victims and victimizers. This documentary highlighted the lack of effort from governmental forces and showcased the police as bumbling enablers of the system. It was amazing how the brothels’ efforts of extortion, aimed at Edmunds, backfired in a heroic and meaningful way, effectively liberating a handful of prospective prostitutes and raising awareness among a national audience of the atrocities of the Southeast Asian sex business and human trafficking.
Conclusion
In the face of stark oppression and enslavement, NGOs and governments alike should take more effective measures to put an end to such abominable things as human trafficking and prostitution. It can be argued that efforts are underway to intercept forged documents and catch traffickers in the act of smuggling people across borders. But it is also relevant to consider the complicated intricacy in which the trade is conducted, with the involvement of many parties located in various places under the noses of officials. (Altink, 55) One conclusion that can be decisively asserted is the observation that whatever measure and actions are being taken, they are not effective enough to stop the monstrous threat that human trafficking poses for the world as a humanitarian concern. A further investigation into the procedures of the various groups that target human trafficking would be in order to determine any further measures. As for the children whose youth and innocence is literally stolen from them, it is hard to say what kind of future they can expect. The years of maximum employment potential for these poor children are early and brief. This period can be drastically abbreviated with the onset of venereal diseases such as AIDS, unwanted pregnancies or the multitude of other risks and dangers associated with prostitution. As a matter of humanitarian concern, child prostitution should be viewed as a practice worth the time, effort and funding necessary to end it.
________________________
1There are in fact 21 UN agencies and NGOs based in Bangkok focused on trafficking that bring in a significant amount of aid. (Renton)
2Roughly a million men from wealthy countries like the US, Australia, Japan and European countries make up less than half of the total number of visitors who come to Thailand, apparently in search of sex.
3Figures are relative to the US dollar.
4All content can be cited to source: Sacrifice (unless otherwise indicated).
5All content can be cited to source: “To the Rescue” (unless otherwise indicated).
______________________________
References Cited
1. A Modern Form of Slavery. New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993.
2. Altink, Sietske. Stolen Lives: Trading Women into Sex and Slavery. London: Scarlet Press, 1995.
3. Muntarbhorn, Vitit, Wimolsiri Jamnarnvej and Tanawadee Boonlue. Status of Women: Thailand. Bangkok: Unesco Principal Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, 1990
4. Peterson, Mark Allen. (2007) Lovelorn Farangs, [Lecture to International Studies 301, Oxford Campus, Miami University]. 23 October.
5. Potter, Sulamith Heins. Family Life in a Northern Thai Village. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977.
6. Renton, Alex. "Learning the Thai Sex Trade." Prospect Magazine 110, (2005): [online. http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=6889] 26 Apr 2005.
7. Sacrifice: The Story of Child Prostitutes From Burma. Dir. Ellen Bruno. DVD. Film Library, 1998.
8. Thitsa, Khin. Providence and Prostitution: Women in Buddhist Thailand. London: Calverts Press, 1990.
9. “To the Rescue.” Dateline Exclusive. NBC. WLWT, Cincinnati. 8 Aug. 2007.

Author: Robert Hart
Student - International Studies, French

Top Five Countries with Highest Rates of Child Prostitution

By Ludovica Iaccino | IB Times – Thu, Feb 6, 2014

Child prostitution has been defined by the UN as "the act of engaging or offering the services of a child to perform sexual acts for money or other consideration with that person or any other person".

By 1990, international awareness of the commercial sexual exploitation and the sale of children had grown to such a level that the United Nations Commission on Human Rights decided to appoint a Special Rapporteur on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography.
Here is a list of the five countries with the highest rates of child prostitution.
Sri Lanka
The number of crimes against children in Sri Lanka increased by 64% in 2012 , compared to the previous year, a Unicef report said.
"According to Unicef and ILO [International Labour Organisation] there are 40,000 child prostitutes in Sri Lanka and 6.4% of the country's child population gets pregnant," said United National Party MP Rosy Senanayake.
Although girls are sexually exploited both in the sex industry and by sex tourists, many NGOs believe that it is boys who face greater abuse by foreign sex offenders, NGO Ecpact (Ending Child Prostitution, Pornography and Trafficking) said.
In Sri Lanka, the plantation sector has been identified as a notorious area for trafficking of children into the worst forms of child labour, particularly child domestic work and commercial sexual exploitation, according to ILO.
The National Child Protection Authority issued a warning in 2011 of an increase in child sexual exploitation, related to the rapid growth of tourism.

Thailand
Child prostitution in Thailand involved 800,000 children under the age of sixteen in 2004.
According to Ecpat, due to the hidden nature of child sexual abuse reliable figures are hard to compile and cases difficult to document. Available figures estimate that currently some 30,000 to 40,000 children, not including foreign children, are exploited as prostitutes.
Sexual exploitation of children in Thailand, as in many other countries, is tremendously influenced by tourism.
"In Pattaya [ Thailand], if there were fewer foreign people coming in to buy sex, then the problem would be easier to manage," Palissorn Noja, who runs Pattaya's Anti-Human Trafficking and Child Abuse Centre, told the Huffington Post.
"They [pedophiles] have an entire worldwide network of people looking for children through human trafficking. And sex tourism makes it harder to stop."
The photographic documentary, "Underage" by photographer Ohm Phanphiroj shows the life of thousands of underage male prostitutes in Thailand.
"The film aims at exposing the rotten problem about sexual exploitation against minors and mistreatment towards children," the photographer said in a statement.

Brazil
Sex trafficking is an appalling truth to many young people in Brazil, where there are half-a-million child sex workers, according to the National Forum for the Prevention of Child Labour.
Children as young as 12 are selling themselves for sex for as little as 80p in Brazil, according to an investigation by Sky News.
The shocking revelation comes as international footballers join a campaign warning fans travelling to Brazil for the World Cup to exploit children.
According to the documentary "Brazil- Children for sale", hundreds of children who live in the slums leave their homes in search of tourists, who are "eager for easy and cheap bodies", to earn money and escape poverty.
Unemployment and poverty is extremely high in Brazil and children are sometimes encouraged by their parents to start prostituting.

United States
According to Crimes Against Children research Centre (CCRC), the numbers of juvenile prostitutes within the United States range from 1,400 to 2.4 million, although most fall between 300,000 and 600,000.
16 children as young as 13 were rescued from the sex trade in a law enforcement operation that targeted suspected pimps who brought the victims to New Jersey for Super Bowl weekend, in February 2014.
"Prostituted children remain the orphans of America's justice system. They are either ignored or, when they do come in contact with law enforcement, harassed, arrested, and incarcerated while the adults who exploit them - the pimp and their customers - largely escape punishment," said Julian Sher, author of the book Somebody's Daughter: The Hidden Story of America's Prostituted Children and the Battle to Save Them.

Canada
Inuit babies and children are being sold by their families and are "prostituted out by a parent, family member or domestic partner", according to a recent report by Canadian Department of Justice.
The sexual exploitation of children is a deeply–rooted reality in too many Canadian homes, families and communities, according to a 2011 report by a Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights.
The committee, which started the investigation in 2009, heard that in one year there were almost 9,000 reported sexual assaults against children
(many of whom belong to aboriginal communities) in Canada. The overwhelming majority of sexual abuse goes unreported.
Social service organisations have estimated the number of trafficked Canadians to be as high as 16,000 a year, but the number of children trafficked within Canada from place to place remains uncertain due to the clandestine nature of the activity, Unicef Canada said in a statement in 2009.
World: Asia-Pacific

UK police aid Thai paedophile crackdown

Bangkok street children often turn to prostitution

By South East Asia Correspondent David Willis


The BBC's David Willis: UK paedophiles are known to have moved to Thailand

Two detectives from the UK have flown out to Thailand to train their Thai counterparts in investigating child sex offences.
It is the latest move in a joint initiative to clamp down on paedophiles and sex tourists in Thailand, many of whom are thought to come from the UK.

Thousands of homeless Thai children are vulnerable to exploitation

It is hoped that enhanced co-operation between the two countries will lead to more British paedophiles being charged in court.
The detectives from Northumbria will be training Thai colleagues in the latest forensic and interviewing techniques and preparing them to compile video evidence that will withstand scrutiny both in Thailand and in the UK.
The two weeks of training are also designed to enhance intelligence sharing, following the passing of laws which allow British courts to prosecute Britons caught committing sex offences abroad.
Quarter-of-a-million child prostitutes
It is estimated that about 250,000 children work as prostitutes in Thailand.
The country's burgeoning child sex industry has proved a magnet for paedophiles from around the world.
Some who have been convicted of offences in the UK are known to have moved to Thailand once their sentences were served.
A children's charity group says it has identified more than two dozen convicted British paedophiles who are now living in Thailand.
In some cases they have been able to return to abusing children simply because local police have not known how to go about investigating a complaint of child sex abuse.
It is hoped that will change once the Northumbria detectives have completed their work.

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Thailand Law Journal 2012 Fall Issue 1 Volume 15

Defining Child Trafficking & Child Prostitution: The Case of Thailand

By Heather Montgomery

1. Introduction

Child trafficking is a poorly misunderstood and badly defined phenomenon. Commentators and activists frequently use the phrase "child trafficking" synonymously and interchangeably with child prostitution and sexual exploitation, and even link child trafficking with sex tourism, even though the connection between these two terms is sometimes tenuous.¹ Indeed, although children may migrate for a number of reasons and can be exposed to a variety of hazards, child trafficking has come to be seen almost entirely in the context of sexual exploitation, causing prostitution to become the main cause for international concern and advocacy. Given the horror that child trafficking for sexual purposes evokes, this might not be surprising. Yet, debate about the meaning of the term is not simply academic pedantry; instead, it is vitally important to understanding the extent and nature of the problem and how to formulate meaningful policy decisions.

This article will address the various uses of the term "child trafficking" before carefully delineating the various forms of child prostitution in Thailand. These forms of prostitution range from forcing girls (and less commonly boys) from neighboring countries and local hill tribes into prostitution, becoming "debt bonded" into brothels, to living on the streets with their peers, and voluntarily selling sex when the opportunity arises. Furthermore, child prostitution may also exist as a family trade where
children live with their parents and sell sex as part of the household economy. An ethnographic case study explores this final type of child prostitution and reveals that many child prostitutes are not trafficked, but show some willingness to participate in selling sex. In this instance, prostitution may be the best choice available for individual children who believe it to be morally acceptable.

Such a conclusion raises many uncomfortable issues and ethical dilemmas. However, by making such a statement, I am not attempting to justify child prostitution or to claim it is a good choice for children. Based on the ethnographic evidence of my own work, I have found that there are various forms of child prostitution, not all of which involve trafficking. Therefore, there is no blanket solution to the problem, and different forms of prostitution require very different methods and ideologies of
intervention. Attempts to tackle the problem of child prostitution through international trafficking legislation, while important and well-meaning, have not always been successful at a grassroots level and do not always reflect the children's own priorities and stated needs.

II. DEFINING THE PROBLEM

A. The Official InternationalD efinition of Trafficking

In theory, the term trafficking ought to be easy to discuss. A clear international definition was agreed upon and set out in the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking, Especially Women and Children² (also known as the "Palermo Protocol" and referred to throughout this article simply as "Protocol"). Through the ratification of the Protocol, there exists significant international agreement that trafficking is a serious form of organized crime that governments need to combat.³ The Protocol states:
(a) "Trafficking in persons" shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means
of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a
position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation;
Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs;
(b) The consent of a victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) have been used;
(c) The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of a child for the purpose of exploitation shall be considered
"trafficking in persons" even if this does not involve any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article;
(d) "Child" shall mean any person under eighteen years of age.⁴

B. Criticisms of the InternationalD efinition

Despite this apparent straightforward description of trafficking, the Protocol has caused great controversy, especially over issues of consent. The heart of the debate is whether or not sex work can ever be entered into voluntarily, and if so, whether it can still be considered "trafficking." Some activists, such as those from the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), claim that all prostitution is involuntary, and therefore, the terms "trafficking" and "prostitution" can be used synonymously. However, others have argued that trafficking is a more complex phenomenon that does not necessarily equate to prostitution.⁵ Academics and activists who take the latter position argue that the Protocol overlooks the connections between legal and illegal forms of migration, viewing the latter as criminal and the former as acceptable, even though a likely overlap exists between
the two.⁶

Since the Protocol came into force, the debate has continued. Some commentators continue to insist that trafficking is a criminal activity with recognizable victims (usually women and children) and perpetrators (usually men).⁷ Kamala Kempadoo points out that the gender stereotyping in this view of trafficking draws on notions of women's and children's innate sexual purity and passivity and contrasts them with men's ability to act and to make active choices about migration. She argues:

Women and children by definition are trafficked-kidnapped, transported against their will over borders, and held in slavery-like conditions-due to their presumed innocence, purity, and inability to take action on their own behalf, while it is men who are thought to actively seek to be smuggled, and hence are viewed as implicated subjects.⁸

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

1. Jyoti Sanghera, Unpacking the Trafficking Discourse, in TRAFFICKING AND PROSTITUTION RECONSIDERED: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON MIGRATION, SEX WORK, AND HUMAN RIGHTS, 3-24 (Kamala Kempadoo, Jyoti Sanghera & Bandana Pattanaik, eds. 2005) [hereinafter Sanghera].

2. G.A. Res. 55/25, Annex II, U.N. Doc. A/Res/55/25 (Jan. 8, 2001), [hereinafter Palermo Protocol]. This Protocol supplemented the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others, Mar. 21, 1950, 96 U.N.T.S. 271, and gave added protections to those discussed in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, Dec. 18, 1979, 1249 U.N.T.S. 13.

3. Palermo Protocol, supra note 2, at Art. 2. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, as of 2010, 110 States have signed and ratified the Protocol although conviction rates remain very low and few victims are helped or even identified. Human Trafficking, United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/what-is-humantrafficking.html?ref-menuside (last visited March 3, 2011).

4. G.A. Res. 55/25, Annex II, Article III, U.N. Doc. A/Res/55/25 (Jan. 8, 2001).

5. Jo Doezema, Who Gets to Choose? Coercion, Consent, and the UN Trafficking Protocol, 10 GENDER & DEV. 20, 20-21 (Mar. 2002), available at http://www.jstor.org/sta ble/4030678; see also BRIDGET ANDERSON & JULIA O'CONNELL-DAVIDSON, TRAFFICKING-A DEMAND LED PROBLEM? 8-9 (2002) [hereinafter ANDERSON].

6. ANDERSON, supra note 5, at 7.

7. See Melissa Ditmore, Trafficking in Lives: How Ideology Shapes Policy, in TRAFFICKING AND PROSTITUTION RECONSIDERED: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON MIGRATION, SEX WORK, AND HUMAN RIGHTS 107, 109 (Kamala Kempadoo, Jyoti Sanghera& Bandana Pattanaik eds., 2005) [hereinafter Ditmore].

8. Kamala Kempadoo, From Moral Panic to Global Justice: Changing Perspectives on Trafficking, in TRAFFICKING AND PROSTITUTION RECONSIDERED: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON MIGRATION, SEX WORK, AND HUMAN RIGHTS vii, xxiii (Kamala Kempadoo, Jyoti Sanghera & Bandana Pattanaik eds., 2005) [hereinafter Kempadoo].

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Nit showed no emotion over what happened next. She kept looking at the ceiling. She whispered that she was very frightened when she faced her first client, an American. She was also impressed: he had to pay 8,000 baht because she was a virgin. It did not occur to Nit that this settled her debt.

Since her deflowering, Nit has seen her price drop like bad stocks. Her second and third clients-from Hong Kong-had to pay her boss 4,000 baht. Number five and six paid only 1,500. After that she lost count and went down to the "normal" price of 200 baht- $8 for an hour. Her boss has kept all the money. Nit seemed oddly resigned to her plight, perhaps because it was her father's decision. But now, she whispered, she wanted to go home ....

Abuse and disease are rampant [among child prostitutes in Thailand]. The harm to their bodies is easier to record: cigarette
bums, self-inflicted cuts, syphilis and gonorrhea, and increasingly the virus that causes AIDS. Social workers worry also about the less visible and harder part-the interrupted childhoods, depression and distrust, the grim prediction that abused children will
themselves become perpetrators.²⁸

Unfortunately, Nit was not the only identified case of a child being tricked into prostitution with the knowledge and possible connivance of her family. A similar story appeared in Time magazine.

A typical victim of the Thai trade in prepubescent sex is Armine Sae Li, 14 (not her real name). She was spirited away from
northern Chiang Rai province at age 12 when child traffickers convinced her parents they would give her a good job in a beachresort restaurant. When she reached Phuket, a center for sex tourism, she was forced into prostitution in conditions of virtual slavery until she was rescued last December by Thai police. But they arrived too late; Armine has tested HIV-positive and will die of AIDS.

During Armine's brief career as a prostitute she entertained two to three customers a night, almost all of them foreigners. In recent years, Europeans, Australians, Japanese, and Americans have flocked to Southeast Asia by the thousands to engage in sex acts with Thai, Filipino, and Sri Lankan youngsters that would win them a jail term in their own countries.²⁹

These stories contain all the elements that have since come to characterize accounts of child prostitution-a young girl, coerced and tricked into prostitution many miles from home, painful initiation through paid sex with a foreigner, no means of escape, and no future other than illness and death. In these stories, trafficking and prostitution are indistinguishable-forced or deceived migration inevitably leads to coerced sex (usually with foreign clients) for pay that the child never receives and then on to death. These stories were so powerful that organizations such as End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism (ECPAT) arose to combat the problem. International publicity and awareness-raising campaigns, including calls for a boycott of Thai goods, also became more prevalent.³⁰ Many of the cases uncovered by these campaigns were indeed horrific, involving foreigners who had sex with very young children, some even filming this abuse. Nevertheless, in the rare instances that they were caught, these Western men simply bribed their way out or jumped bail and left the country.³¹

NGO and media reports also concentrated on the large and everincreasing scale of the problem.³² In 1989, a statement made by the Norwegian Government to the Council of Europe claimed that "[e]very year, one million children are kidnapped, bought, or in other ways forced to enter the sex market."³³ Activists have used this figure extensively, although sometimes modifying it to claim that the demand for young prostitutes is so great that it created "more than one million 'fresh' child prostitutes every year."³⁴

C. Reacting to Stories of Trafficking and Prostitution

It is clearly very difficult to react to stories such as Nit's or Armine Sae Li's-or even to respond to reports of the scale of the issue-with any response other than outright condemnation and outrage. Also, reacting without anger is almost guaranteed to invite accusations of "academic voyeurism," which, as Jean La Fontaine has argued, are "no substitute for more action on behalf of the victims."³⁵

However, the use of such stories is problematic, and as they continue to be widely circulated, such stories have important implications for analyzing the phenomenon today. The statistics used are particularly concerningwhile the figure of one million child prostitutes continues to be cited, it has little basis in accurate, reliable research. The Norwegian Save the Children
Fund found no evidence for its own government's figure of one million child prostitutes in Asia.³⁶ Other assessments of child prostitution in Thailand³⁷ suggested that numbers were much smaller than the 800,000 children sometimes claimed as working prostitutes.³⁸ Furthermore, ethnographic studies³⁹ (as I will go on to discuss) showed that the problem was very different at ground level and did not always involve trafficking or forceful coercion.⁴⁰ As Thomas Steinfatt has argued, "The publicizing of
these numbers diluted the focus on child workers as they actually existed in small numbers in specific places and created an impression of a society gone berserk with paid child sexual abuse."⁴¹

D. Types ofProstitution in Thailand

Although the Protocol makes no distinction between prostitution and trafficking where children are concerned,⁴² it is important to acknowledge that, in reality, there are different types of child prostitution and not all involve trafficking or forced migration. Three main types of child prostitution appear in Thailand: first, there are foreign girls who have been trafficked (by force or trickery) from neighboring countries, such as China or Burma, or from the hill tribes; second, there are girls who have been
"debt-bonded" into brothels either on their own accord or with parental encouragement; and finally, there are children who work freelance.

Both boys and girls exist in the final category ("freelance"); they are the ones most likely to have foreign customers. These children live with their families and sell sex as part of the overall family economy. For some children, selling sex is a rare occurrence done to supplement wages from others jobs; while for other children, it is a regular occupation and their main source of income. This category might also include those children living on the streets who sell sex on some occasions ("survival sex") or girls who exchange sex with boys on the street in order to win their protection.⁴³

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

28 Marlise Simons, The Littlest Prostitutes, N.Y. TIMES, Jan. 16, 1994, at 35, available at http://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/16/magazine/the-littlestprostitutes.html?pagewanted= all&src=pm.

29 Margot Hornblower, The Skin Trade, TIME, June 21, 1993, at 28.

30 Wikipedia, Don't! Buy! Thai!, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't! Buy! Thai! (last visited Aug. 9, 2010).

31 Heather Montgomery, Child Sex Tourism: Is Extra-Territorial Legislation the Answer?, in TOURISM AND CRIME: KEY THEMES 69, 72-73 (David Botterill & Trevor Jones eds., 2010).

32 Judith Ennew, et. al, CHILDREN AND PROSTITUTION: How CAN WE MEASURE AND MONITOR THE COMMERCIAL SEXUAL EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN? LITERATURE REVIEW AND ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY 24-30 (1996); Sanghera, supra note 1.

33 Maggie Black, Home Truths, NEW INTERNATIONALIST, Feb. 1994, at 11-12, available at http://www.newint.org/features/1994/02/05/home/.

34 Quoted in Alison Murray, Debt-bondage and Trafficking: Don't Believe the Hype, in GLOBAL SEX WORKERS: RIGHTS, RESISTANCE, AND REDEFINITION 51, 55 (Kamala Kempadoo & Jo Doezema, eds. 1998); see also Ennew, supra note 32, at 24-30; MONTGOMERY, supra note 25.

35 Jean La Fontaine, CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE 17 (1990).

36 In 1989 Norwegian Save the Children (Redd Bama) published a full report, funded by NORAD (Norwegian Agency for Intemational Development), on the extent and nature of child prostitution. It gave no statistics and acknowledged the difficult nature of defining and counting child prostitutes. It also emphasized the unreliability of many of the sources

37 Philip Guest, Guesstimating the Unestimateable: The Number of Child Prostitutes in Thailand, in CHILD PROSTITUTION IN THAILAND: A DOCUMENTARY ANALYSIS AND ESTIMATION OF THE NUMBER OF CHILD PROSTITUTES 73, 94-95 (Orathai Ard-am& Chanya Sethaput eds., 1994); Thomas Steinfatt, Trafficking, Politics and Propaganda, in ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PROSTITUTION AND SEX WORK 494, 497 (Melissa Hope Ditmore ed.,
2006).

38 Steinfatt, supra note 37, at 498.

39 For ethnographic accounts providing different perspectives about the nature of the problem, see Marjorie A. Muecke, Mother Sold Food, Daughter Sells Her Body: The Cultural Continuity of Prostitution, 35 SOC. SCI. MED. 891 (1992); Montgomery, supra note 25; Lisa Rende Taylor, Dangerous Trade-offs: The Behavioral Ecology of Child Labor and Prostitution in Rural Northern Thailand, 46 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 411 (2005). For excellent introductions and challenges to the dominant narratives, see generally, JULIA O'CONNELL DAVIDSON, CHILDREN IN THE GLOBAL SEX TRADE, (2005); Steinfatt, supra note 37, at 496.

40 This is not to claim that there is no trafficking, only that the scale and extent have been exaggerated and confused with other forms of prostitution. It should also be noted that not all child trafficking in Thailand is for the purposes of sexual exploitation, and there is some evidence of Cambodian children being brought to Thailand for the purposes of begging or adoption. See Steinfatt, supra note 37.

41 Steinfatt, supra note 37, at 497.

42 It is also worth noting that some commentators will not use the phrase "child prostitution," believing that as long as children cannot consent to sexual exploitation they should always be referred to as prostituted children. See MONTGOMERY, supra note 25, at 89-91.

43 For a discussion of the links between survival sex and street children, see Jody, M. Greene, Susan T. Ennett, & Christopher Ringwalt, Prevalence and Correlates ofSurvival Sex among Runaway and Homeless Youth, 89 AM J. OF PUBLIC HEALTH 1406 (1999).

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1. Foreign Girls Trafficked into Prostitution by Force or Trickery Certainly, some evidence exists that girls are kidnapped from their homes and brought to work as prostitutes in Thailand.⁴⁴ At other times, traffickers offer bogus jobs.⁴⁵ NGOs sometimes rescue these girls, but many others do not escape their brothels until police raids occur.⁴⁶ Newspaper reports of these raids are usually accompanied by pictures of the girls trying to hide their faces and protect their identities, sometimes suggesting their rescue is as coercive as their recruitment. What usually goes less reported, however, is what happens to these girls after they leave the brothels; whether or not they run into problems with immigration officials, whether they try to return home, and whether any help is offered to them.

Girls from the hill tribes in the north of Thailand are thought to be at particular risk, given their social marginalization and lack of Thai citizenship.⁴⁷ Various endeavors, such as the Daughters' Education Project, have been set up to help hill tribe girls escape from prostitution by providing foster care for those at risk.

Other groups that appear particularly vulnerable are Burmese children and young women found in brothels on the Thai side of the Thai-Burmese border. In 1993, a human rights group, Asia Watch, reported on the widespread collusion of Thai officials in the indigenous sex trade and, in particular, their treatment of Burmese girls in Thailand.⁴⁸ Their report discussed a raid on a brothel in Ranong (near the Burmese border) where 148 underage Burmese girls were rescued but then arrested. The girls
claimed to have been forced or tricked into the brothels; yet, rather than being treated as victims of a crime, they were arrested by the Thai police as illegal immigrants and sent back to Burma where it was claimed that those who tested HIV-positive were shot.⁴⁹

The Ranong case was controversial, and reliable facts about the fate of these girls were difficult to find. The habitual secrecy of the Burmese military regime and the embarrassment the case caused to the Thai authorities meant it was difficult to monitor these girls and, to this day, their fate is unknown. However, this case did show how politicized trafficking discourses had become. To the Thai police and government, these girls were illegal immigrants, undocumented workers, and a political headache. To the Burmese government, they were criminals who had left the country illegally and who had returned HIV-positive. But to Asia Watch, these girls were innocent victims of trafficking. What the girls believed about themselves
was unclear as their voices were lost in the political arguments that raged around them.⁵⁰

While transborder trafficking dominated headlines in the early 1990s and caused great embarrassment to the Thai government, it is difficult to know how common it was or remains today. A recent report by the US government found that little has changed in the last twenty years, and underage Burmese girls still work in Thai brothels.⁵¹ These girls are likely to be among the most poorly paid prostitutes in Thailand. Their clients are poor Burmese and their working conditions are harsh. They are also the
most obvious targets of police intervention and the most likely to be publicly "rescued" from the brothels. Once found by law enforcement, these girls then face the problem of multiple illegalities-not only did they leave Burma illegally, but they also entered Thailand in violation of immigration, employment, and child protection laws.

Focusing on sexual exploitation may claim victimhood and some legal protection for these women and children, but it can also mask the structural causes of prostitution such as social inequality, restrictive emigration and immigration policies, police corruption, and national and racial prejudice.⁵² These issues are deeply entrenched, sensitive, and politically charged, but
they are issues that academics who wish to understand the lives of child prostitutes must confront if they wish to view the situation holistically.

2. "Debt Bondage" Prostitution of Thai Girls

Ethnic Thai girls are also at risk of prostitution and possibly trafficking, but their danger comes from intermediaries in their own communities as well as their own parents. In many instances, girls (or their parents) sell their labor to a brothel for an advance payment, and then they must work for a certain length of time before the debt is paid off. Journalists or campaigning groups refer to this system as "debt bondage," using this buzz phrase synonymously with both trafficking and prostitution. Media accounts (such as the two quoted earlier) mention that children are sold "for the price of a television" before suffering terrible abuse. Inevitably, these stories end with the child's infection with HIV and an early death.

Another typical example is the horrific story of a fire at a Phuket brothel in 1984 in which five young prostitutes died while chained to their beds.⁵³ While this case was horrible and widely used as an emblematic example of the horrors of brothel life, it is hard to know how representative it was (or remains) of the conditions in many brothels. Other ethnographic work has
suggested that today, while conditions in some brothels can be very harsh, extreme abuse is relatively uncommon, and usually girls are able to exercise some choice about their clients and labor conditions.⁵⁴

3. Freelance Child Prostitutes

The third and most surprising category of child prostitution includes those who voluntarily have sex for money, usually out of familial duty or the "fun" of fraternizing with wealthy foreigners. Anthropologist and activist Lisa Rende Taylor has argued:

Most commercial sex work in Thailand does not typically involve streetwalking, beatings by pimps, or scuffling with deviant
customers, nor does most involve trafficking. Commercial sex workers in the seediest brothels likely do not get to exercise any
choice in their clients and work in extremely hazardous conditions, but many Thai commercial sex workers work in cafes, karaoke bars, and massage parlors, where they do have the freedom to choose and reject clients.⁵⁵

Taylor continues to quote young women who started work as prostitutes in their teens and returned to their native villages after several years. She found that some girls justified prostitution because it was the least bad option. ("The parents here say, 'The problem isn't that our daughter sells her body (khai tua), it's that we have no food to eat."' ⁵⁶ ) Other girls admitted that there were aspects of sex work that they actually liked. One girl stated, "I had a very good income, worked short hours, indoors, it
wasn't hot, I could shop with my friends during the day, and my skin stayed white. I don't really think it was bad."⁵⁷

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

44 O'CONNELL DAVIDSON, supra note 39; Centre for the Protection of Children's Rights, PREVENTION OF TRAFFICKING AND SALE OF CHILDREN IN THAILAND (unpublished manuscript).

45 O'CONNELL DAVIDSON, supra note 39; Centere For the Protection of Children's Rights, supra note 44; ANDERSON, supra note 5; see generally LEONARD TERRITO& GEORGE KIRKHAM, INTERNATIONAL SEX TRAFFICKING OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN: UNDERSTANDING THE GLOBAL EPIDEMIC (2010).

46 Official figures are difficult to find. In addition, NGO and media reports are often extremely unreliable and fail to disaggregate by age and sex. See Yvonne Rafferty, Children for Sale: Child Trafficking in Southeast Asia, 16 CHILD ABUSE REV. 401 (2007), available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/car.1009/pdf. For a discussion of the political charges made of such numbers, see also Steinfatt, supra note 37.

47 LESLIE JEFFREY, SEX AND BORDERS: GENDER, NATIONAL IDENTITY, AND PROSTITUTION POLICY IN THAILAND (2002).

48 ASIA WATCH, A MODERN FORM OF SLAVERY TRAFFICKING OF BURMESE WOMEN AND GIRLS INTO BROTHELS IN THAILAND (1993).

49 In 1995, Coalition Against Trafficking in Women-Asia Pacific, claimed on its website that "[r]epatriated prostituted Burmese women found to be HIV infected were killed by authorities." However, this report was unsourced and there has been no independent verification. Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, Burma-Myanmar, http://www.catwinternational.org/factbook/BurmaMyanmar.php (last visited March 3, 2011).

50 See generally MONTGOMERY, supra note 25.

51 See US Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Human Rights Report, THAILAND (2008), available at http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2007 /100539.htm.

52 In the Thai newspaper, The Nation, Pol. Lt. Gen. Sudjai Yanrat was quoted as saying, "In my opinion it is disgraceful to let Burmese men frequent Thai prostitutes. Therefore, I have been flexible in allowing Burmese prostitutes to work here. Most of their clients are Burmese men." Ranong Brothel Raids net 148 Burmese Girls, THE NATION (Thailand), July 16, 1993, at Al.

53 Rakkit Rattachumpoth, The Economics of Sex, THE NATION (Thailand), Feb. 3, 1994, at 3; Samut Sakhon, Two Burn to Death in Brothel Fire, BANGKOK POST (Thailand), June 13, 1994, at 7.

54 See Pamela Da Grossa, Kamphaeng Din: A Study of Prostitution in the All-Thai brothels of Chiang Mai City, 4 CROSS-ROADS, 1-7 (1989); see also GRAHAM FORDHAM, A NEW LOOK AT THAI AIDS: PERSPECTIVES FROM THE MARGIN (2005).

55 TAYLOR, supra note 39, at 416.

56 Id.

57 Id.

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This aspect of child prostitution often goes unexplored. Prostitution does pose risks, but it may also be seen as an easier, better-paid job than factory or agricultural labor. While prostitution is not a positive choice for many children, it is nevertheless a choice made with knowledge that there are no good options.

Furthermore, it is not necessarily a death sentence as portrayed in the media. Although HIV infection rates are indeed tragically high in certain Thai provinces, not all child prostitutes become infected. There can be life for children after prostitution, and those who can save enough money are not necessarily so traumatized that they cannot adapt or survive lifethreatening
illnesses.

Other studies of Thailand's prostitution business suggest that many children and young women justify their careers because it supports their families and may keep younger siblings from working as prostitutes. In her groundbreaking study of child prostitution in Thailand, Marjorie Muecke claims that sex work can be seen as a continuation of older cultural patterns
of filial obligation. While previous generations would have looked after their parents by selling food or other forms of petty trading, the modem generation fulfils their duties to their parents through sex work.⁵⁸ These young women remain loyal daughters, sending home remittances to their families and functioning as the financial lynchpin of their families. Muecke summarizes the familial benefits of this way of life-although family economics pushes one daughter into sex work, the others benefit from her sacrifice.

In Northern villages, remittances from prostitutes often mean that parents and siblings do not have to work in the dry season, and have to plant only one rice crop a year. The labor of a daughtersister who prostitutes herself can spare her family from work as well as provide them with otherwise unattainable consumer goods. Thus prostitutes invest heavily in the conservation of their families and homes. In doing so, they carry out traditional obligations of women to take care of aging parents and younger siblings.⁵⁹

The women Muecke interviewed gave a variety of reasons why they worked as prostitutes, but none claimed to have been deceived or trafficked into prostitution. Even in cases where parents had taken advances on their daughters' wages, they did not fit into classic patterns of debt bondage. Both parents and children were aware of what they were expected to do, and
while some girls resented it, they nevertheless continued to go into sex work.

Equally important was the fact that several of the women whom Muecke had interviewed eventually returned to their villages after having worked as prostitutes. Instead of being so traumatized by sex work that they had no future, these women in their mid-twenties had in fact returned home after ten years of working as prostitutes. If they were successful at selling sex, had sent money home regularly, and provided houses and consumer goods for their parents,⁶⁰ they were welcomed back. It was only those who failed to send money home or were unsuccessful financially that were stigmatized as selfish, thereby suggesting that prostitution itself was not considered morally indefensible or even inherently corrupting to teenage girls. It was the lack of success as a prostitute that was negatively viewed.

4. Local Demand for Child Prostitution

Another interesting fact to consider is that the vast majority of child prostitutes' clients are local men.⁶¹Although the issue of children selling sex to foreign men has received a disproportionate amount of attention (as in the stories of Armine Sae Li and Nit, quoted earlier), the number of children selling sex to foreigners is relatively small. Foreigners rarely frequent the brothels where the very young sell themselves cheaply or where women are chained to their beds.

Typically, both women and girls working with Western clients enjoy better conditions, more control over which men they sell sex to, more choice to refuse some men, and they earn more money. This is true even for younger children.⁶² However, it is also the case that Westerners sometimes deliberately blur the categories of child and woman, contributing to the eroticization of even the very young. Many of the bars around Patpong in Bangkok or in Pattaya-another well-known sex tourism resort-advertise "schoolgirl" bars and play on fantasies of underage sex. Some bars refer to their dancers as girls and emphasize that they are "very young" or "fresh."

Others advertise that they have virgins for sale; one researcher noted that a bar in Bangkok had a sign outside reading, "5 fresh virgins; 4 down, one to go."⁶³ Even discounting the bravado of such signs and their desire to shock viewers-and even if the women who work there are over eighteen-it is not hard to argue that men watching a sex show performed by women
dressed as schoolgirls are indulging in fantasies of child sex, if not the reality.

Nevertheless, while Westerners are certainly the most visible clients of child prostitutes, they are not necessarily the most numerous.⁶⁴ This certainly does not mean that Thai men are more depraved than Westerners; it simply means that it is often much cheaper to have sex with a child than with an adult woman. What is a fetishized "luxury" for a foreigner is actually a second-rate substitute for a poor, local client seeking a woman. As Judith Ennew has argued:

Children are not necessarily at the high price range of prostitution as something exotic and hard to find. Often they are the cheapest. .
. . [T]hey are sought out by the most poor and marginalized as something they can have power over. They do not know the price of their own sexuality and will sell themselves for a cigarette. ... The attraction of children [for the very poor] may be simply that they are social failures and that the child's social status and small size provides a means of exercising power which is otherwise not available to them.⁶⁵

The Burmese girls in the brothels of Ranong were not selling sex to foreigners or even to Thai men but to poor, Burmese migrants, many of whom could not afford women and had to make do with a child.

As discussed in this section, there are a variety of forms of child prostitution in Thailand, and children may be brought into the sex industry in a number of ways. Although child prostitution involving foreigners has received the most attention from the international media and from NGOs, this form of prostitution represents only one facet of the problem. From the brief descriptions above, it is also clear that different manifestations of the problem require different responses. For example, while prosecuting traffickers and reuniting children with their families would help in the case of children brought in from neighboring countries, it would not help those children working as freelance prostitutes. Similarly, removing children from debt bondage in brothels and returning them home, though their families are still heavily indebted to agents and middlemen, is unlikely to protect them from being debt bonded again. The next section will look in detail at one particular community in Thailand where children carried out freelance sex work. That section will show that it is important to listen to prostituted children's own views and opinions on what they did (and why they did it) when formulating policy responses.

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

58 See Muecke, supra note 39. ' Id. at 897.

60 Id.

61 See generally FORDHAM, supra note 54.

62 Black, supra note 33, at 13.

63 Michelle Gilkes, Prostitution in Thailand, 30 (Unpublished B.A. Thesis, Long Island University) (On file with author).

64 Black, supra note 33, at 13.

65 JUDITH ENNEW, THE SEXUAL EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN 83 (1986).

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IV. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF CHILD PROSTITUTION IN BAAN NUA

The complex nature of child prostitution in Thailand became apparent when I undertook ethnographic fieldwork between 1993 and 1994 in a small slum community, which I have called Baan Nua. Situated on the edge of a larger tourist resort in Thailand, Baan Nua was a poor community that survived through the prostitution of its children. The children's clients were exclusively Western, and the children's parents were not only well aware of their conduct, but even encouraged it. Approximately 150 people lived in Baan Nua, including sixty-five children, around thirty-five of whom worked as prostitutes. My research focused on boys and girls between the ages of six and fourteen. I spent fifteen months doing this research, interviewing the children, gathering life histories, and acting as a participant observer in their lives.⁶⁶

Given the community's extreme poverty and lack of resources, a culture of need led these children into prostitution. The people of Baan Nua had migrated to this resort approximately fifteen years earlier to look for work in the informal economy and had put up makeshift houses of scrap wood and corrugated iron. It was a poor community without running water and only intermittent electricity, which the inhabitants patched into illegally from the supply of a local supermarket. The number of households fluctuated throughout the year as partners changed, children moved out, or the makeshift houses collapsed.

One of the most striking facts about the children in Baan Nua was that they lived with their parents. In contrast to the image presented in the media, the children had not been trafficked, debt bonded, or tricked. The children were therefore technically "free" and able to exercise a certain amount of control over their clients. There was no formal organization for prostitution in Baan Nua. Children entered the trade through the encouragement of friends or older siblings who introduced them to clients,
showed them what acts they had to perform, and looked after them afterwards. The clients of these children were from several European countries with three men in particular (from Spain, the United Kingdom, and Italy) having the most contact with the children. Generally, the children stayed in the village and lived with their families, but sometimes they stayed overnight with clients. In a few cases, the older children (those over fourteen) stayed for a period of a month or two with visiting men but
frequently returned to the village during the day if they were not needed by their clients.

A. Viewing Paid Sex and its Income as a Familial Obligation Within Baan Nua, as in much of rural Thailand, children were seen as a parental investment with an anticipated return, and they were expected to work for the family as soon as they were able. This emphasis on filial duty has been a constant theme in ethnographic and other studies of prostitution in Thailand. As mentioned previously, Muecke argues that while girls in the past would have earned money through market trading, contemporary young women are likely to earn money through prostitution.⁶⁷ Economist Pasuk Phongpaichit made a similar point in an early study of young prostitutes in Thailand. She argued that daughters who left their rural homes to work as prostitutes had not run away, had not been coerced into prostitution, and had not discarded the principles of support and repayment. These women and girls were fulfilling their obligations as best they could in a changed environment by earning money elsewhere and sending home the remittances.⁶⁸

Concepts of gratitude and obedience towards parents remained important cultural reference points. Whenever I asked the children in Baan Nua about prostitution, they almost always referred to these concepts. I was constantly told that prostitution was a means to an end, a way of fulfilling the filial obligations that the children felt were demanded of them by their families.
Despite the stigma against prostitution, a powerful mitigating circumstance for many of them was the financial support they provided for their parents, particularly their mothers.⁶⁹

This is not to argue that child prostitution is an intrinsic part of Thai culture or that it is not abusive, but these responses do suggest that the children's view of prostitution should be understood through the cultural reference points of duty and obligation. From the observations I made of these children, it was clear that they had profoundly different understandings of sex than Western observers. For these children, neither prostitution nor sexuality were the focus of their identity, which was based
instead on belonging to a society and fulfilling obligations to their family and the community. The children felt that by earning money for their parents and keeping the family together, they were acting in socially sanctioned roles as dutiful daughters and sons. Prostituting themselves with the "right" intentions meant that there was little opprobrium on what they did. While outsiders might label prostitution with foreign clients as abusive, exploitative, and a form of trafficking, in the children's view, selling sex
was about social relationships and fulfilling their filial obligations to their families.⁷⁰

However misguided the children might have been, and however little they understood the wider political, social, and economic contrast of their situation, they remained adamant throughout the interviews I conducted with them that they were agents who could exercise some sort of choice. The children had strategies for rationalizing prostitution and for coming to terms with it. They consistently refused to admit to prostitution, rejecting the term when I used it, calling it an ugly thing that had no meaning in their lives. In their terms, it was only children in brothels who could be called prostitutes. The children also continually emphasized that they did not "sell sex," but rather they went "out for fun with foreigners" or had "guests."

Furthermore, these children had an ethical system whereby the public selling of their bodies did not affect their private sense of humanity and identity. When I asked one thirteen-year-old about selling her body, she replied, "it's only my body." She could make a clear conceptual difference between her body and what she perceived to be her innermost "self' and her personal sense of identity and morality. When I asked her about the difference between adultery and prostitution, she told me that adultery was very wrong. In her eyes, adultery was a betrayal of a private relationship, whereas prostitution was simply done for money. Betraying family members, failing to provide for parents, or cheating on spouses or boyfriends were roundly condemned, but exchanging sex for moneyespecially when that money was used for moral ends-was not blameworthy nor did it violate any ethical codes. Furthermore, ideas about sexual abuse played limited parts in these children's understandings of what they did.

My study also showed very different understandings about both the shortand long-term effects of sex on these children. In Western psychological terms, such acts would be seen as causing life-long damage, but sex was understood very differently in this context. When a mother was asked about whether or not she was worried that her eight-year-old son was a prostitute,
she replied, "It's just for one hour. What harm can happen to him in one hour?" The reality that a child's body is too small for penetration by an adult was ignored, despite evidence of harm done by these men seen in the bleeding and tearing that occurred during these encounters.⁷¹ Mothers would condemn such acts and do whatever they could to help their children overcome the pain, but these mothers still claimed not to see it as fundamentally harmful to their children in the long-term or damaging to their mental health. Such occurrences were viewed entirely in physicalrather than psychological-terms, and there was no belief that long-term damage could be inflicted on a child in "just one hour."

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

66 For a full discussion of methods and ethical dilemmas, see Heather Montgomery, Working with Child Prostitutes in Thailand: Problems of Practice and Interpretation 14 in CHILDHOOD 415 (2007). I carried out this research as part of a doctorate in social anthropology between 1994 and 1995. Although many anthropologists use the ethnographic present when discussing their research, I have used the past tense to describe the situation that I worked in. Shortly after I finished the research, the community disbanded, and the inhabitants of Baan Nua migrated to other parts of Thailand. For this reason, the use of the past tense seems most apt.

67 Muecke, supra note 39, at 897.

68 See generally PASUK PHONGPAICHIT, FROM PEASANT GIRLS TO BANGKOK MASSEUSES (1982).

69 Such a view is not uncommon, and other studies with both adults and children have shown that how a person spends their earnings can help mitigate the stigma of sex work. For a vivid example of this see PATTY KELLY, LYDIA'S OPEN DOOR: INSIDE MEXICO'S MOST MODERN BROTHEL (2008).

70 MONTGOMERY, supra note 25, at 82-84.

71 Brian M Willis & Barry S Levy, Child Prostitution: Global Health Burden, Research Needs, and Interventions, 359 THE LANCET 1417 (2002), available at http://www.popcenter.org/problems/trafficked women/PDFs/Willis&Levy_2002.pdf.

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IV. INTERNATIONAL REGULATIONS: A DISCUSSION

A. Criminal Justice System Regulations

Many of the interventions to end child prostitution have framed the problem in terms of its criminality by relying on solutions that originate in the criminal justice system. Also, because foreign involvement in the sex industry has been particularly emphasized, the majority of efforts to end child prostitution have focused on the demand side of the problem. These efforts have concentrated on both preventing foreigners from coming to Thailand to abuse children and prosecuting those that do. The apparent invulnerability of such men, the appalling nature of the crimes being committed, and the public outcry has led several countries to pass extraterritorial legislation enabling them to prosecute men in their home countries for offenses committed against children on foreign soil.⁷⁴ In 1994, Australia became the first country to introduce extraterritorial legislation, passing the Crimes (Child Sex Tourism) Amendment Act, which brought in penalties of up to seventeen years imprisonment for those convicted of sexual crimes against children overseas.⁷⁵ Norway, Germany, France, Belgium, New Zealand, and Sweden have passed similar laws⁷⁶ and obtained several successful prosecutions.⁷⁷

International law is also essential for fighting prostitution, especially when it happens across borders such as Thailand's. The push for changes in international legislation has happened alongside an increased willingness for tourist-receiving countries to prosecute foreign nationals under their own domestic child protection laws. There is evidence of more men being arrested and convicted through the criminal justice systems of the countries in which the crime occurred-not only in Thailand, but also in Kenya, Albania, and India.⁷⁸ In response to international pressure and the shame of developing a reputation as a pedophiles' playground, Thailand introduced new laws in 1996 designed to protect children. Among other benefits, these laws allowed for the prosecution of parents, procurers, and customers of child prostitutes so that anyone who had sex with a child under fifteen could be sent to jail for between two and six years, and the defendant could be imprisoned for up to three years if the child was between fifteen and eighteen years old. The laws apply to both foreign and local men.

It is hard to know what effect these legal changes have had on the behavior of men who are tempted to travel overseas to have sex with children or those who decide to buy sex from a child once there. Although prosecutions in both tourist-receiving and tourist-sending countries have increased, the numbers of men who continue to escape justice is not known. Nor is it clear if these men have stopped going to Thailand and now instead go to Vietnam and Cambodia where enforcement is less strict, or if they have stopped abusing children abroad all together.⁷⁹

There is certainly no room for complacency, and a trawl through the Pattaya Daily News (Pattaya is still one of the main destinations for sex tourism in Thailand) shows that the problem continues to be rife. In May 2008, a headline read, "British Man Arrested In Pattaya For Luring Underage Boy For Sexual Purposes," while in December of that year, the paper sounded positively weary: "Yet Another Foreign Gay Arrested In Pattaya With Underage Boys." The following May, it announced, "2
Swedish, 1 British Pedophiles Arrested in Pattaya."⁸⁰ Despite the risks and dangers, there obviously still remains a belief that it is possible to get away with the sexual abuse of children overseas in a way that it is impossible elsewhere else. Clearly, in some parts of Thailand, the message has still not been received, and it is safe to assume that while a handful of men have been arrested, there are plenty of others who have not and who continue to buy sex from children.⁸¹ Such cases show the gaps in the system which some men are still using to exploit children.

B. Other Initiatives to Help Child Prostitutes

More attention must be given to issues of police willingness and ability to track and arrest the clients of child prostitutes. The endemic poverty of several South East Asian countries makes some families willing to allow their sons and daughters to work as prostitutes.⁸² Compared to the low wages and conditions of many local brothels, selling sex to foreigners often brings in relatively high income and is not always seen as the worst form of exploitation.⁸³ While it may sound deeply crass to make this point, the children that I knew in Baan Nua were very vocal on this subject. Prostitution was not something they liked doing, but it gave them the chance to eat well, go to places they could not otherwise afford (such as amusement arcades or theme parks), and paradoxically, enjoy some aspects of a childhood otherwise denied to them. Compared with working in a
sweatshop, scavenging for rubbish, begging, or even being bossed around for low wages in a "respectable" job like hairdressing, this lifestyle was a better option in their minds.

Other initiatives aimed at helping children and their parents have had some success at providing financial alternatives to prostitution.⁸⁴ The government, with moral and financial support from members of the Thai royal family, set up a system of scholarships to provide money to families who keep their daughters in school until they are sixteen. This is expensive,
however, and has largely relied on private charities so far to supply the funds.⁸⁵ However, by emphasizing prevention and recognizing that economic hardship and family obligations are two of the many factors which contribute to child prostitution, schemes such as these make welcome steps away from a one-size-fits-all intervention that is based on the belief that all child prostitutes are victims of trafficking.

C. Deciding Where to Target Assistance

As more research is being done on child prostitutes in Thailand, intriguing patterns suggest the need for targeting assistance to particular girls who may be most vulnerable. Rende Taylor, who carried out ethnographic work with child prostitutes (as discussed previously) has found that the pattern of entry into prostitution is not uniform across families-first-born girls are less likely to enter sex work, while their younger sisters, especially last-born girls, are at much greater risk.⁸⁶ Because the oldest daughter in Thai families has long taken on heavy responsibilities around the house as the principle caregiver for younger siblings, her work is too valuable at home for her parents to allow her to sell sex. Rende Taylor makes the point that neither poverty nor lack of education per se affects the likelihood of girls becoming prostitutes, but family structures and the order in which girls are born are the most important conditions. These sorts of small-scale studies show where help is needed and where it would be best targeted.

In the case of Baan Nua, the children clearly needed particular forms of help. In the short term, they needed a source of income which would provide enough money for them to support their families but did not involve prostitution. However, such jobs were very hard to come by-the children were largely uneducated, and with such little schooling, they could not aspire to work in a shop or office. Options for girls included finding someone who would teach them hairdressing or dressmaking and working as that person's apprentice for several years. For boys, the choices included working on building sites or setting up small businesses. All these options were paid poorly, however, and required regular attendance of which many children had no experience. In order to transition successfully out of prostitution, these children needed intensive, long-term psychological and
educational help. Furthermore, this help needed to be aimed at their parents as well. Instead of criminalizing parents, and even imprisoning them, the welfare authorities needed to work with them, teaching them that prostitution was a dangerous option for their children, and showing them that other forms of work could be as lucrative. In the longer term, they also needed to understand that education could produce quantifiable benefits and secure their futures and that financial help was available for children who wished to stay in school.

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

74 MICHAEL HIRST, JURISDICTION AND THE AMBIT OF THE CRIMINAL LAW 268 (2003).

75 See C. Michael Hall, The Legal and Political Dimensions of Sex Tourism: The Case of Australia's Child Sex Tourism Legislation, in SEX TOURISM AND PROSTITUTION:
ASPECTS OF LEISURE, RECREATION, AND WORK, 87-96 (Martin Oppermann ed., 1998); NATIONAL CENTER FOR MISSING AND EXPLOITED CHILDREN, PROSTITUTION OF CHILDREN AND CHILD-SEX TOURISM: AN ANALYSIS OF DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL RESPONSES, (1999); see generally JEREMY SEABROOK, NO HIDING PLACE: CHILD SEX TOURISM AND THE ROLE OF EXTRA-TERRITORIAL LEGISLATION (2000).

76 For a summary of the laws in each country see WORLD TOURISM ORGANISATION, PROTECTION OF CHILDREN IN TOURISM-LEGISLATION, http://www.unwto.org/protect children/campaign/en/legislation.php?op= &subop=7 (last visited Aug. 9, 2010).

77 Since 1997, there have been five convictions in the UK, at least sixty-five in the US, and twenty-eight in Australia. CHRISTINE BEDDOE, RETURN TO SENDER: BRITISH CHILD SEX OFFENDERS ABROAD-WHY MORE MUST BE DONE, 18 (2008), available at http://lastradainternational.org/1sidocs/Retumto Sender.pdf.

78 MONTGOMERY, supra note 25. Montgomery, supra note 31.

80 id

81 Id.

82 See generally FORDHAM, supra note 54.

83 MONTGOMERY, supra note 25; FORDHAM, supra note 54.

84 It is also worth noting a decline in the population of girls aged between ten and sixteen which has also led to a decline in the overall numbers of children entering prostitution from the Chiang Rai region. Simon Baker, The Changing Situation of Child Prostitution in Northern Thailand: A Study of Chiang Rai (Dec. 10, 2000), available at http://www.childtrafficking.com/Docs/baker_2000_changingsituation-child-prostitution-thailand 5.pdf.

85 Baker, supra note 84, points out, however, that there have been criticisms from community groups that not enough money is given to parents so that it is still more profitable for their daughters to enter prostitution. It is also unclear as to how successful these schemes are long term, whether they keep girls out of the sex trade permanently or simply for a few more years.

86 See generally Taylor, supra note 39.

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Baan Nua children also needed help that was culturally sensitive and that celebrated their resilience and their loyalty to their families. One of the strongest impressions of these children that I took away from my field research was their remarkable strength. Acknowledging this did not lead me to condone prostitution in any way or excuse their clients' manipulation and
abuse; instead, it warned me against destroying these children's own pride and strategic involvement in their families' survival by recasting them as helpless and pathetic.

VI. CONCLUSION

Unfortunately, all the new laws and initiatives came too late for the children of Baan Nua. A week before I left the field, the first confirmed AIDS-related death shocked an already vulnerable community and it quickly disbanded. Some families traveled to Bangkok while others returned to rural communities, continuing to sell sex to foreigners while they still could. Neither foreign laws nor initiatives of extraterritoriality, nor local laws on child protection would have made much impact on their lives. The children and their families had no interest in seeing their clients prosecuted or even stopped from entering Baan Nua. In the absence of any social support or welfare assistance, these men were the only form of protection the community had-no matter how damaging that might seem to outsiders. The people of Baan Nua would never testify against these "friends."

Secondly, changes in Thai law that came into effect in 1996 meant that parents could be prosecuted if they allowed or encouraged their children to work as prostitutes.⁸⁷ Given the emphasis that the children placed on family relationships and filial obligations, such laws would have made it extremely difficult for the children to have asked for help, even if they recognized that they needed it. Keeping the family together was their primary justification for what they did; the prosecution and imprisonment of their parents was their worst fear. As suggested previously, initiatives to end child prostitution need to work with parents and ensure, as far as possible, that families stay together. Few children would go to the police or welfare
authorities if they believed that their parents could be prosecuted. Furthermore, such a law gave the state immunity by privatizing the issue and laying the blame at the feet of the family, whereas wider social, cultural, and economic factors were also crucially important.

What all child prostitutes need are sympathetic interventions which take account of their individual circumstances, their own values and, if appropriate, enable them to stay with their parents. What are not helpful are punitive sanctions against the adults they love most. It needs to be acknowledged that not all child prostitutes in Thailand (or, indeed, elsewhere) have been trafficked or debt-bonded, and many will one day leave prostitution. Policies need to be formulated to help these children now
as they make the transitions out of prostitution.

While a good body of ethnographic evidence about the lives of young prostitutes in Thailand has now been built up, the findings of such studies have not always filtered down to NGOs and the wider public. Trafficking and prostitution continue to be thought of as interchangeable, which can lead to unhelpful interventions which are, at best, futile; and, at worst, damaging to the very children they are designed to help. There is still not enough of an understanding of the different types of prostitution, its links (or lack thereof) to trafficking, the clients of these children, the different interventions needed, or the scale of the problem. Future research needs to take the children's own views as a starting point and promote appropriate interventions on this basis. Children need to be partners in this process, consulted and involved at every stage. Their strength and resilience needs to be acknowledged, and processes must be put in place so that children can access help without risk to their parents.

Trafficking and prostitution will always remain emotive issues, especially when they concern children. As more cases are revealed, there will always be outrage and calls for more to be done to combat the problem. Legal solutions are a useful starting point, but they can also be blunt instruments in need of constant and sympathetic enforcement. Certainly, national and
international NGOs-backed by international law-have the very best of intentions, but without a full understanding of the problems on the ground, their proposed solutions can exacerbate the problem and alienate the very children they most want to help.

Index Page

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

87 Thailand's Prevention and Suppression of Prostitution Act, Section X, B.E. 2539 (1996).

December 12th, 2013

02:31 PM ET

Mira’s Cambodia Journal – Day One: Arrival in Cambodia

Editor’s note: Mira Sorvino, a human rights activist and Academy Award winning actress, went to Cambodia with the CNN Freedom Project to expose child sexual exploitation. This is an edited journal from her week in the country.

By Mira Sorvino, Special to CNN
Phnom Penh, Cambodia (CNN) – We have just landed in Phnom Penh, to begin one of the most important journeys I have ever embarked upon.
I have been an activist on the issue of human trafficking since 2004, the year I was expecting my first of four children. I was spokeswoman for Amnesty International’s Stop Violence Against Women campaign, which brought the issue of modern-day slavery to light for me. Before this, I was blissfully unaware that slavery was alive and well – it had just gone underground. Meeting survivors of human trafficking changed my life, and deepened my commitment to fighting this terrible scourge that affects most every country around the world.
Since 2009 I have been a United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Goodwill Ambassador Against Human Trafficking, one of the greatest honors and challenges of my life. I have interviewed scores of survivors in many countries, as well as government officials, NGO workers, law enforcement and even a man responsible for sex trafficking about 4,000 girls from Latin America to European club-brothels.
I've also partnered with the CNN Freedom Project several times; this time I'm taking off my UN hat and joining forces with CNN to present this documentary. We are here to see why Cambodia continues be a hub of child sex trafficking and virgin sales, and what we can do to help expose the problem and suggest solutions.
I’ve never been to Cambodia, though I made a fictional movie, “Trade of Innocents,” about child sex trafficking in Cambodia (shot in nearby Thailand). I am excited to discover this new place, but feel trepidation over delving into our heartbreaking topic.
After driving to our Phnom Penh hotel amidst a swarm of mopeds - or “motos” as they’re called here, some with families of five crowded on top - we decided to beat the jet lag by doing a little tourism.
As we boarded a boat for a river tour, we immediately noticed the long, narrow, covered boat homes of ethnic Vietnamese. They live in Cambodia without official status, and spend most of their lives on their boats –families living and working in these small vessels, children swimming and bathing in dirty-looking water. We pass floating houses, with netted fish holding areas underneath.
Corruption is endemic at every level of society here, an expert tells me – adding that every brothel here operates with the help of the police or military.
I have a deep sense of foreboding of the world we are about to enter, the suffering of children being used by men in unspeakably cruel manners. We may meet a few survivors, but knowledge that hundreds or thousands of others still endure the misery of repeated rape in dank, fetid rooms in neighborhoods nearby - and we would not be able to save them.
I have met child survivors before, and been haunted by them, unable to sleep as their faces and deep stares burned themselves into my memory.
I am afraid. But those memories are what drive me to fight for an end to this sexual slavery. I feel ready to face tomorrow's challenges, whatever they may be.

Post by:Mira Sorvino, Special to CNN

Topics: Every Day in Cambodia • Freedom Project Undercover • Voices

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In a Shady Bangkok Brothel, A Raid Fails to Free Child Prostitutes

Brothel architecture is telling. In Bangkok, houses of prostitution tend to be big, boxy buildings with practically no windows and neon-lit signs advertising massage. Sometimes they are converted hotels whose windows have been boarded up. The sex trade does well without sunlight.

A CAUSE FOR CONCERN: THE CONDEMNABLE CRISIS OF CHILD PROSTITUTION IN THAILAND

Top Five Countries with Highest Rates of Child Prostitution

1. Introduction