Thailand Law Journal 2009 Spring Issue 1 Volume 12

Once in Thailand, some find that sex work is one of the few options available to a woman with little or no status, language, education, or other qualifications for non-sex work.  “A thriving sex industry both in Burma and across the border in Thailand has presented many women with their only option for employment.”  [FN86] For the most part, Thailand considers them illegal economic migrants. Some unskilled jobs such as domestic work, construction, and farm labor are available, but are often accompanied by poor pay and oppressive conditions, including sexual abuse by employers. On the other hand, “sex-work can, in the right conditions, earn women six times this standard wage, hence the incentive for this type of work.”  [FN87]

Although trafficking in the traditional sense exists, many women from Burma find themselves in prostitution in Thailand through economic force.  “The necessity of escaping the terrible conditions at home in Burma combined with the attractive stories told about Thailand, make [sex work] an obvious choice.” [FN88] However, it is a “choice” no one should have to make. Even the Thai pro-sex worker organization EMPOWER admits that women in prostitution in Thailand are “economically forced to take up the occupation, pointing out that, if they were not, then they would not want to be prostitutes.”[FN89]

Sadly, prostitution may be considered the best “choice” even by those who have previously been trafficked for sexual exploitation under the traditional understanding of trafficking that involves non-economic forces such as being sold or tricked. In our experience with women who consider themselves to be in “voluntary” prostitution, some of them were initially trafficked, including as children. Once freed, they find few options besides work in sex establishments such as massage parlors or karaokes, either due to lack of work in Burma or lack of status in Thailand. As the Child Protection and Rights Center (CPRC), an NGO working with trafficked ethnic minorities at the Thai-Burmese border notes:

In the Lahu, Shan and Akha villages where the trafficked girls come from, large families live in only one room and have a hard time finding enough food to eat Because of this, many families sell their daughters to trafficking agents we are finding is[sic] that many girls do not want to end their lives as prostitutes. [But] once they eventually start making money, they don't want to give up wearing the nice clothes, the mobile phone and life in the city. [FN90] Wassana Kaonoparat, lawyer and head of Rescue and Assistance Team of Centre for the Protection of Children's Rights, Bangkok, spoke truly when she stated that “[r]escue is only the beginning. There is much to be done.”  [FN91]

A number of important clarifications must be made in order to properly understand the context underlying the CPRC quote.  First, there is often conceptual and practical confusion between the understanding of the dynamics of, and the use of, the terms “trafficking” and “smuggling.” Second, children, especially girls, have the responsibility to help provide for the economic welfare of their immediate and extended families. An understanding of both of these factors will help explain what it really means when a parent “sells” her daughter, often unknowingly, into prostitution.

A distinction must be made between smuggling and trafficking.  As will be discussed in the next section, Thailand has restrictive migration policies towards people from Burma.  Additionally, in a misguided effort to combat trafficking and in direct violation of human rights, Burma has restricted the ability of women and girls under the age of twenty-five to travel alone.[FN92] Because of these restrictions, migration often takes place through agents who smuggle people across the border. Obviously, this dependence on smugglers also increases their risk of trafficking and other forms of exploitation.

Over the last decades, migration has been increasingly feminized and women and girls now constitute roughly one half of all migrants.  At the same time, however, women and girls still primarily find economic opportunities in unregulated sectors such as domestic work, care for the elderly or the sex industry and have less access to information on organized migration opportunities.  As a result, they often have to rely on irregular migration opportunities, are deprived of effective labour protection and are more vulnerable to being trafficked or otherwise coerced into forced labour situations, including forced prostitution. [FN93] Despite the use of the term “trafficking agents” in the quote from the CPRC, it is more likely that he is referring to smuggling agents. In a typical case, an agent, who is known in the community, offers to facilitate travel across the border and/or though immigration checkpoints in Thailand. The agent may receive part of the future salary of the migrant as payment. While this may rightly be understood as trafficking when done for exploitative purposes by means of trick or deception, the parent or family member may not have agreed to or be aware of trafficking but rather thinks smuggling is taking place. Additionally, trafficking can also occur once the consensual smuggling has been completed, such as when trafficking agents prey upon vulnerable migrants who find themselves on the Thai side of the border without language, papers, or work in Thailand.

It is equally important to understand that it is not “the lure of gain or ‘bright lights' that drives young women away from home. The story is more complicated and goes deeper than that.” [FN94] Instead, “[a] desire for self-improvement, especially of poor rural women, which is fed both by the growing poverty of their home-place and the lure of consumerism, makes them vulnerable to the promises of agents and recruiters; particularly when these are people they know, from their own province or neighborhood.”  [FN95]

In both Thailand and Burma, girls shoulder economic responsibility for their families.  However, they are also the least educated and have the least opportunities.  The obligation [FN96] to support the family is strongly ingrained in local cultures and differs from the traditional Western concept of the parent having an obligation to support the children. As Jeremy Seabrook states in his research on the sex industry in Thailand,

[i]t is very difficult for people from the West to understand emotionally (however clear their intellectual recognition may be) that the family is the sole source of the social security of individuals in Thailand.  This means that “relationships”, in the Western one-to-one sense, must be subordinated to the need to sustain parents, grandparents, children and siblings. [FN97] Sometimes the survival of a whole network of people depends upon their earnings. [FN98] This is even more prevalent in Burma where society safety nets and the economy have been eroded by a government that invests so little in the welfare of its people. In a very real sense “[t]heir bodies are the only social security their families have.”  [FN99]

Although the need to support the family exists independently of the sex trade, the sex trade provides one of the few opportunities for uneducated women who are placed in the double bind of being economically responsible while at the same time being less socially valued, and therefore, less vocationally and educationally equipped.  Organizations working in Thailand describe these cultural dynamics:

[FN86]. Shadow Report, supra note 48, at 30.

[FN87]. Juree, supra note 78.

[FN88]. Images Asia, supra note 52, at 27.

[FN89]. Jeffrey, supra note 2, at 121 (citing interview with EMPOWER staff, in Bangkok (Nov. 21, 1996) (internal quotations omitted)).

[FN90]. Colin Baynes, Trafficking on the Thai-Burma Border: Informal Burmese Networks Supplied Teenage Girls to Customers of Thailand's Commercial Sex Industry, Irrawaddy, Nov. 2004, http://www.irrawaddy.org/aviewer.asp? a=4212&z=104 (quoting Somporn Kempetch, coordinator of Child Protection and Rights Center) (internal quotations omitted).

[FN91]. Seabrook, supra note 3, at 162.

[FN92]. Human Trafficking.org, Burma, http:// www.humantrafficking.org/countries/burma (last visited Apr. 7, 2006).

[FN93]. U.N. Econ. & Soc. Council [ECOSOC], Comm'n on Human Rights, Rights of the Child: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography, P 54, U.N. Doc. E/CN.4/2006/67 (Jan. 12, 2006) (prepared by Juan Miguel Petit).

[FN94]. Seabrook, supra note 3, 132.

[FN95]. Id. at 136.

[FN96]. This sense of obligation has been distorted in terms of trafficking involving debt bondage, whereby “for many young women, the idea of ‘debt’ merged with the less palpable form of obligation which Thai children owe to their parents, and many of them simply decided to work as hard as possible to pay off their measureless duty.” Seabrook, supra note 3 at 138.

[FN97]. This includes many “adult brothers who do nothing and expect to be kept by them” according to a representative of EMPOWER. Id. at 87.

[FN98]. Id. at 4.

[FN99]. Id. at 88 (quoting a representative from EMPOWER).

This article is published with the kind permission of Christa Foster Crawford. The article originally appeared in Cardozo Journal of Law & Gender, Summer 2006 issue.