Thailand Law Journal 2012 Fall Issue 1 Volume 15

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

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).