Thailand Law Journal 2012 Fall Issue 1 Volume 15

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

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.