Thailand Law Journal 2012 Fall Issue 1 Volume 15

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.⁶¹ Although 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.

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).