Thailand Law Journal 2012 Fall Issue 1 Volume 15

B. Viewing Clients as "Friends"

Another strategy deployed by the children to justify what they did was consistently refusing to see their clients as abusers and, instead, choosing to view their clients as friends and even protectors. Although the Western men who visited the children in Baan Nua had superior financial and structural power, the children were able to manipulate these men to some extent and, in certain cases, make them enter into reciprocal arrangements. The mother of one fourteen-year-old girl frequently sent requests to one man for money, and the fact that he always responded enabled her to see him as a friend. He played a similar role in another family's life, whereby their twelve-year-old daughter had sex with him and found him other child sex partners in return
for regular payments made to the mother. These two families were very protective of him, and the children were also very loyal to his cause. During the holiday season, several children asked me how to write "Thank you" and "We love you" in English on Christmas cards that they intended to give this man.

Another client, a British businessman who had lived in Thailand for many years and had paid for sex with a number of children, was protected and defended in a similar way. The children told me that, in the year before I did my fieldwork, a girl from another slum in the city had told her parents that this man had propositioned her and tried to pay her for sex. This child's
parents reported him to the police and gave the police the names of several children in Baan Nua. When the police investigated the situation, however, the people in Baan Nua gave this man a character reference, saying how much he had helped them and how he had given scholarships to some of their children to attend school. (I found no evidence that these children had ever been to school.) The police did not press charges. The man was released and continued to live in the city, paying for sex with the children. By the time I was doing my fieldwork, he had become such a regular visitor that nobody referred to the fact that he bought sex from the children. He was always euphemistically referred to as a "friend" by the adults and as a "boyfriend" by the children themselves.

For the children, the length of time that these men had been coming to them-as well as the help these men had given them-meant that they never viewed time spent with these clients as work. Instead, children would say that they were "visiting friends," or that their "guests were in town." While sex and money were exchanged, this money was claimed as incidental to wider ties of friendship and obligation. One of the ways this was made easier was that nobody set a fixed rate for prostitution. The men paid them after sex, but this was given as a "gift" or a "tip"-never as a direct payment for services rendered.⁷² The sums of money they received were relatively substantial; often enough to re-roof family houses or buy televisions or stereos. The children would claim that this money was given as a sign of friendship rather than for the prostitution services rendered. The fact that they were sometimes given money even when they had not exchanged sex made this claim easier to substantiate.

C Prostitution and Other Work

Children in Baan Nua turned to prostitution only after they had tried a variety of other jobs such as scavenging, working in sweatshops, or begging. Prostitution paid them considerably more than these jobs, and they perceived it as less physically demanding. Begging, for instance, while potentially lucrative in the high tourist season, could bring in nothing during the rainy season when tourists were far fewer. Furthermore, the children did not like to beg because there was a risk of being arrested by the police or having their money stolen by older street children. They also did not like to scavenge at the nearby rubbish dump, both because of the rats and fears that they would hurt themselves on broken glass or metal.

While they never claimed to like prostitution, the children often described it to me as better than other jobs they had tried. Although the children seemed willfully ignorant of the threat of pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases, they argued that prostitution gave them access to benefits such as staying in good hotels or apartments, eating well, and occasionally being
given large payments.

D. Viewing the Fuller Picture ofRisks and Consequences

I am in no way suggesting that these children were not abused simply because they did not feel abused. Whatever the children said, they did not know the wider political and economic forces under which they made their decisions, and I remained deeply unhappy about the children's denial of abuse and their rejection of victimhood. While acknowledging their resilience, I believed (and continue to believe) that when an older, richer man from the West is buying sex with young children, exploitation is
inevitable.

Even though the children claimed that their clients treated them well, this must be set against the risks they faced and certain other aspects of their behavior. A high level of drug and alcohol use, unwanted pregnancies, and sexually transmitted infections existed in Baan Nua among these children. While almost never mentioned, there was also the threat of HIV. Towards the end of my fieldwork, one twenty-year-old-who had worked for several years as a prostitute-died of tuberculosis, which I believe was AIDSrelated, although her family always denied it⁷³

Given these circumstances, issues of consent or agency were largely irrelevant. Whatever the children's own claims, they quite clearly did exchange sex for money, and both their clients and their parents had recruited, harbored, and facilitated child prostitution, making them traffickers under international law. Yet the children themselves were adamant that they had not been trafficked, debt-bonded, or repeatedly raped by foreigners in a brothel. The children were introduced to prostitution by their friends and neighbors, not unknown adults, and the children were loved and supported by their parents within their communities. The children understood prostitution in terms of filial duty-not abuse-and rejected the model of child prostitution projected by the media. For these children, selling sex did not involve being kidnapped or having their virginity bought for high sums.

Regardless, I remain deeply uneasy about their views and would argue that whatever the semantics used to describe it, appalling sexual exploitation was being inflicted on these children. What was clear from the time I spent with these children, however, was that the sort of prostitution which occurred in Baan Nua did not involve trafficking, and any attempts to
intervene in their lives needed to be based on understandings of the children's own realities and motivations. As I will go on to discuss, this realization has not always been apparent in solutions proposed-whether they be policy, legal, or practical solutions.

72 For a discussion of the "incomplete commercialization" of prostitute/client relationships in Thailand, see Eric Cohen, Thai Girls and Farang Men: The Edge of Ambiguity, 9 ANN TOURISM RES 403 (1982). See also generally Black, supra note 33; FORDHAM, supra note 54.

73 Heather Montgomery, Motherhood, Fertility and Ambivalence among Young Prostitutes in Thailand, in MANAGING REPRODUCTIVE LIFE: CROSS CULTURAL THEMES IN SEXUALITY AND FERTILITY, 71-84, (Soraya Tremayne, ed. 2001).