Thailand Law Journal 2012 Fall Issue 1 Volume 15

Baan Nua children also needed help that was culturally sensitive and that celebrated their resilience and their loyalty to their families. One of the strongest impressions of these children that I took away from my field research was their remarkable strength. Acknowledging this did not lead me to condone prostitution in any way or excuse their clients' manipulation and
abuse; instead, it warned me against destroying these children's own pride and strategic involvement in their families' survival by recasting them as helpless and pathetic.

VI. CONCLUSION

Unfortunately, all the new laws and initiatives came too late for the children of Baan Nua. A week before I left the field, the first confirmed AIDS-related death shocked an already vulnerable community and it quickly disbanded. Some families traveled to Bangkok while others returned to rural communities, continuing to sell sex to foreigners while they still could. Neither foreign laws nor initiatives of extraterritoriality, nor local laws on child protection would have made much impact on their lives. The children and their families had no interest in seeing their clients prosecuted or even stopped from entering Baan Nua. In the absence of any social support or welfare assistance, these men were the only form of protection the community had-no matter how damaging that might seem to outsiders. The people of Baan Nua would never testify against these "friends."

Secondly, changes in Thai law that came into effect in 1996 meant that parents could be prosecuted if they allowed or encouraged their children to work as prostitutes.⁸⁷ Given the emphasis that the children placed on family relationships and filial obligations, such laws would have made it extremely difficult for the children to have asked for help, even if they recognized that they needed it. Keeping the family together was their primary justification for what they did; the prosecution and imprisonment of their parents was their worst fear. As suggested previously, initiatives to end child prostitution need to work with parents and ensure, as far as possible, that families stay together. Few children would go to the police or welfare
authorities if they believed that their parents could be prosecuted. Furthermore, such a law gave the state immunity by privatizing the issue and laying the blame at the feet of the family, whereas wider social, cultural, and economic factors were also crucially important.

What all child prostitutes need are sympathetic interventions which take account of their individual circumstances, their own values and, if appropriate, enable them to stay with their parents. What are not helpful are punitive sanctions against the adults they love most. It needs to be acknowledged that not all child prostitutes in Thailand (or, indeed, elsewhere) have been trafficked or debt-bonded, and many will one day leave prostitution. Policies need to be formulated to help these children now
as they make the transitions out of prostitution.

While a good body of ethnographic evidence about the lives of young prostitutes in Thailand has now been built up, the findings of such studies have not always filtered down to NGOs and the wider public. Trafficking and prostitution continue to be thought of as interchangeable, which can lead to unhelpful interventions which are, at best, futile; and, at worst, damaging to the very children they are designed to help. There is still not enough of an understanding of the different types of prostitution, its links (or lack thereof) to trafficking, the clients of these children, the different interventions needed, or the scale of the problem. Future research needs to take the children's own views as a starting point and promote appropriate interventions on this basis. Children need to be partners in this process, consulted and involved at every stage. Their strength and resilience needs to be acknowledged, and processes must be put in place so that children can access help without risk to their parents.

Trafficking and prostitution will always remain emotive issues, especially when they concern children. As more cases are revealed, there will always be outrage and calls for more to be done to combat the problem. Legal solutions are a useful starting point, but they can also be blunt instruments in need of constant and sympathetic enforcement. Certainly, national and
international NGOs-backed by international law-have the very best of intentions, but without a full understanding of the problems on the ground, their proposed solutions can exacerbate the problem and alienate the very children they most want to help.

87 Thailand's Prevention and Suppression of Prostitution Act, Section X, B.E. 2539 (1996).