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With a rich resource of defenseless women, children and young boys – largely from Burma, China and Laos, but also from within Thailand itself – human traffickers have operated for decades to provide prostitutes, sex slaves and indentured labor to their fellows in Thailand, and beyond the country’s borders to the Middle East, Japan, and sometimes to the Americas.
Anyone who has sauntered down Bangkok’s Ploenjit Road can attest to the ease of finding a ready and willing sexual partner even without asking. Beautiful Russian women, light-skinned and dark-haired, may cast a fleeting glance in your direction, and if you are like-minded, a bargain can be struck.
There is no such contract between the involuntary human slaves that are imported and trans-shipped from Burma, China, Laos and Thailand. These people are forced to enter the trade, often because of poor economic conditions coupled with a lack of local human rights protections.
Another typical scenario is the outright duping of women into thinking they are being recruited for a legitimate job in a restaurant or small company elsewhere in Thailand or abroad. Once the agent who has lied to them gets them to the initial destination, they are forced into a network of sex slavery and servitude.
Yet, once the initial shock and repeated exposure to the sex industry have worn off, many find that they prefer the new life over working in their local villages as farmers. Being comfortable and having money means a great deal to anyone, not the least to young people who remember what it was like back home and do not want to go back.
Dealing with human traffickers takes funding, and this need was taken into account by Thailand’s latest law. The law creates an anti-human trafficking fund, initially financed through a government donation and subsequently replenished with an annual government budget, contributions and donations, sales of fund properties and other sources. Yet tracking of fund expenditures may not be so simple. For example, the uses of the fund include “providing safety protection of trafficked persons.” Does this mean allowances for owners of safe houses?
The financial cost of prostitution and related human trafficking in Thailand poses a conundrum of sorts to those seeking to totally eliminate the practice, because of beneficial financial aspects. For example, according to www.Globalexchange.com some US$300 million annually is sent up-country to rural families by relatives working in the sex industry in Thailand.
Family members often turn a blind eye because financially they have no choice – their own government has done little to benefit them. They pretend their daughters are working as office staff when at heart they may know otherwise. The girls, too, know how important money is and don’t want to give it up.
According to the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women there are challenging issues now being debated between those who favor prostitution as an industry and those who are against it. Strangely, human rights issues are being used on both sides of the argument, with many maintaining that the right to work and earn an independent livelihood includes being able to work as a prostitute. Countering this is the argument that prostitution should not exist, period.
With reportedly at least 200,000 “prostituted persons” in Thailand, of whom about 75,000 are said to be children, the sheer scope of the supply and demand aspects of human trafficking is both plain and perplexing. On the one hand, there is a steady demand for prostitutes. Taken together with what is globally now a clear degradation of family and ethical/moral standards, this demand is changing its very character by defining itself as the “sex industry,” asking us to accept a new paradigm that this is not a bad phrase and that it can indeed contribute to the economy and social harmony.
For many of those who are part of the supply, however, being a member of the industry is denigrating and dehumanizing. Sent as maids to Saudi Arabia, for example, many young women discover that they suddenly become animals to do the bidding of their new masters, and refusing to do so can cost them their lives.
Many young people, especially women but also boys who are enticed into prostitution, lose their innocence only to become callous and hardened. That innocence should so easily be stolen, bought and paid for, is a testament to social engineering at its worst, where human trafficking for profit, then pleasure, then greed is an all too familiar story.
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(Frank G. Anderson is the Thailand representative of American Citizens Abroad. He was a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer to Thailand from 1965-67, working in community development. A freelance writer and founder of northeast Thailand's first local English language newspaper, the Korat Post -- www.thekoratpost.com -- he has spent over eight years in Thailand "embedded" with the local media. He has an MBA in information management and an associate degree in construction technology. ©Copyright Frank G. Anderson.)
