Children as Commercial Sex Workers in Thailand

In 1991 I took a group of seminary students to a remote Hmong village in Northern Thailand to build 50 toilets in 10 days.  And we did.  But during the entire period I was there there was a little girl by the name Ju.  She was 10 and always kept observing our group peeking through cracks in the wall.  The night before we left this girl came to see one of my students and asked if she could talk to her.  In a small little room attached to an elementary school this girl asked my student, “Why are you and your group so happy?  You smile and laugh all the time?”  My student said, because we believe in God and we have Jesus.  Then she paused, stair at the mud floor with tears rolling down her face.  In a soft voice she spoke, “I hate my mother….she is planning to sell me to a guy in another province.”   I was greatly disturbed when I heard the news and tried to give a sponsor for her.  During the same time I started reading and researching the topic of child prostitution in Thailand.  Here is the story of the development of commercial sex trade during the past 20 years in Southeast Asia (Thailand,Cambodia, Vietnam etc.).   

Between 1985 – 1996 the nature of commercial sex trade was rather brutal.  The brutality done included beating, raping, locking, chaining, kidnapping, and keeping the girls in dismal unhygienic locations.  These girls, when sold, are usually locked up in the brothels, often not seeing the light of day for up to two years.  They can be called on for sex 24 hours a day.  The usual working hours of these girls start from 10 am to 4 am.  The price of a virgin girl is between 2,000 - 15,000 baht (40 Baht/US $).  This amount goes to the brothels.  Each visit after is between 100-150 baht.  If the customer desires to stay overnight, he is charged 200 baht.  The highest return for these girls is 50% of the price charged while the lowest is approximately 5%

According to Aurasom Suthisakorn, some good-looking girls were forced to entertain from 20 –26 customers per night from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m., which is approximately one client per 15 minutes.I have heard that of the 1,000 children rescued by various social welfare organizations from 50 brothels, 20 per cent was HIV positive.  The Center for the Protection of Children’s Right reports thatthe 4th of June 1991, 17 young tribal girls between 11-17 years of age were rescued from a brothel in Phuket.  One of the girls was forced to entertain customers even when she was 7-months pregnant.  In April 1991, a teahouse was raided and 100 girls were rescued of which 10 were below the age of 16.  Twenty of these girls were tricked and coerced into prostitution.  Seventeen out of these twenty girls were HIV positive.  November of the same year a brothel in Rayong Province was raided and 12 girls were rescued.  “Most of the girls had been physically abused with plastic pipes and raped before being forced into prostitution.  Blood tests indicated that 11 out of 12 were HIV positive.”

In her book, Sanim Dookmai, Aurasom Suthisakorn described a pimp taming a girl who refused to cooperate.  The pimp took the sharp curved edge of an iron hanger to whip the bare back of the girls then dragged it down to the waist pulling the skin off their backs.

When I did my research in 2001 I realized that there had been a major transition in the sex industry in Thailand.  First there is less coercion and brutality.  Second, poor rural girls no longer get into this type of career but it has become more prominent among poor urban girls.  Third, there has been a huge reduction in the number of brothels yet at the same time there is a sharp increase in karaoke, bars, café, massage parlors etc.   Lastly, the number of child prostitution has not decreased.   

Factors that contributed to this shift are first, many NGOs have been working to promote education and prevention among rural girls in Northern Thailand.  Second, there are so many deaths in the village that young girls are afraid to get into this business.  Lastly, the government issued The Suppression Act on sex industry. 

The effectiveness of the 1996 Act lies in its severity of punishment to pimps, mama-suns, brothel owners, customers, and parents who sell their children.  Section 12 of the Suppression Act states:Any person who detains or confines another person, or by any other means, deprives such person of the liberty of person or causes bodily harm to or threatens in any manner whatsoever to commit violence against another person in order to compel such other person to engage in prostitution shall be liable to imprisonment for a term of ten to twenty years and to a fine of two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand Baht. If the commission of the offence under paragraph one results in: grievous bodily harm being caused to the victim, the offender shall be liable to imprisonment for life;  death being caused to the victim, the offender shall be liable to death penalty or to imprisonment for life.

It was assumed that the revised Suppression Act would result in a decline in the rate of prostitution.  But this was a miscalculation.  The Act was effective in causing the decline of the number of brothels but it did not stop prostitution.  In fact because of the Suppression Act, other forms of prostitution emerged such as restaurant, café, karaoke, cocktail lounge, and salaya dong is, according to many staff workers of various NGOs, partially the result of the Prevention and Suppression of Prostitution Act of 1996.  Chitraporn Vanaspongse of ECPAT International used to observe young girls walking around in Pattaya soliciting clients.  “After 1996 you can’t find these girls by the street soliciting clients.  They are now working in bars or karaokes.”  It is still about sex but the form has changed.