Saving the child sex slaves

[strider@xxxxxxxxxxx]

/* Written 10:00 am  Jun 20, 1994 by 9310482q@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx in igc:soc.culture.th */
/* ---------- "Saving the child sex slaves" ---------- */
	This long and sad article was written by Jocasta Shakespeare and 
was printed in Cleo, July 1994's issue.

	On the Burmese border of northern Thailand, edging the Golden 
Triangle, money means opium and heroin, and every spring the thatched 
bamboo huts of the villages are roofed with poppy heads drying in the 
sun. The only other commodity here is young girls. In Mae Sai town, 
the flashing red and yellow fairy lights outside a local brothel cast 
a surreal glow over Kok, 11, as she sits quietly with ten other 
frilly-dressed girls waiting for her customers. At first it seems 
unbelievable that this small child is working as a prostitute. but 
she is available for sex at $38 a night.

	She is owned by " Big Boss Ma", who controls the trade of girls 
from Burma, China and Laos into Thailand. Ma doesn't look the part: a 
fat lady dressed in  a red dress, giggling at TV- karaoke. But she is 
one of the most feared and powerful of Mafia bosses in the country 
and her network of cronies is armed and deadly. Her henchmen do not 
deal in worlds- runaway girls get their throats cut. Nobody messes 
with Ma, not even the police.

	When I arrived at Big Ma's brothel , the police were already 
there. They are regular customers of hers. One of them sat swigging 
beer, his handcuffs, dangling casually from a back pocket, leering at 
a 15-year-old in a pink frock. He passed Ma some cash and took the 
young girl into a back room of the brothel for sex. Then I began to 
barter.

	Working with a Thai interpreter, I prosed as a tourist. I told 
Ma that I wanted a girl no older than 15. The fact that I am a 
foreign woman didn't raise suspicion. It seemed acceptable to Ma that 
I should buy a night of sex with a Thai man and a child. But Ma 
warned that Kok, her youngest trick, was having a period.


	This seemed odd since she looked too immature, but I put the 
price up to $50 and the deal was done. Later, in my guest house room, 
it became clear why Ma warns punters about Kok's period.


	" I am burning, " she said, pulling tat the crotch of her 
shorts. After her first rape she bled for five days but Ma refused to 
take her to a doctor. Clients think the wound which they reopen 
through intercourse is just menstruation. " They pity me but they 
still fuck me," she said.

	Her eyes are made up heavily with black kohl, lips reddened and 
fingernails lacquered pink. But no amount of make-up can disguise the 
child- size feet in tiny red flip-flops, the pre- pubescent figure 
hidden under a sailor-collared shirt or the high-pitched voice. " My 
father sold me for 200 baht ($105) two months ago, "she says. " He 
comes to the brothel every month to collect 3000 baht ($190) from Big 
Ma. I clean Big Ma's house in the day and then work as a prostitute 
at night. I don't get money at all- just food. I get one man a night 
but most of the girls go with six or seven men a night. Kok says she 
has never used a condom.

	The recent boom in the underage sex trade, with an estimated 
800,000 children currently working as prostitutes in Thailand, is 
partly due to the mistaken belief that children are too young to 
contract AIDS. On the contrary, immature bodies unready for sex tear 
easily and are especially vulnerable to infections. Most prostitutes 
wear nothing but a little Buddhist charm folded into their bra straps 
for protection against disease.


	Kok is traumatised and constantly touches her face with her 
hands as if trying to hide away. She looks like a little battered 
doll. At dawn, it was very hard to drive her back to the brothel and 
order her to get out of the car. She didn't want to go back but had 
no choice. Zigzagging across the road from tiredness and pain, she 
found her way back through the neon puddles towards her fairylit 
prison.

	Of the 5,136,443 visitors (200,000 Australian) to Thailand last 
year, an estimated 80 per cent bought sex from prostitutes. The blow-
job bars and sex- clubs of Bangkok are filled with boggle-eyed 
Australian, English and German men. At the Queens Castle bar where 
girls pull strings of razor blades from their vaginas before being 
hired out to clients- Dave, Andrew and Tony, all 23 and from 
Newcastle, are holidaying without their girlfriends.


	Thai also consider it a male prerogative to buy sex. Last 
August deputy finance minister Boonchu Trithong held a "bachelor 
party" in which Thai government Mps were awarded prostitutes as 
bonuses for good work performed. In this meat market where pretty 
young women are sized up in baht-per-kilogram, many are forced into 
the prostitution business.

	When a brothel in Ranong, owned by ex-Police Corporal Pinai 
Nakaew, was raided last year in July, 144 Burmese slaves (40 of them 
underage) were discovered to be living in a battery compound of 150 
tiny 2.4 by 1./8 metre concrete cubicles resembling prison cells. 
They had been roped, raped and beaten with wire coat hangers by their 
captors to force them to service clients. The Centre for the 
Protection of Children's right (CPCR) based in Bangkok, who organised 
the Ranong raid, have since been banned by the government from 
mounting any rescue operations because they expose embarrassing 
truths. For this reason the CPCR  volunteers are now working 
underground from secret safe houses, using assumed names.


	Although fines and jail sentences do exist under Thai law to 
discourage child prostitution, CPCR director Sanphasit Koompraphant 
says: " It is only written law, and pimps and owners are invariably 
let off by government officials." The only hope for children  like 
Kok who are sold into sex slavery is to somehow escape and make their 
way to a safe house, where they can be offered complete protection 
from their captors.


	I knew that Kok would be questioned as soon as she got inside 
and, threatened a beating, would probably tell Ma that she had not 
had sex but had talked to us and been photographed. Ma would be 
furious and we had to disappear, fast.

	Within minutes we were on the highway heading south out of town 
and I was scouring the road behind us to see if we were being 
followed. Ma's gang run a chain of brothels and her profits are huge. 
It is a big game with no rules, played dirty. We reached the airport 
in tow hours and caught the next flight to Bangkok.


	But that was not the end of it: the image of that little girl 
sitting on the end of the bed with tears streaking her face as she 
told her horrific story would not leave me. And although Kok is just 
one of thousands imprisoned by the flesh trade, it seemed worth 
trying to get her out. The risks are high and if caught trying to 
escape the girls are murdered. Recently, a runaway had her throat cut 
by Mafia assassins in a provincial town hall toilet where she was 
seeking refuge.

	There is currently no enforced law protecting girls like Kok. 
The government turns a blind eye to the horrors of sex slavery and 
suppresses all information relating to prostitution for fear of 
damaging its valuable tourist trade. Organised Mafia networks supply 
the female goods to brothels, teahouses, massage parlours and 
exclusive  clubs which are allegedly owned and frequented by top-
ranking Thai officials ministers and businessmen.

	Officially, there are 80,000 prostitutes currently working in 
Thailand; but unofficially two million. The Public health Ministry 
admits to just 600,000 HIV positives and since 1991 has banned 
doctors from publishing any AIDS data. However, it is estimated that 
as many as four million Thais will be HIV positive by the year 2000 
and a recent survey shows  70 percent of prostitutes and 50 % of 
child prostitutes to be carrying HIV.

	We came back to Mae Sai from Bangkok, determined to kidnap Kok 
and get her to a safe house. We returned with two Thai friends who 
would not be recognised in the brothel and they went in, pretending 
to be clients, to hire Kok for the night. But when they brought her 
out to the care she recognised the drive and shouted out, terrified. 
After our first meeting, she had been questioned by ma and threatened 
with death if she ever tried to escape. Now she thought she would be 
killed.

	Four of Ma's henchmen bolted out of the brothel to chase us as 
we bundled her into the back of the care and sped off towards the 
nearby town of Chiang mai. There , a contact from the underground 
activist group met us and his assistant took Kok on to the safe 
house.

	Then the CPCR activist leader, who cannot be named, led us to 
the dark corner of a yard behind a petrol station, shielded by parked 
trucks from sight of the road. He smiled wryly in the shadows and 
whispered to me, "They are armed and very dangerous. She is valuable 
to them - they will be very angry and looking for you now." He 
checked us into a local guest house under assumed names where we 
locked ourselves in and waited uneasily for morning. In the morning 
we relayed Kok's story to her guardians and quietly left the country. 
Amazingly, Kok has not tested HIV positive and now has a good chance 
of survival. She is receiving emergency medical treatment and proper 
counselling. She will be taught to read and write. But there is still 
very little opportunity open to her. if she is not offered a job 
within the organisation, she will be trained to sew or helped to get 
a menial job in a factory.

	Other young girls trapped in the flesh trade of Thailand are 
even more unlucky. In Mousha, a little village of twenty bamboo huts 
encircled by green hills, a girl called Nit returned from Bangkok and 
died four nights later from AIDS. Her family suspected it was the 
work of evil spirits so they burnt her corpse on a funeral pyre 
hidden in a bamboo grove on a high hill.

	Inside her leather wallet was one photograph and 30 " service 
tickets" torn from a stub, each marked with her prostitute' s number 
and a fee of 100 baht ($ 6). Up among the tall bamboo, her story was 
ending in cloud of acrid smoke rising from a shallow pit of white ash 
and flaked bone into the dusk sky.

	A piece of skull like a burnt coconut shell enclosing a nut of 
charred brain were all that remained while her uncle, Mai Jan Le, who 
sold here to a brothel agent for $250, squatted on the rim of the pit 
holding her picture and stirring the ashes around with a stick.

	in the same village, Nij Yan Han sold his eldest daughter three 
years ago for $375 when she was 16. His only source of income comes 
from selling banana leaves for packaging at @1.20 for two kilos. In 
such poverty, @375 offered for a spare daughter seems like a gift. So 
Nij Yan says his youngster daughter Nang La, 11 will be sold too.


	Nang La wears a flowered shirt and pink blouse, threadbare but 
adequate in the monsoon hear. Among the wheeling red dragonflies she 
says she doesn't want to go to Bangkok and misses her big sister. " My 
sister was beautiful," she says. Unfortunately for her, so is Nang 
La.

	The kind of Bangkok brothel that is Nang La's destiny is a 
prison compound frequented by Thais and Westerners like the one where 
Mukta, 15 worlds today. It is an L shaped building separated from the 
roadside by steel gates enclosing an inner courtyard. Off the yard 
run corridors shielding numbered concrete rooms.


	Inside, each room is equipped with a double bed, a mirror on 
the wall and ceiling, and a squat toilet with hosepipe shower 
stinking of stale urine. Posing as clients, we got into the compound 
and paid to have sex with their youngest girl. Mukta was pushed into 
room 103 by her Chinese-Thai pimp and stood cowering in the corner. 
She had arrived here from her Akha tribal village near Mae Sai just 
two months before.


	She said she was bought from her father for $630 by a broker 
who sold her on for $1880. her pimp charged $1266 for her virginity 
,m for which Mukta got $3. She covered the crooked eye-teeth in her 
cupid bow smile with a shy hand and said that her father had sold her 
to build a new house.

	Wearing a purple T-shirt, mini skirt and pink-frosted toenails. 
she sits on the edge of the bed in the room. Under it is a tin potty 
full of half-smoke fag butts. " My first time was an old man, may be 
50", she says. " He had a big, fat stomach with white hair growing on 
it and he wouldn't stop. Now I service six or seven men a day. They 
wake me up all during the night to work."

	Mukta has never heard that women can have an orgasm or enjoy 
sex. She said sex disgusts her but she is beaten if she refuses to 
work. She costs $63 a night, $16 an hour, earns $1.80 per trick for 
herself and still owes her pimp the money he paid for her. This 
"strangle money", as it is known in the trade, will cost her 100 
tricks.


	There is no way out for girls like Mukta. The CPCR says: Some 
brothel owners pay one million baht ($ 6266) a month to a police 
station. You can't own a brothel in the heart of Bangkok unless you 
are a top-ranking official. Girls in there have a 100 percent chance 
of contracting AIDS."

	Even for the few prostitutes who are bought out by clients, it 
si often too late. In Emergency House, a refuge for ex-prostitute 
outside Bangkok, Ma Ling Ngam, 17 is dying of AIDS . She left her 
home in Surin province when she was 13, sold by her parents. Last 
year a woman client bought her out of the brothel for $3797.

	Ma Ling is weak, coughing up blood and her breathing is 
laboured and constricted. She says, " This is the happiest time of my 
life because people here care for me and I am free." She says her 
clients were of all ages, male and female, Thai and Western. None of 
them ever used condoms.

	 
	If you would like to help girls like these, send donations to :


CPCR ( Centre for protection of Children's Rights) 
185/16 Soi Watdeeduad
Charunsanitwang 12 Rd Bangkokyai
Bangkok 10600, Thailand

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	End of the article


Busakorn