[Paleopsych] Prospect: (UK) Learning the Thai sex trade
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Learning the Thai sex trade
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=6889
[No. 110 / May 2005]
Thailand generates fantasies, both for tourists in search of sex and
for aid workers peddling lurid tales of trafficking. The tsunami
created more false horror stories. What are the facts of the trade?
Alex Renton
_________________________________________________________________
Alex Renton is a contributing editor of "Prospect"
January was ugly in our part of Bangkok. We live near Soi Nana, off
Sukhumvit Road, a famous tourist site catering for a specific sort of
visitor: middle-aged western men. They come to Nana for one reason--to
have sex cheaply. November to January is high season in Thailand for
holidaymakers from northern nations, and the bars and pavements of
Nana are packed with hundreds of people buying and selling sex.
January was busier than ever this year. It took a struggle every
evening to get through the ranks of skinny Thai women and the pale men
in shorts picking them over.
It was the tsunami, of course. Patong beach, one of the worst hit
parts of Phuket island, is among Thailand's best known destinations
for tourists seeking sex. So the men transferred their holidays to
Bangkok. Happily for them, there was a drought in northeastern
Thailand at the end of 2004. The poor rice crop that resulted sent
more young girls than usual down from their impoverished villages on
the plains of Isaan to harvest the tourists in the big city. This
seasonal migration goes back, historians of the sex trade will tell
you, to the Vietnam war and the establishment of Thailand as a brothel
for American GIs on leave. Prostitution for foreign visitors developed
into a major industry, although official Thailand shrouds its economic
and social significance in misinformation and a variety of interesting
hypocrisies.
For a start, no one knows how many foreigners come to Thailand every
year to buy sex. Many people have opinions on the matter--not least
Thailand's government, which understandably resists the label "brothel
of the world." It has threatened to expel journalists who impugn the
honour of Thai womenfolk, and forced Longman's dictionary to change
its 1993 edition, the entry for Bangkok which included the line "a
place where there are a lot of prostitutes." Thailand, in its turn,
has been considerably abused by statisticians and NGOs. Claims that
there are 2m or more prostitutes in the population of 64m, as was once
stated in a Time cover story, are absurd. This much-quoted figure was
drawn from the statistics of the Coalition Against Trafficking in
Women, an international NGO. If true, it would mean that one in four
Thai women between the ages of 15 and 29 in Thailand was a prostitute.
Another anti-trafficking organisation, Ecpat (End Child Prostitution,
Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes),
claimed in the mid-1990s that there were up to 800,000 Thai child
prostitutes--a lunatic figure that still circulates in the US state
department.
The trade in humans across the borders of southeast Asia is a real and
ugly story, but it continues to throw up incredible
statistics--perhaps because it is an issue that generates large
amounts of aid dollars. There are 21 UN agencies and NGOs based in
Bangkok which concern themselves with trafficking. The Boxing day
tsunami predictably generated a trafficking angle. Within a few days,
aid agencies led by Unicef were issuing grim warnings of orphans being
sold for adoption or the sex trade. The western media got particularly
excited by the picture of an angelic Nordic child, supposedly stolen
from a Thai hospital. This proved baseless, and there has yet to
emerge a single credible example of a tsunami child, blond or brown,
being sold. But the story has flourished in the global consciousness,
leaving the few facts from which it seeded far behind.
The sex industry in Thailand generates fantasies. There are the
fantasies of pliant girls which draw the western sex tourists, and
then there are the fantasies of lurid exploitation which draw the
western moralisers and NGOs. But what is the actual scale of
prostitution in Thailand? And how serious is the trafficking problem?
Selling sex has been illegal in the kingdom since 1960, but Longman's
was right--there are a lot of prostitutes. Ask most sensible analysts
in Thailand and you will be told that the number of women employed in
prostitution, though a long way short of 2m, is between 150,000 and
220,000 (male prostitutes are a tiny fraction of that). You will also
hear that western sex tourism is not economically significant, that
most prostitution in Thailand is for local men, and that most of the
people who do come from abroad for sex are Asian. There is some truth
in this. Sixty per cent of Thailand's 10m visitors in 2003 were from
elsewhere in east Asia, and certainly the brothel-lined towns on
Thailand's Malaysian border, and the entire streets in Bangkok that
are devoted to sex clubs for "Japanese only," are evidence of the sex
trade designed for the region.
But the proof is there--in Pattaya, in Phuket and on my own street in
Bangkok--that huge numbers of non-Asian visitors buy sex in Thailand.
But how many? Sex tourism is notoriously difficult to measure. How can
you ask at immigration if tourists have arrived in Thailand primarily
for the prostitution? How do you know if a man on a business trip is
likely to visit a sex venue with his Thai colleagues? Yet while the
government, and the tourist and aviation industries, resist attempts
to measure the significance of the sex trade, there is one way to
gauge the extent of sex tourism, even if in fairly crude terms. A look
at the Thai immigration department's statistics, culled from the cards
foreigners must fill in on entry, reveals an interesting discrepancy:
60 per cent of visitors are male and only 40 per cent female. The gap
grows when you look at arrivals from the rich countries who come to
Thailand on holiday in large numbers--the US, Japan, Britain, France.
For these places, nearly two males arrived for every female in 2003.
More British citizens visit Thailand than those of any other non-Asian
country. In 2003 (the last year for which full figures are available)
some 545,000 British residents arrived on visits. If you remove the
children, and the British citizens visiting for business or reasons
other than a holiday, you arrive at about 489,000--314,000 men and
175,000 women. That is 139,000 more British men than women coming to
Thailand for a holiday--a gap of 28 per cent. The French gender
disparity--60,500 more men than women--is 32 per cent, about the same
as that of visitors from the US. The Japanese, at 35 per cent, is the
highest--over 300,000 more men. If you take Europe as a whole (though
there are some countries, like Finland and Sweden, with virtually no
disparity) the gap is 25 per cent--494,000 more men than women.
A look at the major rich-nation visitors--those from the US,
Australia, Europe and Japan--shows that 952,000 more men than women
visited Thailand on holiday in 2003, a disparity of 28 per cent. (The
2004 statistics, not yet complete, will show a slight narrowing of
this gap, but a leap of overall numbers of around 20 per cent.) This
pattern is unique among major tourist destinations. Take, for example,
the Caribbean, another popular tropical destination for economy
tourism. Here, the disparity runs at 2 or 3 per cent--the only country
with a significant gap in favour of men, nearly 11 per cent, is Cuba,
the Caribbean country most notorious for sex tourism.
Do nearly a million men from the rich world come to Thailand to buy
sex every year? The proposition deserves challenge. Men are capable of
holidaying for reasons other than fornication with strangers. There is
golf, after all. I asked Sasithara Pichaichannarong, director general
of the Thai government's office of tourism development, how she
accounted for the discrepancy. "Businessmen!" she said promptly.
"They're counted as tourists in the statistics." But I had factored
them out--and in any case, only 31,000 Britons stated business rather
than holiday as the purpose of their visit in 2003, less than 6 per
cent of the total. So did sex explain the extra 950,000 men that
arrive from wealthy countries? "Probably," she said. "But sex tourism
exists everywhere, not just in Thailand." Not in such numbers,
however. These extra men represent 10 per cent of all international
arrivals in Thailand.
So what are these men doing in Thailand? I took the problem to John
Koldowski, managing director for strategic intelligence at the
Bangkok-based Pacific Asia Travel Association. He was understandably
cagey: Pata is funded by government, airlines and the hotel industry.
But yes, he confirmed, the gender discrepancy is unusual for the
global tourist destinations. So these extra men are coming here for
sex? "It's that, or the golf," said Koldowski.
And why so many Brits? He thought that the backpacker tourists might
account for the gap--young British males, following the traditional
trail through southeast Asia to see mates or relatives in Australasia.
But the average British arrival is aged 40, I pointed out.
"Backpacking is a state of mind, not an age thing," pronounced
Koldowski. That's an advertising slogan, not an explanation, I said.
He became tetchy. "Look, if you are really researching the social
factors of this, you should consider if men might come here because
they're fed up with the ball-breaking females they have to deal with
at home. Maybe they want to meet the sort of gentle, beautiful,
kind-hearted women they'll find here." This seemed to answer my
question. The men are here for sex and, of course, golf. Or both.
Female golf caddies who double as prostitutes are, anecdotally, one of
the special features of the courses of Thailand.
Sex tourism is a significant part of Thailand's economy. Tourism
overall has been the country's major foreign currency earner since
1982. In 2003, international tourism alone accounted for 309.26bn baht
(£4.56bn) in receipts--about 6 per cent of GDP--ranking Thailand 15th
in the world. That year, the extra adult male holidaymakers from
around the world probably generated almost £1bn--over 1 per cent of
Thailand's GDP.
But prostitution in Thailand is much bigger than just the trade for
tourists. There is no official measurement of the economics, but the
clues are there. Many Thai men are habitual users of prostitutes, and
the trade, while illegal, carries less stigma than in most countries
and is acknowledged by the government as a source of revenue. In
January, the Thai excise department announced that it was going to
seek a larger take in the so-called "sin tax" from massage parlours, a
common brothel front. But Thai tax collection is notoriously
inefficient. A better indicator of the money around in the
prostitution business came last year from Chuwit Kamolvisit, who was
employing 2,000 prostitutes in six luxury massage parlours in Bangkok
(which he liked to refer to as "semen collection centres"). Chuwit,
the "Tub Tycoon," is an amusing rogue--"very un-Thai," they say
here--who in February 2005 became an opposition member of parliament
with an anti-corruption agenda. During his campaign he opened his
books to the press, revealing to a largely unsurprised nation that his
monthly bill for bribes and payoffs to the Bangkok authorities came to
£160,000. Separately, Thailand's National Economic and Social Advisory
Council (Nesac) said that massage parlour owners pay £62m a year in
police bribes. The income directly generated by prostitution was
estimated at 100bn baht (£1.5bn) by the respected Thai economist Pasuk
Phongpaichit in a 1998 study. This is about a third of the value of
the agriculture sector, which employs more people than any other in
Thailand.
Westerners form an important--albeit not the major--part of this
economic picture. A few have settled here because of it, calling
themselves "sexpatriates." In towns like Pattaya on the Gulf of
Thailand, on Phuket island and in the sex trade districts of Bangkok,
they run bars, hotels and brothels, mediating the transactions between
male tourists and Thai women. They are vocal on websites and in local
publishing ventures, churning out guides for sex tourists. Some of
these men see themselves as exiles, refugees from the "feminazis" who
are crushing the spirit of the western male. Here, the old order of
the sexes still reigns. Women know their place, they wash your feet
before they have sex with you, they say thank you and help you in the
shower afterwards. And, of course, westerners' savings and pensions go
a long way. Beer is a dollar a bottle, and a woman for the night
available for £10 or less. It's the "last place you can be a white
man," says one bar-owning sexpat on his website.
Their guidebooks picture a world of grasping, stupid peasant girls,
known as "LBFMs" (little brown fucking machines), out to entrap and
rip off the honest, randy male visitor, who must treat them firmly and
be sure to stamp out any nonsense for the sake of the next bloke who
comes along. Books like Sex, Lies & Bar Girls are available in
mainstream shops, including at Bangkok airport. They are full of
robust advice on "scrogging" as many Thai women in as short a time and
for as little money as possible.
One of the self-justifications put forward by the sexpats is that the
business makes everyone happy--the exploitation is two-way. It is not
like normal prostitution, you hear. All the girls are smiling! ("All
smile, all the time!" is an official tourism slogan). But you don't
have to be a feminazi to see that the power relationship is grossly
unbalanced. The real choices lie with the man with the wallet.
The famous Thai smile hides a lot. The women of rural Thailand who
descend on the tourist areas are driven by poverty. Around a third of
the Thai population lives on less than $2 a day; in the agricultural
northeast, where farmers are beset by drought and collapsing prices
(chiefly because of the dropping of trade barriers with China), one in
six people lives on less than $1 a day. A high proportion of
prostitutes--over 60 per cent, according to some surveys--have left
children at home in the countryside. In traditional Thai society, a
girl's first duty is the support of her family. Seventy-five per cent
of prostitutes, according to one study, entered the trade after the
failure of a relationship--"damaged goods" in a society that still
puts a high premium on female virginity. Another common reason given
for entering prostitution is the pressure of family debts.
And the gains to be had are fabulous. The price of sex from a street
prostitute in Nana starts at perhaps 500 baht, a little over £7. That
is a fortnight's living costs in the countryside, or half a week's
salary for a Thai police constable. There is little doubt that the sex
trade is vital to the economy of the poor northeast, which is another
of the well-rehearsed justifications of the sexpats. Tales of bar
girls who retire rich and happy to their home villages--some of them
with a farang (foreign) husband--are many, and there is no social
disgrace attached. "The land a girl child ploughs lies between her
legs," goes a saying from rural Thailand. But some women are broken in
the process, and on my street, occasionally, you can see the damage
that results.
Still, there is a grain of truth in the sexpat argument. Soi Nana is
not like the grim red light districts of London or New York, with
their backdrop of organised crime, violence, and drug use. The only
fight I have seen on Nana was between drunken Englishmen. Amphetamines
are widely used by the prostitutes, it is said, but not heroin. I have
spotted one used syringe in the gutter in our four years here: there
was worse to be seen nightly on the crack-infected street in west
London where we used to live. Most women soliciting rich-world
foreigners are relatively free agents. Their worst affliction appears
to be the corrupt Bangkok police. In Thailand, the industry is not
generally pimp-driven and, although technically illegal, its openness
undoubtedly provides some protection for women. The sex tourist is
more likely to visit a bar or a massage parlour than a traditional
"closed" brothel (these appear to be more common for the domestic sex
trade). NGOs say that condom use is close to 100 per cent, and HIV
infection has been in decline in Thailand for a decade.
My family and I have become blasé about the street over the four years
since we rented a house off Nana. We used to stare, transfixed by the
grotesque Beauty and the Beast scenes: slender girls being slobbered
over by beery skinheads, the doddery grandfathers being escorted to
hotels by tiny teenagers. But you come to realise these objections are
chiefly aesthetic. The tourists, as opposed to the sexpats, are not so
bad--often ignorant, yes, but lonely and innocent too. We have only
once on our street seen a girl who was plainly underage. She was being
bundled into a car by two western men--we tried to get the police to
stop the vehicle but they were not interested. (Of the 21 agencies and
NGOs working from Bangkok on the trafficking problem, not one has
managed to set up a 24-hour hotline where foreign visitors can report
it actually happening.)
On my street you get snapshots of sadness--the look of a woman as she
turns her face from her elderly male escort, her smile slipping to
reveal what she is really thinking; the desperate patience of the
older women, not pretty enough any longer to be attached to a bar, who
must patiently wait in line under the glaring lights of the Nana Hotel
sign. These can make you feel like crying for humanity, but,
rationally, you must think, this is what globalised tourism and the
laws of supply and demand will produce. What specifically should we
object to? To stamp out the sex trade would cause enormous harm in a
country that fails abjectly, despite its relative wealth, to provide
for its poor. After four years, I find that the only aspect that can
get me really heated about sex tourism in Thailand is the hypocrisy,
from both the trade's apologists and its enemies.
There is another sex-related industry in Bangkok--run by those who
survey and lobby, preach and analyse and argue endlessly with each
other about how to stop or curb prostitution and human trafficking.
There is a harvest here, too, for cultural anthropologists and social
historians. The books on why people have sex in Thailand line the
bookshop shelves next to those on how to have sex in Thailand. There
are socioeconomists analysing the "incomplete dialectic between
tourist and prostitute"; anthropologists on the Foucaultian
relationship between a Thai prostitute and her body; social historians
on the growth of the myth of the exotic Orient, as promulgated by
Puccini, Gauguin or the young British men who ran the trading posts of
the East India Company. There are, as Pasuk Phongpaichit points out,
many people beyond the prostitutes themselves who make a living on the
back of Thailand's sex trade.
And there is one aspect about which everyone agrees something must be
done: "trafficking," the sale of women and children into the sex
trade. Worrying about trafficking is another business, employing its
own community of expats in Bangkok, which is the southeast Asian hub
for many international NGOs. Thirteen UN agencies and eight
international NGOs are involved in anti-trafficking work, so many that
a further UN body (Uniap, the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on
Human Trafficking in the Greater Mekong Sub-Region) was established in
2000, employing 18 people, to co-ordinate them and all the
international NGOs (Save the Children, Oxfam and so on) which run
programmes or policies on trafficking in the six countries through
which the Mekong river flows.
Donors--particularly the US and British governments--throw millions of
dollars at trafficking every year. Spending on the issue has shot up
during the Bush administration--it was $50m in 2003--for which the
trafficking of women and children for sex is an ideal target for
foreign aid. "It fits the demands of an ideological morality that says
that in essence all sex issues should be dealt with by abstinence. And
it's about defenceless kids and teenagers," said one former Unicef
worker. Another who was involved in the agency's anti-trafficking
programmes in east Asia told me that within Unicef they are seen as "a
great collecting bucket," a reliable method of raising funds that can
then be spent on less donor-thrilling projects, like education or
immunisation.
Thus hardly a fortnight in Bangkok goes by without another seminar,
conference or children's forum, organised by Uniap or others. In
November, I dropped in on the "post-Yokohama mid-term review of the
east Asia and Pacific regional commitment and action plan against
commercial sexual exploitation of children," held by Unescap (UN
Economic and Social Commission for Asia and Pacific), Unicef and
Ecpat. This three-day meeting, attended by delegates from more than 20
countries, was to report on what had happened since the last such
meeting three years earlier in Yokohama. The only concrete
development, it seemed, was the signing in Burma a month earlier by
ministers from Cambodia, China, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam of a
"memorandum of understanding to co-ordinate action to prevent
trafficking." This was being hailed as a big achievement. But it was
also noted that "a lack of reliable data remains a major hindrance to
the implementation of well-targeted and effective measures to stop the
commercial sexual exploitation of children."
That is an understatement. Everyone in the anti-trafficking industry
is painfully aware that there is no real data at all. There are
gruesome anecdotes and a few unimpressive figures for arrest and
prosecution, but hard facts do not exist. You are told that each year
many Thai women are sold into the sex trade in Japan, that they arrive
thinking they are going to work as nannies or waitresses and find
themselves saddled with "debts" of $25,000-45,000 and forced to work
them off by yakuza gangsters in brothels known as "black jails." Such
was the report of human rights lobbyist Kinsey Dinan, published by the
Harvard Asia Centre in 2002. But that article, like so many others,
made no attempt to attach numbers to the stories. Dinan's
"several-year long research project" with Human Rights Watch merely
says she "found that thousands of women from Thailand were being
trafficked into... Japan each year." That is it. The truth is there
are no useful statistics on this issue in Japan, other than some on
the female visa overstayers (10,000 from Thailand in 2001). But the
NGO lobbyists need better than that to tickle the donors. There are
much more frightening ones around, and they are widely quoted:
Unicef's estimate, for example, that 1.2m children (meaning under-18
year olds) are trafficked every year, a third of them in Asia.
At a recent anti-trafficking meeting of international NGOs, I met a
woman from Oxfam India who told the meeting that in Delhi alone
child-trafficking was a business worth $1m a day. No one raised an
eyebrow. Another agency claims the child sex trade has a $7bn annual
turnover in Asia (a figure the US state department gives as the global
value of the human trafficking trade). These numbers are endlessly
parroted by lobbyists and journalists, and never, it seems,
challenged. The trade in humans is an area where anyone seems pretty
much able to say anything. David Feingold, international co-ordinator
on HIV and trafficking for Unesco, analyses the statistics on these
issues, but even he has not been able to get Unicef to explain its
figure of 1.2m children. "Trafficking is a dangerous word," Feingold
says. "It stops the brain working."
If you ask the agencies how they get these figures, you get a weary
response: "Why are you journalists so obsessed with statistics?" At
the post-Yokohama mid-term review, I put the question to Anupama Rao
Singh, regional director of Unicef for east Asia. She replied that she
understood the journalistic "compulsion" for figures, but added, "I
must make one point: the trafficking of children for sexual
exploitation is one of the worst and most abhorrent abuses, one that
cannot be condoned, irrespective of the numbers!" For this, she earned
a cheer from her colleagues. Question the figures and you will be told
you are helping the exploiters. A researcher I know who has worked in
east Europe and west Africa on trafficking surveys for Unicef and Save
the Children says that the problem lies in the fact that the data
everyone wants are near impossible to come by. "It's not like
measuring HIV infections, or seeing if children have access to safe
drinking water. How do you extrapolate from the anecdotes? How do you
separate a woman whose uncle gave her a lift to the big city to help
her find work from a woman whose uncle paid her mother money to be
allowed to put her to work?" But the commissioners of reports demand
hard statistics. "The pressure to fudge them is enormous."
Feingold has a favourite example: the commonly used figure of 5-7,000
girls trafficked each year from Nepal to India. "It dates from a 1986
NGOs' seminar, when it was, I gather, a wild guess, and it was
published in the Times of India in 1989. It has been in use ever
since." After we met, I searched for the terms "5,000-7,000 Nepali
girls" in Google and got 110 results, most of them relevant and
appearing in documents by eminent organisations, including the World
Bank and USAid. The most recent references to this 19-year-old "wild
guess" were dated February 2005, and appeared in a Unicef paper and on
the website of the Catholic aid agency APHD.
Bad statistics have a habit of reproducing and mutating. "The US
government," says Feingold, "recently revised its figure of 700,000-2m
people trafficked worldwide--a figure which no one could possibly
know. On the state department website, this is now down to
600-800,000. Then they say that 80 per cent of these are female and 50
per cent minors. How could anyone possibly know that? I've been given
a private explanation of their methodology and it's ludicrous."
I asked Anne Horsley for statistics. She is project co-ordinator for
the International Organisation for Migration, working on "long-term
recovery and reintegration assistance to trafficked women and
children." Based in Phnom Penh, Horsley seemed more hands-on than most
trafficking lobbyists. Cambodia to Thailand is meant to be a big
export route for women and children. There is migrant labour going,
legally and illegally, across these borders in the hundreds of
thousands. Horsley, though, was also reluctant to be specific. Her
rehabilitation project dealt with "a few hundred" Cambodian children
each year, repatriated from Thailand. Some 25 per cent had had sexual
experience, and two per cent said they had been involved in
prostitution. If "a few hundred" were, say, 400, then 2 per cent would
amount to eight under-18 year olds.
Shortly after the tsunami, Unicef started raising the spectre of
orphans from the disaster being preyed upon and sold for sex, quoting
"reports" of this having already happened. This was seized on by other
agencies, and doubtless brought more money into appeal funds that
were, as some organisations will admit, already subscribed beyond the
organisations' ability to spend the cash. (Privately, the agencies are
staggered at the success of their appeals. One international NGO says
it will take eight years to spend the money donated in the first month
after the wave hit.) No one at Unicef has come up with a credible
example of a tsunami orphan being sold for sex--despite journalists'
repeated requests. A British aid agency worker returning from the
devastation in Aceh said to me: "Well, I heard that only one case of
that actually having happened has been proved. But the good thing
about that story is that it made the Indonesians wake up to the fact
that there could be a problem, and that their people needed training
to look out for it."
The statistics are seductive: a powerful tool for raising money, but
also, as in Aceh, for embarrassing complacent governments whose women
and children are demonstrably vulnerable. Some shocking stats and
opprobrium in the media have got the Thai government to beef up its
laws and policing, and in Thailand, arrests on trafficking or child
abuse charges have risen a little. In May 2004, Thailand's autocratic
prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra announced a "war on trafficking and
prostitution," shortly after the International Labour Organisation
(ILO) announced that 200-300,000 children were trafficked for sex into
Thailand annually (though it is hard to see how they would fit into an
existing population of 200,000 prostitutes), and shortly before the US
state department released a report putting Thailand on its "watch
list" of countries not working adequately to prevent human
trafficking. Special police squads now exist to track the trafficking
gangs, which are said to number about 30 in Thailand, and to have
links to 70 or 80 in other countries; and in April 2005 a deputy prime
minister was put in charge of a new human trafficking control board.
But arrests and prosecutions remain few. In December 2004, in a report
on one of the special 36-man anti-trafficking squads now patrolling
1,165km of the northern Thai-Burmese border, it was revealed that not
a single arrest had been made, nor any victim rescued. In fact, in the
first year of operation, on the entire Burmese border only four
arrests had been made and four suspected trafficking victims freed.
Many things can be deduced from this--not least the inefficiency of
the Thai police. But a worrying question remains: how can you stop the
trafficking of children for sex if you cannot find out where or how or
in what numbers they are being trafficked?
Some of the agencies are beginning to admit that bad numbers can
undermine their credibility. Ecpat, the child prostitution agency,
does impressive work at the "demand side," including the training of
hotel staff in Thailand to report on customers who may be using
underage prostitutes. Formerly one of the worst offenders with
exaggerated numbers, Ecpat now bases its statistics on figures
provided by national governmental bodies, which are likely to be
underestimates. In 2003, the ILO started a $10m, five-year project to
combat trafficking in Thailand and four neighbouring countries,
largely funded by Britain's department for international development.
Allan Dow, communications officer for the project, partially disowns
that ILO figure of 200-300,000 children trafficked into the region.
"We've stopped using numbers now. We know the problem is serious:
there's no point coming up with unreliable statistics. Not having
numbers doesn't mean we don't know what we're doing... but we have to
admit that the current methodology for getting statistics doesn't
work."
Trafficking is a real problem and, though there is little prospect of
it being measured accurately, circumstances suggest that it will grow.
Tourism into southeast Asia is forecast to increase by 14 per cent a
year. Even after the tsunami, 13m people are expected to visit
Thailand during 2005, and the kingdom plans to push that to 20m by
2008, which would make it the world's seventh most popular
destination, just after Britain. And sex is demonstrably one of
Thailand's major tourist attractions. What must concern those who,
like me, take a liberal view of the sex trade is that underage
prostitution is an inevitable part of it. Teenagers, research shows,
are brought into the trade not principally because of the dedicated
paedophiles we read so much about, but because youth is a valuable
commodity. Men like to buy sex with young women: the young poor are
the most easily obtained for them.
A few in the anti-trafficking community admit they have to reassess
their approach. Amid the self-congratulation of the post-Yokohama
meeting, there was one note of caution sounded. Vitit Muntarbhorn, a
law professor and former special rapporteur for the UN secretary
general on child prostitution and trafficking, told the meeting:
"We've focused a lot on supply issues. It's time we placed as much
focus on demand." The professor is a Thai, but his own country is set,
if anything, to increase the demand for prostitutes. "The Thai
government is committed to quality tourism," said Sasithara
Pichaichannarong of the office of tourism development, "and that
includes being anti-sex tourism." She gave no details of exactly what
the kingdom is doing to oppose sex tourism--though if you tried to set
up a sex tourism business today you would probably be discouraged. It
was not always thus. In the 1980s, overt sex tourism flourished with
considerable government encouragement. Doctors were even asked to play
down the threat of Aids in order not to put off tourists.
Quietly, though, Thailand appears to have accepted its role as
provider of sexual services to the rest of the planet. All that can be
realistically asked is that it sets about doing it as cleanly and
kindly as possible: that means tackling poverty in the rural north and
corruption in the police force, as well as properly addressing the
problem of the trafficked and the underage. The country would be aided
in the latter by more honesty from the NGOs who have been given so
many millions of aid dollars to tackle these problems.
Travelling to Thailand for sex will continue. The brand is
established. The beautiful young woman wrapped in silk with her demure
but inviting smile is a feature of Thai travel posters across the
world. The promise is of "happiness on earth"--the delights of
paradise just a cheap flight away. Most of the traditional tourist
attractions are disappearing. The country's beaches are overexploited,
its forests shrinking and the islands poisoned by tourists' waste. But
Thailand and its neighbours retain one renewable resource for the
tourists that is not in danger of running out--the supply of poor,
smiling women.
End of the article
Related Subjects
[38]Southeast Asia (21), [39]NGOs and charities (12), and [40]Love
and sex (36).
[41]Southeast Asia, [42]NGOs and charities, and [43]Love and sex.
By this Author
[45]Out of order
[46]Alex Renton
Some parts of Iraq face not merely political chaos but long-term
social breakdown
Jul 2003
[47]Press mess
[48]Alex Renton
References
38.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/list.php?subject=137&AuthKey=88f209b9fb2e6c89f92dd8e7c037ca91&issue=505
39.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/list.php?subject=186&AuthKey=88f209b9fb2e6c89f92dd8e7c037ca91&issue=505
40.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/list.php?subject=167&AuthKey=88f209b9fb2e6c89f92dd8e7c037ca91&issue=505
41.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/list.php?subject=137&AuthKey=88f209b9fb2e6c89f92dd8e7c037ca91&issue=505
42.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/list.php?subject=186&AuthKey=88f209b9fb2e6c89f92dd8e7c037ca91&issue=505
43.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/list.php?subject=167&AuthKey=88f209b9fb2e6c89f92dd8e7c037ca91&issue=505
44. http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=6889#contactForm
45.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=5634&AuthKey=88f209b9fb2e6c89f92dd8e7c037ca91&issue=505
46.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/list.php?author=12&AuthKey=88f209b9fb2e6c89f92dd8e7c037ca91&issue=505
47.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=3363&AuthKey=88f209b9fb2e6c89f92dd8e7c037ca91&issue=505
48.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/list.php?author=12&AuthKey=88f209b9fb2e6c89f92dd8e7c037ca91&issue=505
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