My first week working with COSA is an eventful one, due to an unexpected occurrence a few days before I start. Mickey and some volunteers were visiting hilltribe villages 4 or 5 hours’ drive away, intended as an information-gathering mission on possible trafficking routes; however, when they arrived at one village, they were informed by the village head that a group of twenty-two children were being held there temporarily before being trafficked down south. After a quick discussion, the guys decided to take action and intercept them.
Now – before you’re carried away by visions of a muscled Arnie lookalike bursting in and carrying away five children under each arm, firing off a machine gun with his teeth, I must tell you, rescues rarely involve actual raids. In this case, the village head told the traffickers to leave town, which they did; the villagers rounded up the children and brought them to the chief’s house, where they were documented and photographed by our guys, before being temporarily installed in houses around the village. When I first heard this, I was very surprised; I may not have been expecting an Arnie showdown, but I certainly would have expected some form of protest on the side of the traffickers, seeing as their precious merchandise was being snatched away. There are two reasons for this lack of conflict: firstly, Thais as a general rule dislike confrontation. When a figure of authority tells you to do something, you do it. The second reason is darker; as Mickey points out to me, for every one kid rescued, there are ten to take their place. For the traffickers, supply is never a problem.
This leads me to a crucial point: trafficking is widespread here because it is viewed as normal. Officially by law, it is illegal, but there are deeper, far more ancient cultural factors at work that say otherwise. To give you an idea of just how everyday this is: the children’s current temporary homes in the village are the very same places they were being kept in transit before COSA intervened. The traffickers, rather than working secretly under cover of darkness as I had imagined, were working out in the open, paying people to keep the children in their homes. It is not illicit – it’s just business, one that everyone has a share of. As I said before, the majority of the time it’s families that sell their children. I don’t want to send the wrong message here; yes, for most of us, the idea of willingly putting one’s own child into such a situation is unthinkable, heartless, cruel. But as Laura, COSA’s programme director, told me a few days into the job, love and trafficking do co-exist; it’s not that parents don’t care about their children, but that they view things in a very different way from the West. We come from a culture where the role of a parent is to protect and provide for their children at all costs. In Thailand, the reverse is true, and it is seen as the child’s duty, even honour, to do anything they can to help their family. Add to the fact that sex work is seen as an acceptable, and more importantly, lucrative way to make money, and you can perhaps begin to see why this has become such an enormous industry.
This was something I found difficult at first; in battling trafficking, we’re talking about changing fundamental aspects of society, and who are we to come in with our ‘West is Best’ mentality, telling people that their way of life is wrong? However, as my very clever friend Mishal pointed out to me, ‘normal’ doesn’t mean that people automatically think it is right. After all, it’s ‘normal’ in Scotland to get paraletically drunk every weekend, and yes, while there’s no doubt it’s loads of fun, nobody who’s experienced a hangover could say that putting gallons of alcohol into your body is good for you - but everyone does it, so it's fine, right? Similarly, while there may be some here who find nothing troubling with trafficking children, there are many who know it is wrong, but considering its normality, do not know of any other way. This is why the work that COSA does is so important: we focus on preventing trafficking through educating communities about alternatives to this way of life.
So, as I was saying before my little aside – the first week at work is dominated by the rescue of these twenty-two children. I spend Monday settling into my new home, and on Tuesday make the journey up with Mickey to the village where they were found. The journey takes a long time, five or six hours, the road winding through jungley hills. The last stretch to the village takes us off the beaten track, literally – we’re jumping around like fleas in a blanket trying to navigate the bumpy path that’s been eaten away by the rainy season. The purpose of the visit is to conduct the first of what will be many interviews with the kids. In the early stages of rescue, it’s important to get details of the children’s origin and family circumstances, for a number of reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, it’s to get hold of their families and documentation like birth certificates. This is so we can register them as Thai citizens; being hilltribe children, they often aren’t registered, which creates problems when enrolling them in school. Since we aren’t a law-keeping force or government agency, we need the parents’ consent to take over temporary guardianship of their children. We can also keep an eye on any siblings and step in to offer aid if they seem at risk of being trafficked. Later interviews will focus on more personal information to provide to sponsors (one child sponsored for a year comes to just under £1000, which goes a long way here).
Right now though, the priority is to get them registered and under our custody, as we have emergency funding to tide us over until sponsorships are arranged. The group consists of about fourteen boys and eight girls. A few of them seem quiet, shy and wary, others fairly at ease. We find out that many of the boys were intended for Chiang Mai as labourers, though one had already gone down to Pattaya for an ‘interview’ at a gay bar. When asked what he wanted to do (believe it or not, sometimes children don’t want to be rescued, feeling an obligation to their family), he replies, ‘I don’t want to work. I just want to go to school’. The girls are more subdued than the boys, and Mickey suspects that a couple of them have already worked in brothels. The way it usually works is that a family will take out a loan from the brothel owner, and the daughter works until it gets paid off. A lot of the time the family, used to the source of income, will take out a bigger loan once the first has been worked off, continuing the cycle. Contrary to what you might have heard, brothel clientele generally aren’t Western sex tourists; they are usually local men or Asian tourists. Because of the huge rise in AIDS here over the past few years, there’s a growing demand for younger and younger girls, in the belief that they will be less likely to have STIs. Some even believe that having sex with a very young girl or a virgin increases your virility. Usually, however, the children we find are young teenagers, as with this current group, all of whom are above twelve.
Once the interviews are over, we sleep at the village head’s house, after being treated to some amazing food and home-brewed white whiskey - let's just say it's an acquired taste! The next morning, before heading off, we are told by the village head that there has been word of yet another group of kids being trafficked through a neighbouring village. I look at Mickey expectantly, but he just shakes his head. On top of the twenty-two children we have just interviewed, we have another fifty on the waiting list for spaces at Baan Yuu Suk and other safe houses; we have neither the resources nor the capacity to do anything about it. So we have to leave them. This is something I know I’ve got to get used to, or I’ll go crazy; but as we drive home, I remember Mickey’s pronouncement about there being ten children to replace every one rescued, and rather than focusing on the twenty-two children who are now safe because of us, I can’t help thinking about the two hundred and twenty who weren’t so lucky this time round.
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