So far I’ve only talked about internal trafficking trends within Thailand; however, this is just one aspect to the country’s trade in people, as it’s part of a huge international trafficking network involving pretty much every country on the globe. Here’s a (very) brief run-down of Thailand’s place within that network:
Countries are generally divided into three basic categories when talking about trafficking trends; these are sending, transit and receiving. The sending countries export people to the receiving countries, and tend to be poorer, like Burma, Nepal and Bangladesh. The receiving countries are generally wealthier nations like Japan and Australia. In the middle are the transit countries, acting as a route between the senders and receivers. Some countries fit into two or more of these categories, like Thailand, which is all three, making it a huge trafficking hub within this network. The border between Burma and Thailand is especially porous, and has a constant stream of people passing back and forth between the two. Whole families are regularly brought over into Thailand illegally and sold into sex work or hard labour. You might think that bringing illegal immigrants over would discourage traffickers; however, it provides a handy loophole in a lot of cases; in Thailand, the legal age to have sex is 18. If a Thai girl was found to be an underage sex worker, she could get taken in by government welfare; however, if this girl happens to be an illegal immigrant, she will just get sent back across the border, where the whole cycle will begin again. Due to the lax security between the two countries, border towns are a prime place for ‘sex tourism’, where men both Western and Asian get taken over to Burma in groups to have sex with underage girls. This is so widespread that even my boss was offered a ‘young girl’ by a cigarette vendor when we were last across renewing my visa; the fact that I was there didn’t faze this guy at all.
So COSA’s prevention work within northern Thailand does not just deal with those children who have been trafficked internally; we also sometimes come across children who have been victims of international trafficking. One of these is Pang, a fifteen year-old Burmese girl. Mickey first heard about her when making a regular border run to renew visas; he bumped into a young woman who he had helped out of sex work when she was younger. She told him about Pang, then thirteen, who had been brought over from Burma along with her mother and siblings (there is a big trend for single mothers and their children to be trafficked together, as they apparently provide ‘better insurance’, ie; are more vulnerable and less likely to run away; lovely). Pang went to work in a bar run by an Englishman who regularly takes sex tourists over to Burma; as you can imagine, her ‘kitchen job’ didn’t remain that, and she, along with two other girls her age, was made to sleep with the bar customers. Mickey arranged for these three girls to be taken out of the bar, and set up support and schooling for them. I asked him why he didn’t try and get the police involved in taking down the, quite frankly evil, man who owned the bar (I really try not to be biased on this blog, but please, this exploitation of young women was his ‘retirement plan’!). Mickey’s reply was that the police probably already knew about the goings on in the bar. Corruption and bribery is common in Thailand, but it’s rife on the border, and there are always officials who benefit from keeping quiet about illegal sex work. Besides that, if this bar got shut down, there would always be another ‘entrepreneur’ waiting in the wings to set up another. After all, as I've said before, due to its pervasive presence sex work in Thailand is far more ‘normal’, and thus accepted, than it is in the West. It’s one of the things I’m still not used to, and I’m not sure I ever will be. Even Pang, now safely in school but still living in the same border town, walks past her old workplace every day as if it's the most natural thing in the world; in fact, on our last trip to see her she even told Mickey that she goes to visit her aunt there who works in the kitchens (she actually really does just work in the kitchens!). Most people would assume that she would want to get as far away as possible from a place that holds such horrible memories; but Pang is evidently happy in her new life, going to school and helping her mother at the weekends (she now sells clothes at a little stall). We asked her if she was interested in coming to live at the shelter, but she said she preferred to stay at her current school and live with her family. It's a prime example of both the amazing resilience of young girls here, and the absolute normality of the trafficking and sex work industry.
We’re always concerned about the children we sponsor outside of the shelter; we can visit Pang quite regularly, but six other girls are living at a safe house far off the beaten track. It’s a long trip to make; in fact in all the time I’ve been here, I’ve never visited them. This means we can’t be fully certain that they are going to school every day; they also don’t have access to the same quality of schooling and other opportunities that come with living close to a city. So we recently decided to set up a fostering system in a village we regularly do projects with and where we have good relations with the head (his daughter lives at Baan Yuu Suk as a sign of good faith and trust in COSA). This will mean that we get to monitor the girls’ wellbeing and schooling more closely, as they will be living with trusted families handpicked by the village head. It will also give the community more responsibility in monitoring and preventing trafficking in their own area. When you consider that they are dealing with not only internal trafficking, but also a flow of children coming in from neighbouring countries, this community support is more important than ever.
