prostitution2

"Lin Lin" was thirteen years old when she was recruited by an agent for work in
Thailand. Her father took $480 from the agent with the understanding that his
daughter would pay the loan back out of her earnings. The agent took "Lin Lin" to
Bangkok, and three days later she was taken to the Ran Dee Prom brothel. "Lin
Lin" did not know what was going on until a man came into her room and started
touching her breasts and body and then forced her to have sex. For the next two
years, "Lin Lin" worked in various parts of Thailand in four different brothels, all
but one owned by the same family. The owners told her she would have to keep
prostituting herself until she paid off her father's debt. Her clients, who often
included police, paid the owner $4 each time. If she refused a client's demands,
she was slapped and threatened by the owner. She worked every day except for
the two days off each month she was allowed for her menstrual period. Once she
had to borrow money to pay for medicine to treat a painful vaginal infection. This
amount was added to her debt. On January 18, 1993 the Crime Suppression
Division of the Thai police raided the brothel in which "Lin Lin" worked, and she
was taken to a shelter run by a local non-governmental organization. She was
fifteen years old, had spent over two years of her young life in compulsory
prostitution, and tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV.
"Lin Lin" is just one of thousands of Burmese women and girls who have been
trafficked and sold into what amounts to female sexual slavery in Thailand. In the
last two years, Thai NGOs estimate that at a minimum, some twenty thousand
Burmese women and girls are suffering Lee's fate, or worse, and that ten
thousand new recruits come in every year. They are moved from one brothel to
another as the demand for new faces dictates, and often end up being sent back
to Burma after a year or two to recruit their own successors.
These Burmese women and girls are only a fraction of the estimated 800,000 to
two million prostitutes currently working in Thailand. We focus this report on the
Burmese trafficking victims because of the range of violations of
internationally-recognized human rights that they suffer, from debt bondage to
arbitrary detention, and because government officials, particularly form Thailand,
are complicit in these violations both by direct involvement in the brothels and by
failing to enforce Thailand's obligations under both national and international law.
The Women's Rights Project and Asia Watch, both divisions of Human Rights
Watch, traveled to Thailand to investigate the trafficking of Burmese women and
girls into prostitution and to assess the responsibility of the Thai government for
this problem. We made three trips to Thailand: in September 1992 for three
weeks, in January and February 1993 for three weeks, and July 1993 for one
week. On the first trip, an Asia Watch staff member fluent in Thai was
accompanied by a consultant who was fluent in Burmese and Shan. Together they
interviewed thirty Burmese women and girls in depth, most from remote rural
villages in Shan state, most from peasant or agricultural laborer backgrounds.
They ranged in age from twelve to twenty-two, although the average age was
seventeen. All but one had been lured to Thailand by the prospect of improving
their economic situation. Only four knew they would be working as prostitutes,
and even those four had no idea of what the actual work would be like.
Most of our interviews took place at emergency shelters for trafficking victims
run by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Chiangmai and Bangkok. We
were also able to speak with women and girls detained at the Immigration
Detention Center in Bangkok. In the course of the three visits, we conducted
interviews along the Thai-Burmese border in Mae Sai, Three Pagodas Pass and
Ranong. In addition to our own interviews, we had access to other primary source
material, including the transcripts of twenty-one interviews with Burmese women
conducted by an NGO in Chiangmai in October 1992. We interviewed officials in
Mae Sai, Chiangmai and Bangkok, including Police Colonel Surasak Suttharom,
the deputy commander of the Crime Suppression Division of the Thai police, and
Dr. Saisuree Chutikul, a member of the Thai cabinet in 1992 and, after the
September 1992 elections, an adviser to the new Chuan administration. Finally,
we consulted with academic specialists such as Dr. Vicharn Vithayasai of the
Faculty of Medicine at Chiangmai University.
In the interviews with the women and girls, we realized that simple questions and
answers masked a much more complex reality. For example, many of the girls,
when asked if they knew they would be working in prostitution before they came
to Thailand, said, "Yes." But when we asked what they understood prostitution to
be, we would get responses such as "wearing Western clothes in a restaurant."
Likewise, when asked if they were able to leave the brothels freely, many initially
said, "Yes." But when asked if in fact they had ever tried to leave, almost all said
they had not dared to do so because they had no money or because they feared
being arrested or sold to another brothel. When we asked if they could refuse
clients, again, the answer was almost unanimously, "Yes." Yet asked to give
specific examples, most could not, and it turned out that refusal was almost
unheard of because the women and girls feared repercussions from the brothel
owner and pimps. Only slowly did the reality of recruitment and life in the brothels
emerge.
Throughout this report, we draw on material from the original thirty interviews for
examples, using Burmese pseudonyms for the real names of the victims.