When I would walk along Sukhumvit Road, the street where most expatriates lived and tourists frequented while in Bangkok, and then wind my way down to the side street of Soi Cowboy, where sex tourists and local businessmen sought out their nightly entertainment, I’d be accosted not only by fluorescent lights, but by morality.
I’d stop and peer into dark, makeshift bars spread out like an aisle of sin with black lights that lit up the faces of young girls. Their hipless figures stood out from short skirts or bathing suits while in high heels which they maneuvered like little girls playing dress-up in their mother’s closet. Once the customers chose one bar over fifty others, the bar girls would hang on the shoulders and waists of these old men with protruding guts on holiday from the West, and then try to get overpriced drinks bought for them that included a kickback to the bar.
I’d stand watching in wonder as to how old the bar girls were. It didn’t matter how long I had lived or traveled in Asia or how well I was getting to know its women, I still could never gauge their age. Asian girls had this way of holding their hands over their mouths to giggle as if they were all fifteen years old, even when they were thirty. I wanted to know how many of these girls were actually underage girls, who had been trafficked in as slaves, and how many had come here on their own free will as a choice for a better life. I didn’t want to believe either option, but the reality was that in Asia, they co-existed.
UNICEF estimates that 1.2 million children under eighteen years of age are trafficked every year, with a third of them in Asia. More than thirty million children have been traded in Asia and the Pacific region alone over the last three decades—and the numbers are rising. Most come from the poorer regions of Thailand, the Northeast provinces, where constant droughts and pittance wages force them into the idea of a new life in the big city of Bangkok. If the girls work in the beer or go-go bars, they can earn anywhere from 2,000–30,000 baht a month (around $60 to just over $900 per month), depending on the status of the club, with the latter figure equaling far more than what the average Southeast Asian makes in one year. Others are trafficked from the region or from the poorer neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia. These are young girls who may not be getting an education, who work in the fields, and then are told false stories of empty dreams. They and their parents might sign contracts for the girls to go work as waitresses or domestic workers in the city, and then the girls spend years trying to flee their plight as indentured slaves in the sex trade. Those who do escape may eventually get caught and charged with a crime.
This was true of one case study involving nineteen-year-old, Pheap, from Cambodia, who explains her story on The Asia Foundation’s counter-trafficking multilingual Web site, TIPinAsia (Anti Trafficking In Persons in Asia).
“Two months later, the owner of [a] food shop tried to force me to wear a short skirt and work late at night. I didn’t agree to wear a short skirt. But after one week of torture from the owner of [the] food shop, being raped by a gang, and deceived to lose my virginity, I decide to agree to what the owner said and entertain customers. I felt I could not return home anymore and I was in despair. One year later, I and my three Laotian friends escaped from the food shop and filed a complaint against the owner at the police station. In the end, I was detained for three months on charges of illegal migration.”
