Young daughters sold into the sex trade for the price of a television

WHEN Ngun Chai sold his 13-year old daughter into prostitution for the price of a television set, his wife had one regret - they did not get a good enough price for her.

La Chai discovered that her eldest daughter was not working in a nearby city, as the agent who had bought her daughter had promised, but instead was forced to sell her immature body in a Bangkok brothel to as many as eight men a day - many of them sex tourists from America, Britain and Australia. She wept.

But the tears were not for her daughter. "I should have asked for 10,000 baht (159)," she said. "Not 5,000 baht (79). He [the agent] robbed us."

The Chais live in a thatched hut in Pa Tek village on the outskirts of Mae Sai, a bustling township situated on Thailand’s northernmost border with the military state of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

Tensions here run high between the rival armies and occasionally lead to the trading of bullets across the muddy waters of the Mae Sai River that separates the two countries. Yet the sporadic outbreak of hostilities has done nothing to hinder the two main trades in town - drugs and daughters.

Though it is the smuggling of vast quantities of heroin and amphetamines from Myanmar and China through Thailand that has given this region its infamous tag - The Golden Triangle - it is the explosion in the recruitment of young girls into the Thai sex industry that has put this particular border town on the map.

Last month the town and its insidious trade were high on the agenda at the Second World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, held in Yokohama, Japan, where national governments and child protection agencies met to exchange information and review their policies.

There are no reliable statistics on the number of children working in the sex industry worldwide, but the lowest figure cited is one million. The United Nations Children’s Fund - a sponsor of the Congress - estimates that one third of sex workers in south-east Asia are aged between 12 and 17. Many get bought and sold in Mae Sai.

Every year hundreds of young girls in the town - and thousands from across the borders in Myanmar and Laos, and further afield in Yunnan province in southern China - are spirited away to brothels in Bangkok where they feed the insatiable appetite of the multibillion dollar commercial sex industry.

Few villages in the region have contributed as many daughters as Pa Tek. Populated by Burmese immigrants who have crossed the border illegally to escape persecution and poverty at the hands of the ruling military junta, most are permitted by the Thai government to live and work in the border area yet with no legal status. Many work as agricultural labourers earning less than 7,000 (111) - a year.

The depths of poverty make the area easy pickings for brothel agents, or Aunties, as the procurers of young girls are known locally. The Development and Education Programme for Daughters and Communities (DEPDC), a Mae Sai-based NGO working with local children at risk of being sold, estimates that of Pa Tek’s 800 families, seven in every 10 have sold at least one daughter into the trade.

"Agents will come to the village with orders to fill," said Sompop Jantraka, director of the DEPDC. "The people in Bangkok - mostly foreigners - can order girls like they order pizza. They will say ‘I want a girl with thin hips and big bosoms and a round bottom’ and the agents will come up here and find her. And they always deliver."

Virginity is highly prized. Fuelling the demand for young girls is ignorance about HIV/Aids transmission and myths about the curative powers of virginity. Some brothel clientele - particularly those from Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Middle East - believe that sex with a child is less risky because the child is more likely to be ‘clean’ and unable to transmit disease.

In reality, said Phil Marshall, manager of the Bangkok-based UN inter-agency project on trafficking women and children in the Mekong sub-region, children are physically more prone to bleeding, infection and disease.

Somporn Khempetch, co-ordinator of the Child Protection and Rights Centre in Mae Sai, has seen first hand the devastating impact of children in sex work. This year alone, she said, 50 girls in Pa Tek village had died from Aids. Not one of them was over 18.

Yet despite the risks, there is no shortage of parents willing to sell their children. With prices varying from 5,000 to 40,000 baht, - almost six years’ wages for most families - parental bonds in impoverished households are easily broken. So established has child trafficking become that many of the brothel agents live in the village, and are often friends or relatives of the family from which they buy the children.

"We tend to think of trafficking as involving sophisticated crime networks but much of it is really a cottage industry involving small time profiteers," said Marshall.

A new report from the International Labour Organisation, in conjunction with United Nations Development Project, supported his claim. The report’s findings, to be released later this month, challenges existing thinking on combating the recruitment of children into prostitution in Asia - suggesting that current policy to target and eradicate sophisticated people-smuggling networks is misguided.

The report’s authors claim that the majority of girls leaving their villages do so through informal networks, and with the approval of their parents. Perhaps most controversially the report found that many of the girls are willing participants in the exercise.

"What we have found is that many girls want to leave home and work elsewhere, preferably in cities," said Hans van de Glind, deputy project manager for the ILO in Bangkok, and one of the report’s authors. "It’s not so much a poverty issue because we found that girls from one village would migrate while girls from another, equally poor, village, wouldn’t. Consumerism plays a part. A girl with access to a television and who lives close to a road is more likely to migrate. Suddenly they want to have nice clothes... and an entertaining life like the people on TV."

DEPED director, Sompop, insisted the only way to deter girls going into prostitution is through education. He pointed to the success of the 1997 Thai constitution that stipulated 12 years of free education for citizens. Prior to that, he maintained, the majority of girls leaving Mae Sai were Thai. Now, he said, Thais account for less than 2% of that trade .

With fewer girls in Mae Sai leaving for the bright lights of Bangkok, agents have cast their nets wider. Hundreds of girls from Myanmar, and Yunnan and Guangxi Province in southern China, are now crossing the bridge over the Mae Sai River into Thailand every month. The border guards and immigration checkpoints inside Thailand claim they are powerless to stop them.

"This is an open border," said Wichai Promsilpa, Mae Sai’s police chief. "Thousands of people cross here every day. We cannot tell the difference between a girl coming here to buy eggs and a girl coming to work as a prostitute." He said the trade had exploded since the Thai government opened its borders with Myanmar, and promoted an active engagement policy with the military junta in Rangoon. "When I was based here 10 years ago, and the border was closed, there was no trade in people trafficking," he said.

The DEPED’s Sompop was not so sure. "The border was always easy to get across," he said. "What has changed is the demand for these girls. As long as there are foreign men coming to this country and spending large amounts of money for girls, this trade will exist. And not just exist. It will flourish."