Modern Babylon?

Prostituting Children in Thailand

Heather Montgomery

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781782384762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Children's Studies in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Child prostitution became one of the key concerns of the international community in the 1990s. World congresses were held, international and national laws were changed and concern over "cemmercially sexually exploited children" rose dramatically. Rarely, however, were the children who worked as prostitutes consulted of questioned in this process, and the voices of these children brought into focus. This book is the first to address the children directly, to examine their daily lives, their motivations and their perceptions of what they do. Based on 15 months of fieldwork in a Thai tourist community that survived through child prostitution, this book draws on anthropological theories on childhood and kinship to contextualize the experiences of this group of Thai child prostitutes and to contrast these with the stereotypes held of them by those outside their community.

CHAPTER 1

HISTORY AND CONTEXT

Myths and Stereotypes

It is, perhaps, a truism that activists in the West need child prostitutes in developing countries far more than child prostitutes need the activists; they fulfil a special need and function in Western iconography. At some level, there is an agreement about what is expected of child prostitutes and how they will be portrayed. The child prostitute has taken on such iconic status that each child’s suffering is no longer seen as the suffering of an individual but has become a stereotype of martyrdom. The assumptions behind this have not been examined, and yet it seems obvious to ask; why is the picture received through the media or through the case studies of the NGOs so uniform, with such repetitive ingredients? In his work on street children Hecht notes the particular agenda that many researchers have, whatever their background, and he describes ‘a loosely agreed upon recipe. The staple ingredients include a definition of the “problem”, a pinch of history about street children, a sprig of statistics about the numbers of street children, and a final shake in the form of suggestions for policy makers (1994: 4).’ With slightly different ingredients, the same is true for child prostitutes.

At the very outset then, the stereotypes of child prostitutes that are received must be recognised and challenged. Journalists know what child prostitutes should look like, so they find HIV-positive children, rescued from brothels, who can be recognised as ‘the real thing’. The children in their turn know what is expected of them, what they need to do or say to get sympathy and they play the role as best they can. Both sides are telling the stories that are expected of them, while never recognising that the narratives which they present as truth, are only partial. Any examination of child prostitution must be an analysis of the discourses surrounding child prostitutes and the stories and mythology that influence views of them. What stories do the children tell each other and themselves? What do they tell an anthropologist, a journalist, an advocate, or others who demand their stories? What stories do these people then tell others?

I will give just two examples here of the myth, before going on to argue that the stories these articles tell fulfil the needs of the campaigners and advocates, not those of the children. Child prostitutes can suffer enormously through their work but they should not be made to suffer further by being given a pre-arranged script which denies their own history and further reduces their identity. The following two articles appeared within a month of each other during one of several peaks of media interest in the problem of child prostitution and, especially, the issue of child-sex tourists. I have chosen them out of a collection of hundreds, simply because they are so typical. They were no more sensational than usual, neither were they outstandingly well written: they did not radically change anything. Indeed, they are formulaic and are stories that have been told previously. The names of the children have been changed, as have their home towns and even the nationalities of their clientele, but these are old stories with a set pattern and an inevitable consequence. As with folk tales or fairy stories, there is even a certain satisfaction in knowing how they will turn out.

The first is the lead paragraph from the Australian newspaper, The Sunday Age, published on 18 April 1993. Although it goes on to give more detail and coverage of the problem, in true journalistic style, it sums up the story in the first paragraph. Under the headline ‘Bo, 12, taken to a hotel and forced to have sex,’ it tells the girl’s harrowing story. It is accompanied by a picture, purportedly of Bo with a younger child, but it makes no attempt to hide her face or shield her identity.

‘At 10, Bo was tricked into prostitution after the death of her mother and father and substantially left without family.

For five years in a brothel resort in the southern Thai resort town of Songkhla, Bo endured countless Thai and Western men, including many Australians, whom the brothel owner called ‘kangaroos’.

The euphoria of escape has been short-lived. Bo has been diagnosed HIV-positive. She is not expected to celebrate her 25th birthday. She is now 17 or 18.’ (Sunday Age 1993: 10).

The second article, entitled ‘Impoverished Thai parents sell girls into prostitution,’ is by Gayle Reeves and was published in the Dallas Morning Star of March 21, 1993. It is a longer article which gives the name and addresses of an organisation at the end of it so its readers can find out more information or send a donation if they wish. Like the previous story, it is based on an interview the child gave the journalist in her home village after returning from a brothel.

At an age when many American teens are trying to talk Dad out of the car keys, she sits on the floor of a shabby cottage, trying to talk her frail, gaunt father out of sending her back to a brothel. At 17, she has already worked in three brothels, because of the need to help support her ailing parents. In the dim interior of the cottage purchased with her prostitute’s wages, her father argues with social workers who want her to live and study at their shelter. The thatched cottage holds a few possessions: a charcoal brazier, a water jug, two battered tin cups and, on the room’s one table, a television set. She is their only child, the father says. The brothel agent owns the land on which the house sits, and that day he has threatened to evict them. The father has borrowed money from the agent, with his daughter’s work as collateral. What will happen to them if they lose her wages? He does not understand that, soon enough, he may lose her anyway. She has the AIDS virus.’ (Reeves 1993).

Bo and the anonymous child in the second article have familiar stories. Abandoned by their parents into brothel life, they are rescued by good outsiders for a brief period of happiness before dying. In countless other articles, the pattern is repeated: betrayal, abuse, rescue, death. There is a neatness and coherence to this story which is compelling; no loose ends and a predictable outcome. The reader is invited to be outraged at the story, and to pity the victims but, ultimately, there is no escape from the plot and nothing that can be done to help these children. Once the story begins, it can only end, unhappily ever after, with the child’s death. Anything else is too complex, too difficult to deal with, or too much like ‘academic voyeurism’.

Yet there are other stories too, those which the children themselves tell to each other and sometimes to outsiders. They too are constructs, events are structured in a particular order to make particular points and, like the articles above, they are full of omissions and maybe exaggeration but, unlike the journalists or the campaigners, the children are not allowed to tell their own stories or not believed when they do so. There are various ways in which communities and individuals remember, and construct their memories, as Connerton has shown (1989), and yet only one ‘true’ history is allowed in regards to child prostitutes. The tendency to see children as unknowing or uncomprehending is firmly rooted in both the academic and the NGO worlds. There is an inherent bias in many studies of children that sees them as ‘less than’ rather than ‘different from’ adults and therefore their opinions and behaviour are interpreted and analysed by adults as incomplete and incompetent (Waksler 1991). When children speak, especially in relation to sensitive topics like prostitution, they are usually dismissed. They are accorded no authority for their views, and are seldom allowed to decide what is in their own best interest. On an issue like prostitution, it is assumed to be so apparent what the child’s best interest is that there is little room for dissent from the child.

The pattern is so well known and so often repeated that it is difficult to remember that there are other routes into prostitution, often less dramatic and more complicated than the previous examples, and that there are ways out of it other than death. In 1993, the same year in which these two articles were published, I went to Thailand to conduct an anthropological study of a community which survived through the prostitution of its children. I was interested in how the community survived, what both the children and the parents thought of prostitution, and how they justified it and rationalised it to themselves. The study of child prostitution seemed to be an area where anthropology could make a key contribution, in that, while economic and demographic studies as well as many speculative articles had been published, no-one had carried out extensive research with the children themselves, studying their home lives and their own perceptions and explanations. There was no context based research or any analysis of the children’s experiences and perceptions which only extended fieldwork could provide. In all the literature that I had read on the subject, the voices of the children themselves were noticeably absent.

The study I carried out was based in a tourist resort in Thailand. I worked within a community of people who earned their means of survival through the prostitution of their children. I too had a very clear idea of how I expected a child prostitute to behave or look and although I expected some variation from the usual stereotype, I thought I would recognise the children when I saw them. However, what became clear very quickly was that no-one in this community identified themselves with the images and stereotypes of child prostitutes. What they experienced was not the same as what they read about or were told about. This is not to say that the exploitation they suffered was any less painful or difficult to deal with, only that they responded to it and analysed it in very different ways. Their stories were much less neat than the ones used for campaigning purposes or written up in the newspapers. Here were people whose lives contained messy contradictions, loose ends which were never tied up, and who were still struggling to make sense of their situation.

The stories that they told me reflected this and made it impossible for me to look only at prostitution while ignoring the wider social forces of family, community, economy and globalisation. In December 1993, I met a thirteen-year-old named Daeng who was working as a prostitute. I asked her to tell me her story as she remembered it. Over several days she told me how she had become a prostitute and mentioned the key events in her history, which she felt, explained and influenced her life.

‘My mother and father separated soon after I was born. My father supported me financially but I didn’t live with him and his new wife. I never saw my mother and I was never given any money by her. Instead, I stayed with a relative of my father, but my father visited regularly. His new wife also came to visit and, although I didn’t like her at first, she was always kind to me and always brought things when she came to visit. Even after my stepmother had children of her own, with my father, she continued to treat me the same and was always very fair and I liked her for that. My mother came to visit when I was nine or so and decided that I should go and live with her. But I hadn’t seen her for so long, and she seemed like a stranger to me. I didn’t want to go with her at all but everyone pressured me to go, so I went with her to where she lived. I liked my grandmother and we became very close but this caused problems and generated hostility from my mother’s other relatives. They were suspicious of me and thought I would be left a lot of money by my grandmother when she died, while they would be cut out.

I lived at my grandmother’s for another year. When I was ten and living with her, a family friend came to the house one evening while I was asleep and raped me. My grandmother was very kind, looked after me and comforted me and said that it would be a secret between us and that no-one else would ever know. I continued to live with her for a while but the following year, I came to Bangkok with my mother. We tried many jobs, first, delivering goods but that was very hard. Then I worked on a construction site but that was also too difficult, so I left. After that, I got a job in a gas station for another three or four months in Bangkok and then decided to move down to a tourist resort. I had an aunt who worked in a bar down here and she invited me down to work in the same bar. I didn’t want to do this so I got a job in a restaurant instead for a few months and then in a shop where I worked until I got fired.

When I was working at this shop, I met a friend called Toi who worked with her mother on a noodle stall nearby. We started to go to discos together which annoyed our parents. I began to have several boyfriends around then. Toi had fallen out with her parents on a number of occasions and kept running away. She had a sister who worked in a nearby brothel and Toi would frequently stay with her. Once when she came back, her mother took her to the doctor who diagnosed three different kinds of sexually transmitted diseases. One night we went to a disco and stayed out all night. The next day when I telephoned work to say that I was ill, they fired me. As I lived at the shop, I had nowhere to go and so Toi decided that she would not go home either. Instead, she and I moved in with Toi’s boyfriend who worked as a waiter in a bar. He was twenty-one and already living with another girl who was very jealous of us. Soon enough, I became his lover too and Toi was furious.

Finally, his girlfriend threw us out because she thought we drank too much and had too many boyfriends. We did not know what to do so we went to an entertainment agency which placed us as dancers. We were expected to have sex with customers and we could keep their tips on top of the 2,600 baht a month (about £70) that we were earning. How else are we to get money? And anyway, whatever happens in there it’s no worse than what I’ve already done.

What I really wanted to do was to become a nurse, but people like me don’t become nurses. All I want now is a well-paid job so that I can go home with my head held up and help my father and stepmother. My father has rheumatism and I want some money for him. I don’t care about my mother. I hate her. She never visited me here except one time when she tried to find me in the shop that I had been working in before I got fired. I wasn’t there but because I had only just left, my stuff was there. So my mother collected my clothes, my radio and my salary. Then she stole them. She has even written to me and asked me to send money home and I will, but not to her. I’ll only send it to my father! For the money though, I’ll stay here. I enjoy this place. There is a lot to do here and I have a lot of friends to go to discos with.’

A closer study reveals the variety of forms of prostitution and highlights the danger of privileging one particular image. The constant repetition of the same story containing the same elements ultimately dulls its impact. Certain things are expected of child prostitutes; they should be kidnapped, trafficked, forced into debt-bondage or tricked into prostitution. These are the real victims, the unfortunate ones deserving of sympathy who are fundamentally ‘innocent’, while others who live at home, work part-time and refuse the pity that would be offered to them if only they fitted, are seen as the ‘guilty’ ones to be condemned and despised. Holland sums this up eloquently in her book What is a Child?

‘The child who appeals to the viewer, humbly requesting help, has remained the mainstream of aid imagery. But children’s actual response to conditions of deprivation may well refuse qualities of childhood which give them their pathos. It is less easy to deal with children who have become fighters, workers or brutalised dwellers on the streets.’ (1992: 161).

What cannot be dealt with is treated with great unease, especially when children do develop strategies for fighting back or just for coping.

It is these children, who do survive by any means possible, that are rarely heard about; the children who exist in grey areas. These are often the children on the doorstep, the child prostitutes of Britain who are not the adorable innocents in Thailand or the Philippines, snatched from their families. They are the rejects of society, sent out of care or welfare homes at sixteen, or sexually abused at home but ultimately abandoned by society (Finkelhor 1979a, Sereny 1984, Weisberg 1985, Lowman 1987, Campagna and Poffenberger 1988, Gibsonainyette et al. 1988, Allsebrook and Swift 1989, Widom and Ames 1994, Lee and O’Brien 1995, Snell 1995). Their lives do not have the grand tragedy of abused innocence and they are rarely as ‘attractive’, either physically or emotionally, as distressed Third World children in rural settings. Their poverty and helplessness are too mundane and too normal to warrant any special consideration. They are, quite simply, not exotic enough. They do not fit neatly into the stereotype that has been created and society responds by ignoring them, being fearful of them and blaming them for their own problems. New laws have been passed throughout the world, promising stiff penalties for men who have sex with anyone under eighteen abroad, but there is no such protection for young people of a similar age in this country. They are covered by adult laws on prostitution and ages of consent, not specific legislation.

Like child prostitutes in Britain, Daeng is positioned in an uncomfortable grey area. She is clearly not a helpless victim but, equally apparently, she is a child who needs support. She does not fit easily into the stereotype of child prostitute and reactions to her story will be very different from reactions to Bo’s. It is easy to dismiss her as not ‘really’ a child prostitute and to place her way down the scale of deserving children, or to emphasis certain events such as the rape and ignore the rest. Yet her account of her life and the events that lead up to her becoming a prostitute are much more complicated and her family life and lack of relationship with her mother are obviously vitally relevant to her. Cases such as Daeng’s are common and should add more complexity to analyses of the issue but, often, they are glossed over in place of unequivocal vignettes which need no analysis and admit no ambiguity.

I am not suggesting that other writers are unaware of these difficulties or that the first two stories are necessarily sensationalised and distorted. Different types of child prostitution exist and the kidnapping, debt-bondage and abuse of young girls in brothels has been well documented (Koompraphant n.d., Heyzer 1986, Lee-Wright 1990, Centre for the Protection of Children’s Rights 1991, Muecke 1992, Asia Watch 1993). Also, they...