Thailand cracks down on child slavery

Press, 13 August 1980, Page 8

Thailand cracks down on child slavery

NZPA Bangkok Thailand, stung by an assertion that child workers, including prostitutes, are being widely exploited in Bangkok has announced a big crack-down on so-called “slave factories.”

The Labour Department’s deputy chief (Mr Charoen Siriphan) said he would try to smash activities at a Bangkok railway station where children from the impoverished north-east were allegedly auctioned to factory owners like slaves.

The department would also step up . its checks of indusrial plants in Bangkok and outlying areas, fining or closing those found to be employing children under 18 without official permission. But he cautioned that the problem would remain unsolved “as long as the Government to improve living conditions of the people, especially' in the north-east,” home of most of the victims.

The announced clamp-down came after a call by the Lon-, don-based Anti-Slavery Society for United Nations Ac-

tion to stop the buying and selling of what it alleged were 3.5 million under-age labourers in Thailand, many qf them girls under 16 sold into prostitutioni.

In a report to '-the United Nations Human Rights Commission which has ben meeting in Geneva, the Anti-Sla-very Society said that children as young as, 10 could be bought at Bangkok’s -main railway station for as little as $2O for two months. “Sinister employment agencies” sometimes bought children directly from their parents in northern Thailand for $l4O to $2OO on the-under-standing that they would work for a year, the report said.

The Thai Labour Departments conceding such a problem exists, has dismissed as grossly exaggerated the accusation. that millions of children, are involved. Fewer than 6000 children under/ the.- minimum legal working age of 12-were employed, and the - department had raided several offending plants with the police to free them, Mr Charoen said. Of Thailand’s four million

industrial workers, 60,000 were aged between 12 and 8 and were allowed by the law to handle light jobs.

Another United Nations human-rights panel has been told in Geneva that hundreds of young women are being killed daily in Arab countries under an accident code designed, to protect the “family honour.”

A report submitted to the working Group on Slavery alleged that victims had their “throats cut, were buried alive, poisoned and disemboweled by their father, their elder brother, a cousin, or a paid killer.” It said that these women were condemned for having extra-marital sexual relations —willingly or by rape — “or just because they were observed exchanging a few words with a young man and thus came under suspicion of having more intimate relations.”

The report was presented by Jacqueline Thibault, a representative of the Londonbased Minority Rights Group, a private organisation that has consultative status with the United-Nations..