Thai children being lured into prostitution

Press, 25 March 1982, Page 14

Thai children being lured into prostitution

By

DELLA DENMAN,

in Bangkok

Jankaew is a pretty 13-year-old girl who comes from a poor, remote farming village 500 miles north of Thailand’s capital, Bangkok. Three months ago a welldressed southerner visited the village and arranged to hire Jankaew and two of her friends to wash dishes in a Bangkok hotel. The childrens' unsuspecting parents accepted a ?50 ‘commission’ and were told they would receive further regular payments to help support the girls’ brothers and sisters.

. Jankaew and her two friends spent their first week in Bangkok washing dishes. They quickly discovered that the ‘hotel’ was a brothel.

The manager was selling the services of about 90 girls, most of them teen-agers, for 150-200 baht ($0 to $10). He was pleased with the new arrivals from the north because he priced a virgin at $l5O to $250.

Jankaew was beaten up by

pimps when she refused to sleep with a customer. She was kept in a fifth floor room where 10 girls shared one large bed. They were given rice and vegetables twice a day and $1 pocket money a week. Letters home were torn 21 up. If relatives called the hotel guards would show them the door.

This month help, of a kind, came to Jankaew’s ‘hotel.’

The police raided it and took 90 girls and 12 pimps off to a police station. Jankaew and her friends were rescued by a human rights group, ‘Emergencv Relief for Women and Children,’ which

gave them a temporary home.

But the following day some of the 90 girls were back at another ‘hotel’ where they were taken by the brothel operator. Others had disappeared. E.R.W.C. has accused the police of forcing the girls back to prostitution. According to some of them, the brothel operator paid the police 40,000 baht(s2ooo) protection money every month, and they were allowed to sleep with them for nothing. Only when the local press publicised the scandal was the brothel operator arrested and his establishments closed

down. An investigation into police involvement has been completed but the results have not been made public. Child prostitution is an accepted phenomenon in Bangkok, which has an estimated 1000 brothels and 100,000 ‘city ladies,’ as they are known. The police seem to turn a blind eye. In impoverished rural areas, particularly in the north, families with large numbers of children often resign themselves to the exploitation of their daughters because they need the money so badly. Some girls earn small fortunes and return to their village to marry and go on to lead happy lives. The Government is now concerned that prostitution rackets and the rising crime rate, one of the highest in the

world, are giving Thailand a bad . name. Last year over 12,000 people or an average of 35 a day, were murdered, many of them in simple family arguments, business disputes or lovers’ tiffs. ‘Parangs’, or foreigners, are not immune — four tourists have been shot dead in the past four months.

Tourism is the country's second biggest revenue earner and the police have just launched a major antivice drive to clean up Bangkok before the city’s 200th anniversary celebrations in April, which are expected to attract three times the usual number of tourists.

The military, special police teams, and defence volunteers ■ are to be stationed at 15 main tourist sites during the celebrations and close checks are to be kept on 20,000 prisoners who will be freed this year in a ‘bicentennial’ amnesty. Copyright — London “Observer” Service.