Research for this report was undertaken by an Asia Watch staff member who must remain anonymous, with additional research by the Women's Rights Project. It was written by the Asia Watch researcher together with Dorothy Q. Thomas, director of the Women's Rights Project and Sidney Jones, executive director of Asia Watch. Sarah Lai of the Women's Rights Project researched and wrote Chapter VII. The report was edited by Thomas and Jones. We would like to acknowledge with gratitude and admiration the help of many people in Thailand, both Thai and Burmese, who cannot be named.

I. INTRODUCTION

"Lin Lin" was thirteen years old when she was recruited by an agent for work in Thailand. Her father took $480 from the agent with the understanding that his daughter would pay the loan back out of her earnings. The agent took "Lin Lin" to Bangkok, and three days later she was taken to the Ran Dee Prom brothel. "Lin Lin" did not know what was going on until a man came into her room and started touching her breasts and body and then forced her to have sex. For the next two years, "Lin Lin" worked in various parts of Thailand in four different brothels, all but one owned by the same family. The owners told her she would have to keep prostituting herself until she paid off her father's debt. Her clients, who often included police, paid the owner $4 each time. If she refused a client's demands, she was slapped and threatened by the owner. She worked every day except for the two days off each month she was allowed for her menstrual period. Once she had to borrow money to pay for medicine to treat a painful vaginal infection. This amount was added to her debt. On January 18, 1993 the Crime Suppression Division of the Thai police raided the brothel in which "Lin Lin" worked, and she was taken to a shelter run by a local non-governmental organization. She was fifteen years old, had spent over two years of her young life in compulsory prostitution, and tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV.

"Lin Lin" is just one of thousands of Burmese women and girls who have been trafficked and sold into what amounts to female sexual slavery in Thailand. In the last two years, Thai NGOs estimate that at a minimum, some twenty thousand Burmese women and girls are suffering Lee's fate, or worse, and that ten thousand new recruits come in every year. They are moved from one brothel to another as the demand for new faces dictates, and often end up being sent back to Burma after a year or two to recruit their own successors.

These Burmese women and girls are only a fraction of the estimated 800,000 to two million prostitutes currently working in Thailand. We focus this report on the Burmese trafficking victims because of the range of violations of internationally-recognized human rights that they suffer, from debt bondage to arbitrary detention, and because government officials, particularly form Thailand, are complicit in these violations both by direct involvement in the brothels and by failing to enforce Thailand's obligations under both national and international law.

The Women's Rights Project and Asia Watch, both divisions of Human Rights Watch, traveled to Thailand to investigate the trafficking of Burmese women and girls into prostitution and to assess the responsibility of the Thai government for this problem. We made three trips to Thailand: in September 1992 for three weeks, in January and February 1993 for three weeks, and July 1993 for one week. On the first trip, an Asia Watch staff member fluent in Thai was accompanied by a consultant who was fluent in Burmese and Shan. Together they interviewed thirty Burmese women and girls in depth, most from remote rural villages in Shan state, most from peasant or agricultural laborer backgrounds. They ranged in age from twelve to twenty-two, although the average age was seventeen. All but one had been lured to Thailand by the prospect of improving their economic situation. Only four knew they would be working as prostitutes, and even those four had no idea of what the actual work would be like.

Most of our interviews took place at emergency shelters for trafficking victims run by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Chiangmai and Bangkok. We were also able to speak with women and girls detained at the Immigration Detention Center in Bangkok. In the course of the three visits, we conducted interviews along the Thai-Burmese border in Mae Sai, Three Pagodas Pass and Ranong. In addition to our own interviews, we had access to other primary source material, including the transcripts of twenty-one interviews with Burmese women conducted by an NGO in Chiangmai in October 1992. We interviewed officials in Mae Sai, Chiangmai and Bangkok, including Police Colonel Surasak Suttharom, the deputy commander of the Crime Suppression Division of the Thai police, and Dr. Saisuree Chutikul, a member of the Thai cabinet in 1992 and, after the September 1992 elections, an adviser to the new Chuan administration. Finally, we consulted with academic specialists such as Dr. Vicharn Vithayasai of the Faculty of Medicine at Chiangmai University.

In the interviews with the women and girls, we realized that simple questions and answers masked a much more complex reality. For example, many of the girls, when asked if they knew they would be working in prostitution before they came to Thailand, said, "Yes." But when we asked what they understood prostitution to be, we would get responses such as "wearing Western clothes in a restaurant." Likewise, when asked if they were able to leave the brothels freely, many initially

said, "Yes." But when asked if in fact they had ever tried to leave, almost all said they had not dared to do so because they had no money or because they feared being arrested or sold to another brothel. When we asked if they could refuse clients, again, the answer was almost unanimously, "Yes." Yet asked to give specific examples, most could not, and it turned out that refusal was almost unheard of because the women and girls feared repercussions from the brothel owner and pimps. Only slowly did the reality of recruitment and life in the brothels emerge.

Throughout this report, we draw on material from the original thirty interviews for examples, using Burmese pseudonyms for the real names of the victims.

THE NATURE OF THE ABUSE

The trafficking of Burmese women and girls into Thailand is appalling in its efficiency and ruthlessness. Driven by the desire to maximize profit and by the fear of HIV/AIDS, agents acting on behalf of brothel owners infiltrate ever more remote areas of Burma seeking unsuspecting recruits. Virgin girls are particularly sought after because they bring a higher price and pose less of a threat of exposure to sexually transmitted disease. The agents promise the women and girls jobs as waitresses or dishwashers, with good pay and new clothes. Family members or friends typically accompany the women and girls to the Thai border, where they receive a payment ranging from 10,000 baht ($400) to 20,000 baht ($800) from someone associated with the brothel. This payment becomes the debt, usually doubled with interest, that the women and girls must work to pay off, not by waitressing or dishwashing, but through sexual servitude.

Once the women and girls are confined in the Thai brothels, escape is virtually impossible. Any Burmese woman or girl who steps outside the brothel risks physical punishment, retribution against her parents or relatives for defaulting on her debt and/or arrest as an illegal immigrant -- by the same police who are often the brothel owner's best clients. The worst brothels in the southern Thai town of Ranong are surrounded by electrified barbed wire and armed guards.

The women and girls face a wide range of abuse, including debt bondage; illegal confinement; forced labor; rape; physical abuse; exposure to HIV/AIDS; and in some cases, murder. Initially, young girls like "Lin Lin" are kept in what is known as the hong bud boree sut, literally "the room to unveil virgins." Later they are moved to the hong du, or "selection" room, where they are displayed in windowed enclosures wearing numbers. The sex occurs in small cubicles where the women and girls also live and where the bed is often little more than a concrete bunk. Working conditions are inhumane. The women and girls work ten to eighteen hours a day, about twenty-five days a month. They average between five and fifteen clients a day. Health care and birth control education are minimal. In some instances, pregnant women are forced either to abort illegally or to continue to service clients well into their pregnancies. Many of the girls and women are brought to Thailand as virgins; most return with HIV. Fifty to seventy percent of the women and girls we interviewed were HIV positive.

Their HIV/AIDS positive status frequently results in further abuse, often while the women and girls are in official custody. We found that many of the women and girls were tested for HIV, without their informed consent and sometimes without even their knowledge, not only by brothel owners but also by public health officials. Those who were aware of having been tested were often denied the results of their own tests, even as outcomes were made available to brothel owners, immigration officials and others. This breach of medical confidentiality not only violates Thai law and the women and girls' fundamental rights to privacy, but may have dangerous consequences for the treatment of these women and girls on return to Burma.

The government of Thailand recognizes that trafficking in women and girls is widespread and, particularly in the last two years under Prime Ministers Anand Panyarachun and Chuan Leekpai, has undertaken some limited reforms, both legal and institutional, which are described more fully in the next chapter. In November 1992, for example, Prime Minister Chuan pledged to crack down on child and forced prostitution. A number of high-profile raids on illegal brothels followed. But more than a year later, the trafficking of Burmese women and girls continues virtually unchecked and according to some local activists, is on the increase. Despite clear evidence of direct official involvement in every stage of the trafficking process, not a single Thai officer, to our knowledge, has been investigated or prosecuted except in one highly publicized case of murder.⁽¹⁾ For the most part, agents, pimps, brothel owners and clients have also been exempt from punishment. In fact, the main victims of the Chuan administration's crackdown on forced and child prostitution appear to be the victims of such abuse themselves, whom police routinely subject to discriminatory and wrongful arrest and summary deportation.

Legal safeguards are either lacking or poorly enforced. The Thai government has yet to ratify or accede to most of the international instruments relevant to trafficking in women and girls, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the 1949 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others. Nonetheless, under customary international law, Thailand has an obligation to eliminate slavery and all slave-related practices, including trafficking and debt bondage. In addition, Thailand's obligations under the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), to which Thailand acceded in 1985, further requires the government to eliminate discrimination against women and to take all appropriate measures to suppress trafficking in women and girls. Thai national law also prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, trafficking in women and girls, prostitution, procurement for prostitution, debt bondage, illegal confinement and rape and physical assault. Yet, despite these clear international and national obligations and prohibitions, the Thai government has consistently failed to punish offenders and instead has routinely arrested female victims as illegal immigrants or prostitutes or both and summarily deported them back to Burma.

This discriminatory pattern of arrest is made all that much more egregious by the fact that under both national and international law, the women and girls should never have been arrested in the first instance. Under international anti-trafficking norms and Thai domestic law, trafficking victims are clearly exempt from fines or imprisonment and guaranteed safe repatriation back to their country of origin. The Thai government's attitude toward Burmese trafficking victims contrasts with its efforts on behalf of Thai women trafficked into Japan and subsequently arrested as illegal immigrants. When the Japanese government indicated in July 1993 that it planned to crack down on illegal immigrants in August, Thai officials urged Japan to "waive the use of jail as a punishment for all Thais facing arrest and secure reliable measures to protect Thai women from harassment by their gangster bosses."⁽²⁾ Thailand also urged Japan to pay all repatriation costs and to form a "repatriation committee" to arrange the workers' safe return to Thailand.

Not only are the arrests of the Burmese women and girls in Thailand discriminatory, but they are carried out with little respect for the women's and girls' fundamental rights to due process. They often are conducted without warrant, and the women and girls are subsequently held, often for long periods, without charge or trial. Where legal procedures do occur, they are routinely conducted in Thai, a language that the women and girls for the most part cannot understand. In the course of their detention and deportation the Burmese women and girls often experience horrific prison conditions and routine custodial abuse.

The process of deporting Burmese women and girls to the border involves a new round of extortion and sexual abuse as Thai officials exploit the pervasive fear these women and girls have of being handed back to Burmese authorities. A Thai policeman in a border detention center may offer to bring a girl back to Bangkok if she will sleep with him or simply take a woman detainee by force with little fear of repercussion. Getting down from a bus or truck at the deportation site, without money and terrified of being arrested once they cross the border, Burmese women and girls find themselves surrounded by brothel agents offering them jobs -- and the cycle begins again. The deportation process in many cases thus becomes a revolving door back to the brothels.

Information about what happens to the women and girls once they return to Burma is not readily available. Under the State Law and Order Restoration Council or SLORC, Burma has acquired one of the worst human rights records in Asia. No domestic human rights organizations exist, and no international non-governmental human rights organizations are allowed access to the country. Giving information to such organizations or to journalists is grounds for arrest, and surreptitious efforts to make inquiries about returnees can put the latter in serious jeopardy.

This much is clear, even when the women and girls have finally returned to their country of origin: after months and in some cases years of sexual enslavement, they still are not safe from abuse. Rather than returning them safely to their families, the Burmese government often arrests the women and girls for having left the country illegally or engaged in prostitution, both of which constitute offenses under Burmese law.

THE NEED FOR ACTION

At one point, during the administration of Prime Minister Anand Panyarachun in 1992, the Thai authorities began to recognize that no justification, legal or otherwise, existed for arresting and deporting the Burmese women and girls and subjecting them to near certain abuse on return to Burma. Working with Burmese authorities, then Minister Saisuree Chutikul arranged an official repatriation of ninety-five Burmese women and girls.

This unprecedented official repatriation process was plagued with problems, most notably the lengthy remand of the women and girls without charge or trial to penal reform institutions pending their repatriation; official Thai complicity in discrimination against non-ethnic Burman women and girls; and lack of follow-up once the official repatriation was complete. Nonetheless, it marked an important effort by Thai and Burmese authorities to craft an approach to trafficking victims responsive to their plight and consistent with international law. Unfortunately, rather than further refining this approach, the Thai government appears to have abandoned it entirely.

But Thailand has the greatest responsibility for protecting the women and girls whose human rights are violated on its territory, with the knowledge and complicity of its officials. The Thai government must ensure that Burmese women and girls trafficked into prostitution and forced into a situation tantamount to sexual slavery are not punished and that all those complicit in the trafficking are prosecuted and punished to the fullest extent of the law. To this end, Thailand should expand legal protection for the Burmese women and girls through accession to or ratification of relevant international standards and exempt them (and all others forced or lured into prostitution) from punishment under domestic laws relating to immigration and prostitution. The Thai government must also discontinue summary deportation and institute non-penal alternatives to assist the women and girls to leave the brothels and return safely to Burma. It should also actively investigate and prosecute all those involved in trafficking and brothel operations, with particular attention to its own police force and government officials who collaborate with or profit from those operations.

Many observers, despairing that the Thai government will meet its international obligations to protect trafficking victims, have advocated a greater role for Thai non-governmental organizations. These NGOs have played a vital role in raising the visibility of the problem of trafficking and its attendant abuses, advocating important legal reforms and providing services to the tiny fraction of trafficking victims who have the good fortune to end up in NGO-run shelters. But NGOs cannot and should not be expected to shoulder responsibilities that the Thai government has shirked. They are woefully underfunded and understaffed. Even unlimited resources to help women "rescued" from the brothels, in the absence of the government's political will to punish the traffickers, would only increase the demand for services without in any way addressing the root cause of the problem.

The international community can help. For well over a century and at a minimum since the Slavery Convention of 1926, the international community has condemned slavery and slavery-related practices and worked toward the abolition of such abuse wherever it occurs. Female sexual slavery has also been clearly condemned, most notably in the 1949 Convention on the Suppression of Traffic in Persons and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others. But unlike other slavery-related practices, female sexual slavery routinely escapes effective national and international sanction. Often it is mischaracterized as prostitution or is dismissed as an abuse perpetrated by private individuals for which states have no responsibility under international human rights law. As a result, at the close of the twentieth century, female sexual slavery, which involves the transport and sale of women into forced prostitution, servile forms of marriage and other forms of compulsory sexual service is widely and increasingly practiced, not only in Thailand but also in many other parts of the world.

The international community must step up pressure not only on the Thai government, to meet its international obligations, but the Burmese government as well. Just as the Thai police raid the same brothels they patronize and arrest women as illegal immigrants whom they may have hired the night before, Burmese officials arrest deported women and girls for illegal departure whose recruitment to Thailand they may have facilitated by taking bribes from brothel agents. It is incumbent on the Burmese government to investigate and prosecute those involved in trafficking on the Burmese side of the border. Just as important for the safety and well-being of the women and girls, however, is pressure on SLORC to allow regular access to Burmese villages and detention centers by international human rights and humanitarian organizations.

None of the measures needed to stop trafficking and related abuses will take place without concerted international pressure because there is too much money to be made from the practice. This pressure must come from countries like the United States and Japan which have close relations with Thailand; from the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) which also have an interest in ending trafficking; from China, whose women are also being sold into Thai brothels and from international organizations such as the United Nations.

It is long past time for the international community to realize that women and children in many parts of the world are being sold on the international market like any other commodity. No justification whatsoever exist for presuming the consent of the victims to such treatment or for failing to hold their abusers accountable.

II. BACKGROUND

A. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC FACTORS

The number of Burmese women recruited to work in Thai brothels has soared in recent years as an indirect consequence of repression in Burma (Myanmar)⁽³⁾ by the ruling State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) and of improved economic relations between Burma and Thailand.

Human rights violations, war and ethnic discrimination had displaced hundreds of thousands of Burmese between 1962, when Burmese strongman Ne Win took power in a coup, and September 1988, when mass street protests against the government in Rangoon and elsewhere led to a crackdown by the Burmese military. An estimated 3,000 people were killed, and thousands fled the country. Mounting domestic and international pressure led the government to hold elections in May 1990 that the opposition, led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, won handily. The military, however, refused to hand over power and tightened its control, arresting thousands and forcing thousands more to flee into Thailand or join forces with several armed ethnic insurgencies operating along the Thai and Chinese borders.

Despite some cosmetic changes and some widely publicized prisoner releases (not including Aung San Suu Kyi who remains under house arrest), little has changed since then.⁽⁴⁾ Late 1991 saw the beginning of one of the most intensive dry-season offensives ever mounted by Burmese troops against minorities living along the borders of Thailand, China and Bangladesh. The military operations appeared to be directed not only at ending armed insurgencies which had been active along the borders since the 1940s, but also at promoting an ethnically Burman, Buddhist culture.⁽⁵⁾

By the end of 1993, fighting was at its lowest level in years, and SLORC was engaged in a concerted effort to negotiate cease-fires with different minority groups. But throughout 1992 and 1993, the Burmese army continued to employ the "four cuts" strategy, designed to cut off the rebel armies' food, funds, intelligence and recruits. This meant forced removals of entire villages along the Burmese side of the Thai border and the transformation of populated areas into no-man's-lands, leading in turn to a mass exodus of villagers into Thailand. Thai officials in June 1993 estimated that 1,200 Burmese a month were coming across the border from the war-torn Mon and Karen states, because of unemployment, commodity scarcities and fear of being conscripted as porters by the Burmese military.⁽⁶⁾

Since 1990, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights has undertaken to investigate the human rights situation in Burma, first through a confidential procedure and in 1992 and 1993 through the appointment of a Special Rapporteur, Professor Yozo Yokota of Japan. In February 1993, Professor Yokota presented his first report to the Commission based on a visit the previous December, noting a pattern of systematic government abuse including torture, arbitrary executions and disappearances.⁽⁷⁾ He returned to Burma in November 1993 and submitted a preliminary report to the U.N. General Assembly at the end of November, noting a few developments which "may lead to improvements" in the human rights situation but emphasizing the "many serious restrictions and grave violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms continuing in Myanmar."⁽⁸⁾ These restrictions included at least 500 political leaders still in detention, including Aung San Suu Kyi whom Professor Yokota was not permitted to visit; widespread violations of the right to life and freedom from torture and slavery; and ongoing problems with forced labor and forced relocation. General restrictions also continued on the freedoms of expression, association and assembly.

International Response and Thai-Burmese Relations

Most donor countries responded to the 1988 crackdown and subsequent human rights abuses in Burma with economic sanctions and withdrawal of foreign aid.⁽⁹⁾ SLORC, desperate for foreign exchange, turned to Thailand at the end of 1988, offering a range of economic concessions for fishing, logging, gem mining and exploitation of gas and other natural resources. The beneficiaries were often highly placed Thai officials with the ability to influence foreign policy. When he was Supreme Commander and Army Chief of the Thai army, General Chavalit Yongchaiyudh secured profitable logging and fishing concessions after an official visit to Rangoon on December 14, 1988. In January and February 1989, he deported over 300 Burmese student refugees back to Burma in an apparent effort to keep his relations with the SLORC leadership intact.⁽¹⁰⁾

Such economic links led to official openings of new border crossings along the Thai-Burmese border. In the past, the crossings operated on an informal basis and were poorly regulated by both governments. The formalization has allowed both Thai and Burmese citizens to more easily cross their common border.⁽¹¹⁾ For example, in April 1993, the Thai Cabinet approved a proposal from the Ministry of the Interior to open fourteen temporary border crossings to facilitate the importation of logs.⁽¹²⁾ An Interior Ministry spokesman said that relevant government agencies would have to ensure that the logs were properly felled and that "the smuggling of war weapons, drug and illegal commodities is not involved in the logging business."⁽¹³⁾ Two months later, the Burmese government threatened to end timber and fishing concessions, apparently because of the income they provided to armed rebels from ethnic minority groups operating in and around many of the logging areas.

Nevertheless, cross-border trade appeared to be increasing. Cease-fire and trade agreements between SLORC and minority groups in northern Burma led to the opening up in 1992 of the northeastern corner of the country, facilitating trade with Thailand and China. Both Thailand and Burma began promoting tourism to the Golden Triangle area,⁽¹⁴⁾ and the Thai press reported plans for the construction of a major new road through China, Burma and Thailand. The new road would link Mae Sai on the Thai side with Keng Tung in Burma, an area from which many of the women and girls we interviewed for this report originally came.⁽¹⁵⁾

The opening of trade and border crossings has facilitated the rise in trafficking of Burmese, men, women and children, with the same routes used to transport people as are used to transport drugs and goods.⁽¹⁶⁾ The most important towns for cross border trade are Mae Sai, in the northwest corner of Thailand, just across the border from the Burmese town of Taichelek; Mae Sot across from Myawaddy; Three Pagodas Pass bordering Thailand's Kanchanaburi Province and Burma's Ye Township; and Ranong, in southern Thailand across from Kawthaung. The association between improved Thai-Burmese trade relations and the increasing number of Burmese women in Thai brothels is most obvious in the southern Thai town of Ranong, where fishing and logging concessions in Burma have provided the primary source of income since the 1988 uprisings. According to the Bangkok Post of September 13, 1992, "Ninety-nine percent of all business in Ranong involves border trade with Burma and/or depends on Burmese labor." The number of brothels in the town multiplied threefold between 1988 and 1992.⁽¹⁷⁾ The chief police inspector of Ranong, Lieutenant General Sudjai Yanrat, explained the high concentration of Burmese women in brothels there as follows:

In my opinion, it is disgraceful to let Burmese men frequent Thai prostitutes. Therefore I have been flexible in allowing Burmese prostitutes to work here. Most of their clients are Burmese men.⁽¹⁸⁾

Conservative estimates of Burmese girls and women working in brothels in Thailand now range between twenty thousand and thirty thousand, with approximately ten thousand new recruits brought in each year. A non-governmental organization (NGO) monitoring the trafficking in Mae Sai estimates that an average of seven Burmese girls a day were brought into Thailand through the Mae Sai immigration point alone in 1992.

Economic Factors

The flourishing trade in Burmese women and girls in Thailand must be understood in the context of economic conditions in both countries. In Burma, there has been perceptible economic growth in urban areas such as Mandalay and Rangoon since the early 1990s, a direct result of SLORC's decision to loosen some government controls over trade. In the countryside, however, there has been a steady deterioration in the rural economy, with declining productivity, decreasing availability of basic commodities, such as cooking oil, skyrocketing prices, and heavy taxation. Rural villages face ever more dire poverty -- hence the attraction of work in Thailand.

The overvaluation of the Burmese currency, the kyat, also fuels the exodus to Thailand. One US dollar is worth 6.7 kyat by the official exchange rate, 100 kyat on the black market. Any foreign currency, including Thai baht, is preferable to the Burmese currency.

On the Thai side, the steady supply of illegal Burmese workers stokes a burgeoning economy nationwide with a 1992 growth rate of close to eight percent;⁽¹⁹⁾ a border boom brought about by the increased trade with Burma; and a profitable tourist industry.

Burmese and Thai border towns, as noted above, have been flourishing economically since SLORC, in search of hard currency, opened its borders (and its natural resources) to Thai businesses. The growth has generated an increased demand for labor and services, in the fields of construction, food processing, fishing, commercial agriculture, and prostitution. In early 1993, the regional army commander in Ranong complained of police crackdowns on illegal immigrants. He said the crackdowns "could scare away the immigrant workers and seriously affect the local economy, which needed the cheap labor to sustain its growth."⁽²⁰⁾

The boom, together with the tourist industry, has increased the demand for women, especially for young girls, free of infection. According to one source, tourism generates some $3 billion annually, and sex is one of its "most valuable subsectors,"⁽²¹⁾ employing anywhere from 800,000 to two million people throughout the country.⁽²²⁾ The Burmese women and girls are thus only a fraction of the total. Burmese trafficking and health researcher Hnin Hnin Pyne notes that in 1989,

Tourism, which has been an increasingly profitable industry...exploded, becoming the country's major source of foreign exchange, surpassing even exports such as rice and textiles. Thailand's image as a "sexual paradise" plays a significant role in this tourist boom.⁽²³⁾

However, the tourist trade is less a factor in the sex industry than the local demand. It is estimated that seventy-five percent of Thai men have had sex with a prostitute, and that forty-eight percent experienced their first sexual intercourse with a prostitute.⁽²⁴⁾ The potential for profit and incentive to "look the other way" -- is high.

Brothels are a hugely lucrative business. Despite expenses incurred in employing a network of agents to recruit new workers, paying protection money to police⁽²⁵⁾ and giving minimal daily allowances to the women and girls, the brothel owners can make substantial profits. The owners collect anywhere from 100 to 250 baht ($4 to $10) per client. A typical brothel employs several dozen workers, each taking some six to ten clients a day, twenty-five days a month. The workers generally receive a little over 25 baht ($1) a day from the owner as an allowance and can keep tips from their clients, about 20 cents per man. With these meager resources, they must cover their own expenses for food, clothing, personal effects and medicine. The owner, who frequently owns more than one brothel, clearly stands to make an enormous amount of money. Agents, local police and others involved in the business also benefit.

Immigration Policy

The trafficking in women must also be viewed against the background of migration into Thailand from Burma more generally. As noted earlier, the deteriorating political and economic situation in Burma has spurred a significant outflow of Burmese into Thailand: students fleeing imprisonment in Burma, ethnic minorities fleeing counterinsurgency operations, and economic migrants, including some of the women and girls lured into brothels. Thai government officials have given estimates ranging from 200,000 to 500,000 Burmese living illegally in Thailand, and all illegal immigrants are vulnerable to abuse.

The problems of Burmese men, women and children, are particularly striking because in many cases, their entry into Thailand is facilitated or actively encouraged by Thai officials eager to attract cheap labor or make a personal profit.⁽²⁶⁾ At the same time, the fact that they are in the country illegally becomes a potent form of control in the hands of their employers, because if they protest, refuse demands or disobey, they can be summarily arrested under the Thai Immigration Act and eventually deported.

The Immigration Act is often used not to keep Burmese from entering Thailand, but to ensure compliance and obedience once they are there. This is particularly true in the case of women and girls trafficked into prostitution, who in virtually every case enter Thailand with the knowledge and complicity of border guards and police. Most are forced to remain in the brothels because of their debt to the owner and their fear of arrest as illegal immigrants.

Under the Thai Immigration Act of 1979, as amended in 1980, illegal entry into Thailand is a criminal act, punishable by detention of up to two years or fines of up to 20,000 baht ($800). Among the eleven categories of persons to be denied entry under Section 12 of the law are:

-- those not in possession of valid travel documents, although Section 13(2) of the law exempts from carrying passports "citizens of the countries having common borders with Thailand who temporarily cross the border in compliance with the mutual agreement made between Thailand and those countries."

-- those without means of subsistence

-- those seeking work as unskilled laborers

-- those who have engaged in prostitution, trading in girls or children, drug trafficking, or other immoral activities.⁽²⁷⁾

Burmese women in the brothels can run afoul of any of the above provisions. Aiding and abetting illegal entry is a more serious crime than the entry itself, punishable by up to ten years in prison. In theory, Thai prisons should be full of the agents, recruiters and officials who benefit from or turn a blind eye to the steady stream of Burmese. They are not.

Over and above the use of the Immigration Act as a form of control, all Burmese suffer from its arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement. Members of some Burmese groups opposed to SLORC operate with the knowledge and protection of central or local Thai officials, for example, while others are more prone to arrest, detention and deportation.⁽²⁸⁾ Burmese workers in certain industries -- saw mills along the border, for example, or the tourist industry in Chiangmai -- are less vulnerable to arrest and deportation than women and girls working in brothels who become the target of highly publicized "crackdowns," in part because the industrial workers are not easily replaced and earn enough to pay the requisite bribes.

Fear of arrest as an illegal immigrant is especially pronounced among Burmese because it can mean deportation back to a country with one of the most abusive governments in Asia. For the women and girls who are victims of trafficking a particular set of problems arises. If they are arrested under the Immigration Act and sent to the Immigration Detention Center in Bangkok, they often face further sexual abuse as described in Chapter V. The IDC and other detention centers where many illegal immigrants end up are substandard, overcrowded, and characterized by corruption, extortion and physical abuse. If the women are deported, they face not only the possibility of forced conscription on the Burmese side of the border, but also arrest in Burma on charges of both leaving the country illegally and engaging in prostitution. To avoid deportation, many look for any way to stay in Thailand -- which makes them particularly vulnerable to renewed exploitation by the brothel agents.

The problem for Burmese women is also exacerbated by the fact that Thailand has no coherent policy on asylum-seekers. As far as Burmese are concerned, Thai authorities make little meaningful distinction between those who have a valid claim to refugee status and those who do not.⁽²⁹⁾ The result is that deportation decisions for the most part ignore considerations of how deportees are likely to be treated on their return to Burma. Corruption makes a mockery of those decisions in any case, since virtually anyone can avoid deportation for a price.

B. RELEVANT NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

Prior to the abolition of slavery in Thailand by King Rama V in 1905, prostitutes were recruited from the slave markets and sold either as "slave wives" or "slave women."⁽³⁰⁾ Slavery's abolition brought about an immediate increase in prostitution, as former women slaves were drawn into the sex trade. From 1905 until 1960, prostitution was legal in Thailand, regulated primarily by the Control and Prevention of Venereal Disease Act of 1909 (VD Control Act), which established government control over prostitution through a system of licensing and fees and required registered prostitutes to be "free of infectious disease."⁽³¹⁾

The VD Control Act provided that brothel owners "must get approval from the government and secure a license;"⁽³²⁾ that "no girls shall be forced to stay in the business against her will;"⁽³³⁾ that brothel operators "must not confine a prostitute;"⁽³⁴⁾ and that "the girls must be at least fifteen years of age."⁽³⁵⁾ Penalties were provided "for anyone who seduces or forces a girl to enter or remain in prostitution."⁽³⁶⁾

According to a 1957 paper prepared by Morris G. Fox, then a U.N. Social Welfare Advisor, from 1905 through 1957 prostitution was "big business" in Thailand and the under-registration of both brothels and prostitutes was common. A recent preliminary study by the Foundation for Women, found that in the years 1957, 1958, 1959 and 1960, the number of registered prostitutes arrested were 524, 344, 308 and 298 respectively. During the same years, the number of illegal or unregistered prostitutes arrested was 6,747, 8,990, 9,400 and 7,876 respectively.⁽³⁷⁾ Then, as now, there was a "special premium for virgins." Ninety percent of the prostitutes were reported to be between the ages of fifteen and twenty, averaging about five clients a night. The vast majority were Thai, although some were "Chinese and other nationalities."⁽³⁸⁾

The 1928 Anti-Trafficking Act

The presence of foreign nationals in the Thai brothels led the government to pass a 1928 law expressly prohibiting trafficking in women and girls. According to the Trafficking in Women and Girls Act (Anti-Trafficking Act), any person who brings women or girls into Thailand for the purpose of having sexual intercourse with other persons, and any person who is involved illegally in the trading of women or girls brought into the country for such purposes, will be liable to not more than seven years imprisonment or a fine of not more than 1,000 baht ($40 in 1993 currency) or both.⁽³⁹⁾ Women and girls trafficked into Thailand are exempt from imprisonment or fine, but must be sent to a state reform house for thirty days, a period that can be extended by a judge.

The absolute prohibition on trafficking clearly distinguished it from prostitution, which was legal at the time. However, when prostitution was itself criminalized in 1960, this important distinction blurred. As a result, key protections for trafficking victims under the Anti-Trafficking law, for example exemption from fines and imprisonment, were not available under Thailand's Anti-Prostitution Law, and have been ignored. Although these protections should urgently be made available, the Anti-Trafficking Act also needs serious reform. The Foundation for Women notes that the Act does not prohibit trafficking in boys, nor does it address the selling of Thai women and girls outside of Thailand. Finally, the Act's proscribed punishments are very light and no minimum penalty is established for traffickers. Trafficking victims, meanwhile, are remanded to a penal reform institution for not less than thirty days.

1960 Criminalization of Prostitution

The clear failure of the VD Control Act meaningfully to suppress illegal prostitution, coupled with the drafting at the United Nations of the 1949 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffick in Persons and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others, eventually led to the criminalization of prostitution in Thailand. In 1960 Thailand adopted the Suppression of Prostitution Act (hereinafter the Anti-Prostitution law), still in effect today, which outlaws prostitution and penalizes both prostitutes and those who procure prostitutes or benefit from their exploitation. According to historian and women's rights activist Sukanya Hantrakul, the ban culminated in a social purification campaign driven by Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, who ruled Thailand in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Sarit believed that "uncleanliness and social impropriety...led to the erosion of social orderliness...."⁽⁴⁰⁾ Eliminating prostitution was one of his main obsessions.⁽⁴¹⁾

Under the new legislation, prostitutes were liable for imprisonment of not more than six months or a fine of not more than 2,000 baht ($80) or both; procurers for imprisonment of not more than three months or a fine of not more than 1,000 baht ($40) or both; and brothel owners for imprisonment of not more than one year or a fine of not more than 4,000 baht ($160).⁽⁴²⁾

The law was intended, at least in theory, to criminalize prostitution. But its main purpose -- and the thrust of the majority of its provisions -- was the reform of prostitutes. Sections 11 to 16 of the 1960 Act provide that convicted prostitutes "should be given medical treatment, vocational training or both," be "committed to an assistance center [for a period] not exceeding one year from the day the person has satisfied the sentence of the court," and be penalized if they seek to flee the center by "imprisonment for not more than three months or fine of 1,000 baht or both." The Act further empowers the Director General of Public Welfare "to issue rules on disciplinary and work regulations for assisted persons," and to punish those breaking these rules by "(1) confinement...of not more than fifteen days...or (2) cutting off or reducing benefits or facilities provided by the assistance center."⁽⁴³⁾

Since its inception this law has been denounced by many Thai women's rights advocates as weak, ill-defined and discriminatory. Penalties for procurers under the Anti-Prostitution law are lower then those under the Penal Code (discussed below). The definition of "places of prostitution" contained in the law is extremely vague and therefore largely unenforceable. The law does not explicitly exempt persons forced into prostitution from punishment and, finally, it penalizes prostitutes, but not their clients.

Moreover, as noted by Hantrakul, the Anti-Prostitution law depicts prostitutes as women in need of "moral rehabilitation."⁽⁴⁴⁾ The law explicitly provides for the early release of the convicted prostitute who "has reformed...."⁽⁴⁵⁾ In Hantrakul's view, the law represents a de facto institutionalization of discrimination against women in Thai society, suppressing "female promiscuity," but tolerating similar behavior in males.

The Entertainment Places Act and the Penal Code

The government's commitment to suppressing prostitution was called into serious question a scant six years after the Anti-Prostitution law's passage with the introduction of the Entertainment Places Act of 1966. This act regulates nightclubs, dance halls, bars and places for "baths, massage or steam baths which have women to attend male customers," by requiring them to obtain operating licenses from local police. The use of such licensed establishments for prostitution is expressly outlawed, but police enforcement is lax and many "places of service" do not bother to register at all.

The Entertainment Act's passage coincided with a national policy to increase state revenue from tourism, particularly from the "Rest and Recreation"(R&R) activities of U.S. armed forces stationed in Vietnam. According to researcher Hnin Hnin Pyne, the presence of U.S. Army bases in Thailand "stimulated the growth of massage parlors, hired-wife services and bars for soldiers."⁽⁴⁶⁾ In 1967, one year after the passage of the Entertainment Places Act, Thailand and the U.S. military agreed to allow American soldiers stationed in Vietnam to visit Thailand for R&R. According to researcher Tranh Dam Truong, "[I]n 1967 it was estimated that the spending of the U.S. military personnel on R&R in Thailand came to approximately five million dollars. By 1970, the amount rose to approximately twenty million dollars, or as much as one-fourth of total rice exports for that year."⁽⁴⁷⁾ According to Hanktrakul

Scrutinizing the Entertainment Places Act one could not help but conclude that it was enacted to pave the way for whorehouse to be legalized in the guise of massage parlors, bars, nightclubs, tea houses etc.⁽⁴⁸⁾

The Anti-Prostitution and Entertainment laws developed alongside the Thai Penal Code, adopted on November 13, 1956,⁽⁴⁹⁾ which did not prohibit prostitution, but did criminalize procurement for the purpose of prostitution and assigned higher penalties to this offense than those contained in the Anti-Prostitution law. The Code, as amended, specifically outlaws procurement, both forcible and not, of women for "indecent acts" and the abduction of women for the same. Article 282 provides that

any person who in pandering to the wanton desires of other persons, undertakes to furnish, seduce or persuade for the purpose of obscene acts, a woman, with or without her consent, shall be liable to one to ten years imprisonment and a fine from 2,000 - 20,000 baht.

Article 283 further punishes any person who

undertakes to furnish, seduce or persuade for the purposes of obscene acts...by any fraudulent or deceitful means, threat, violence, exercising undue influence or coercion, shall be punished with imprisonment from five to twenty years and a fine from 10,000 - 40,000 baht.⁽⁵⁰⁾

Penalties increase if either offense is committed against girls under eighteen years old and again if committed against girls under fifteen years old. If such offenses are committed against a descendant or a person under the offender's "tutorship, guardianship,or curatorship," the punishment is increased by one third.

The Penal Code also severely penalizes rape, which it defines as an extra-marital offense, and punishes sexual intercourse with minors, providing in section 277 that

Any person who commits an act of rape on a girl aged under 15 years, who is not his wife, with or without the consent of such a girl, shall be liable to imprisonment from four to twenty years and fine from 8,000 - 40,000 baht.

For wrongdoing pursuant to the proceeding paragraph against a girl aged under 13 years, the perpetrator shall be liable to imprisonment from seven to twenty years and fine from 14,000 - 40,000 baht.

The section sets forth higher penalties for gang rape or rape with a deadly weapon of under age girls. It also establishes that criminal liability can be eliminated for rape of a girl over thirteen but under fifteen, with the girl's consent, if "subsequently the Court has permitted the man and girl to get married."⁽⁵¹⁾

By 1990, Thailand had at least four separate legal regimes addressing various and sometimes overlapping components of both trafficking and prostitution. The Immigration Act also contains relevant prohibitions.⁽⁵²⁾ As a result, inconsistencies and even contradictions emerged: the Penal Law severely penalizes persons who have sex with minors, the Anti-Prostitution law does not; the Anti-Trafficking law exempts women trafficked into prostitution from imprisonment or fines; the Anti-Prostitution law makes no such exemption; the Suppression of Prostitution Act penalizes prostitution, the Entertainment Places Act, at least indirectly, regulates and even taxes it. These inconsistencies, while clearly not insurmountable, undermined the development of a clear legal sanction on prostitution and trafficking and, to some extent, contributed to several Thai governments' utter failure actually to suppress or even meaningfully control prostitution and/or trafficking, both of which rapidly expanded in the period between 1960 and 1990.

However, the root cause of the Thai government's failure rigorously to combat prostitution and trafficking as required by law lies not as much in the inconsistencies among the relevant statutes, as it does in the Thai government's routine failure to enforce even the most straightforward prohibitions, like those penalizing procurement or statutory rape or trafficking in women and girls. According to Vitit Muntarbhorn, an associate professor of law at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, in the period from 1960 to 1991

...many governments...tried to stem the tide of prostitution but much has also resulted in lip service. More often than not, they seem to wait for a catalytic incident...before pushing the authorities to take action and where action is taken the fervor dies down after a period.⁽⁵³⁾

To a large extent this fact reflects the tension inherent in Thai policy between abhorring and prohibiting prostitution, while at the same time promoting and profiting from tourism which, explicit or implicitly, includes sex tourism, and from the local demand for commercial sex.

This has proved to be particularly true for Thai law enforcement officials who routinely profit from the Anti-Prostitution and Anti-Trafficking laws' non-enforcement by extorting protection fees from brothel owners or independent prostitutes. The 1992 U.S. State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices found that "senior [Thai] government officials have cited corruption as a major factor in police willingness to turn a blind eye to the problem. Reliable sources report that police can earn $120-200 per month in protection fees."⁽⁵⁴⁾

International Law

Thailand has yet to ratify or accede to most of the international human rights instruments relevant to trafficking in women and girls, particularly the Convention for the Suppression of Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (The Trafficking Convention) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). On March 29, 1993 Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai publicly announced that his government

is undertaking the necessary steps for Thailand to accede to the International Covenants contained in the International Bill of Human Rights, thus consolidating further the efforts made by previous Thai governments.⁽⁵⁵⁾

As of January 1994, however, the process of accession was not complete, and the Chuan administration had made no discernible effort to ratify or accede to the Trafficking Convention.

Since 1985, however, the Thai Government has been a party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which obligates states parties to eliminate discrimination and, under Article 6, to take all appropriate measures to suppress all forms of traffick in women. While CEDAW does not set forth what measures states parties should institute with regard to the suppression of trafficking, earlier conventions that address trafficking of women should give content to CEDAW's directive.

The international community first denounced trafficking in the Trafficking Convention, which was approved by the General Assembly in 1949. The Convention calls on states parties to punish traffickers and to protect all persons against such abuse. The Convention also calls on states parties "so far as possible" to "make suitable provisions for [trafficking victims'] temporary care and maintenance;" to repatriate persons "only after agreement...with the State of destination," and, where persons cannot pay the cost of repatriation, to bear the cost "as far as the nearest frontier."⁽⁵⁶⁾

Despite its failure to ratify many of the other pertinent international conventions, Thailand has clear obligations under customary international law with regard to many of the violations documented in this report. International law clearly condemns slavery and slave-related practices. It is well established that the prohibition of these practices has attained the status of customary international law.⁽⁵⁷⁾ Under customary international law the Thai authorities are also obligated to protect against and punish prolonged arbitrary detention and torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.⁽⁵⁸⁾ Resolutions adopted by the United Nations General Assembly also urge member nations to conform to basic principles of due process, enumerated in the ICCPR and elsewhere.

C. The Current Crackdown: The Anand and Chuan Administrations

The Anand Panyarachun administration, installed in 1991⁽⁵⁹⁾ following the Thai army's overthrow of the civilian government of Chatichai Choonhavan, sought to respond to the rising prostitution and trafficking problem, particularly forced and child prostitution. In response to the escalating scare of acquired immunodefiency syndrome (AIDS), Dr. Saisuree Chutikul, then Minister to the Office of the Prime Minister for Women, Children, Youth, Education and Social Development, introduced a bill seeking to legalize prostitution by women eighteen years or older, who work voluntarily and regularly check their health. In attempting to legalize voluntary prostitution, Dr. Saisuree sought to strengthen law enforcement in the area of compulsory and, particularly, child prostitution and trafficking. However, the bill lapsed following the end of Anand's administration after the March 1992 elections and, as with previous administrations, the endeavor to address prostitution faltered. Nonetheless the Anand administration did put in place some notable reforms with ramifications for forced and child prostitution and trafficking.

Most notably, Anand established a unit within the Crime Suppression Division (CSD), a division of the Central Investigation Bureau that has national jurisdiction. The CSD is empowered to make criminal investigations and inquiries anywhere in the country.⁽⁶⁰⁾ The CSD's newly formed anti-prostitution task force was charged with rescuing those forced into slavery, in particular children compelled into prostitution.

Unfortunately, the CSD's task force was plagued from its inception with problems of understaffing and inadequate funding. According to the former task force head, Police Colonel Bancha Charusareet, his unit was

supposed to raid every brothel that has child prostitutes or detains unwilling girls for prostitution anywhere in the country, but it has a staff of only six people and one vehicle.⁽⁶¹⁾

The Division's efforts were further hampered by the lack of cooperation from the local police officers in whose jurisdiction the CSD was mandated to intervene. Other local analysts also accused the CSD units with inconsistencies in their work and taking bribes from brothel owners and other police units.

Nonetheless, in 1991 the Bangkok Post reported nine brothel raids by the police.⁽⁶²⁾ According to researcher Pyne, out of these (and other) raids a new trend began to emerge: "[o]ver 200 of the 342 women discovered came from Burma."⁽⁶³⁾ Pyne notes that the Center for Protection of Children's Rights (CPCR), which maintains a shelter for women and children rescued from the brothels, estimated that in 1991, ten to twenty percent of the prostitutes were Burmese. The increase in the number of non-Thai women and girls, particularly among those brothels most associated with involuntary and child prostitution, signaled a rise in trafficking of women into the country for the purposes of prostitution.

The presence of Burmese women and girls in Thailand's most abusive brothels was increasingly evident in 1992. Statistics for 1992 compiled by CPCR estimate that roughly thirty to forty percent of the children they assisted were Burmese.⁽⁶⁴⁾ Major CSD/police raids on several brothels in Ranong in June and July 1992 turned up an estimated 153 Burmese women and girls.⁽⁶⁵⁾ Raids earlier in the year had rescued an additional 147 women and girls.⁽⁶⁶⁾

The increasing presence of foreign nationals in these raids prompted the Anand administration to take another notable step to address this problem. Initially, according to researcher Hnin Hnin Pyne, most of the Burmese caught in the government raids in 1991 were either deported immediately or transferred to the Immigration Detention Center in Bangkok to be deported three to six months later.⁽⁶⁷⁾ However, reports of deported women and girls being arrested upon return to Burma for prostitution or illegal immigration, and unconfirmed statements that some HIV positive returnees were murdered by Burmese authorities, raised concerns about summary deportation for both NGOs and the Thai government.

Faced with this dilemma, Dr. Saisuree Chutikul tried to develop an alternative to the Burmese women and girls' summary deportation. Rather than arresting and imprisoning the girls as illegal immigrants, Dr. Saisuree arranged for at least one group of them to be sent to the penal reform institution of Pakkret⁽⁶⁸⁾ pending an officially sanctioned repatriation in cooperation with the Burmese authorities. From June through July 1992, the majority of the Burmese women and girls "rescued" from brothels were sent to Pakkret.⁽⁶⁹⁾

The Thai NGOs working with trafficking victims supported Dr. Saisuree's attempt to find an alternative to the arrest and summary deportation of the Burmese women and girls as illegal immigrants. However, they argued that the Dr. Saisuree's plan was problematic both because the penal reform institutions are discriminatory in nature and unduly punitive, and because the safety of the women and girls upon return to Burma could not be monitored or guaranteed.

Dr. Saisuree, who after the September 1992 became an adviser to the new Chuan government, defended the Pakkret scheme. In an interview she gave to an NGO called End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism (ECPAT), she argued that the Burmese women and girls posed a problem for Thai authorities because they were in the country illegally and possessed no papers. They were not classified as refugees because they did not flee their country of origin. Under existing Thai law they had no legal right to remain in Thailand. She disputed NGO contentions that the women and girls faced dangers on their return to Burma, citing assurances from SLORC that the women and girls would not be harmed and could be visited subsequent to their return to establish their well-being.⁽⁷⁰⁾ Although she pledged that all 150 women and girls in Pakkret as of mid-1992 would be repatriated at Thai government expense⁽⁷¹⁾ in late September, only ninety-five of the 150 Burmese women and girls were officially repatriated.

It was in this context that on November 2, 1992, Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai announced to provincial governors that he intended to crack down on child and involuntary prostitution, and child labor abuse. He told the governors of Thailand's seventy-five provinces that they must "take responsibility and give special attention to child prostitution and child labor abuse."⁽⁷²⁾ Several days later, the Minister of Interior, General Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, announced that he wanted all brothels shut down in two months.⁽⁷³⁾ In subsequent speeches, the Chuan administration pledged to get "concrete results" in three months.⁽⁷⁴⁾

In large measure, Chuan's announcement came in response to growing national and international condemnation of child and forced prostitution, particularly in the wake of the 1992 raids. It was also prompted by efforts, particularly by the United States Congress, to deny trade preferences to countries making use of child or forced labor.⁽⁷⁵⁾ The Thai government highlighted these latter concerns in announcing the crackdown and the Prime Minister told local journalists that "Thailand's trading partners would boycott our products if these two problems continue to exist."⁽⁷⁶⁾

In making his announcement Chuan was careful to distinguish between forced and child prostitution and prostitution more generally. He clearly stated that he would not attempt to touch prostitution in general, telling reporters

I won't talk about what is impossible, if the problem cannot be solved, I won't order the authorities to tackle it.⁽⁷⁷⁾

Instead, Chuan argued that the numbers of child and forced prostitutes were smaller and the problem therefore easier to address.

Chuan's announcement was greeted by local activists with a measure of optimism, particularly because he pledged, for the first time in the history of Thai government crackdowns on forced or child prostitution, to address the involvement of government officials in such abuse. He told the governors that in some areas of Thailand the problems were caused by police and military officers and noted that Thailand's "problems...will be less if the ones who have the weapons and enforce the law are not the sources of the involvement."⁽⁷⁸⁾

Not all Thai police welcomed Chuan's plan. Soon after Chuan's announcement, Deputy Police Director General Police General Pongammart Amartayakul told reporters that sex-related crimes would probably increase if the brothels were shut down. He reportedly said that men in the seaside provinces would have "a lot of pent-up sexual aggression" and would have to relieve themselves. He suggested that the rate of rapes and other sex-related crimes might rise as men find no place to satisfy their "sexual desires."⁽⁷⁹⁾

The Chuan administration must be commended for undertaking such a high-profile effort to combat involuntary and forced prostitution, which by definition includes trafficking, and for publicly acknowledging the involvement of government officials in perpetrating and profiting from such abuse. However, in the year since Chuan's November 1992 announcement, several serious problems have emerged with his policy that raise questions about the depth of the government's commitment to end forced and child prostitution. Where the Burmese trafficking victims in particular are concerned, that policy may have exacerbated the problem.

First and foremost, the trafficking of Burmese women and girls into Thailand continues, virtually unchecked. Moreover, despite clear evidence that Thai law enforcement and immigration officials remain directly involved in the flesh trade, not a single officer has been prosecuted or punished for such abuse. Brothel owners, pimps and recruiters have also been largely exempt from punishment. In fact, the main targets of the Chuan administration's crackdown on forced and child prostitution have been the victims themselves.

Some of these problems might have been avoided had Chuan undertaken the necessary legal reforms and adopted the relevant international instruments. Local women's rights NGOs have proposed a number of reforms in the existing Anti-Trafficking and Anti-Prostitution laws that would, among other measures, stiffen the penalties for trafficking and procurement for prostitution, reduce or remove the remand of prostitutes or trafficking victims to penal reform institutions, and clearly punish clients who engage in statutory rape. Unfortunately these legal reforms have yet to become law. In addition, while Thai NGOs have called on the Chuan administration to ratify or accede to ICCPR and the Trafficking Convention, both of which would provide clear guidelines for addressing trafficking and compulsory prostitution, neither ratification has been actively pursued by the government.

Even in the absence of such legal reform, however, Thailand's existing national and international obligations could yield more effective and equitable results. As noted above, the existing Anti-Prostitution, Trafficking and Penal laws clearly penalize recruitment and a range of other abuses associated with trafficking and forced and child prostitution, and Thailand's obligations under CEDAW provide clear guidance with regard to eliminating both discrimination and trafficking. Thailand's existing laws also clearly protect the victims of forced and child prostitution, and of trafficking in particular, from imprisonment, fines and summary deportation. Unfortunately, the Chuan administration has failed to issue a clear mandate to its law enforcement officials to enforce these prohibitions. As a result, police are routinely tolerating traffickers and arresting trafficking victims on charges of prostitution and illegal immigration, although as a matter of both fact and law they should not be liable for either crime.

The crackdown's problems might have been mitigated had the Thai government created procedural mechanisms to ensure that corrupt police were penalized and forced and child prostitutes and trafficking victims were treated fairly. Instead, and over the objections of local NGOs, the Chuan administration weakened one of the key official mechanisms, the Crime Suppression Division, which although not without problems of its own, had the authority to override local police and to deal with forced and child prostitution directly. Instead Chuan, in late 1992, disbanded the CSD's anti-prostitution task force in favor of a new CSD "Coordination Center for the Prevention and Suppression of Child Prostitutes and Child Labor Abuse," which was mandated to maintain a database on brothels. The Coordination Center was required to carry out the raids and rescues in cooperation with other local police units, many of which local NGO observers suspect "are actively involved in the sex trade or on the payroll of the brothel owners."⁽⁸⁰⁾ In addition, the Chuan administration appears to have abandoned the non-punitive, coordinated, official repatriation of Burmese women and girls entirely.

Thus, in the months following Chuan's November 2, 1992 announcement, the myth that his administration is "rescuing" forced and child prostitutes has been shattered. Except for the few women and girls whom NGOs are able to take to emergency shelters, it is clear that government's high profile "rescues" actually are arrests.

III. THREE PORTRAITS

The following portraits of three women give some idea of the experiences of women and girls caught in the trafficking. These women were interviewed in NGO shelters over several hours and the descriptions given here come directly from their testimony.

"LIN LIN"

When "Lin Lin" was thirteen years old, her mother died and her father remarried. Shortly thereafter, her father took her from their village of Chom Dtong near Keng Tung to Mae Sai. She was too young to get an identity card in Burma, so her father paid 35 kyats ($.30) for a travel pass. They arrived at a job placement agency in Mae Sai and her father was given 12,000 baht ($480) from the agent who assured him he could find a job for "Lin Lin" in Thailand. [That payment became the basis of Lin Lin's bondage to the owner.]

"Lin Lin" was sent with Thai Lu, a Shan woman living in Thailand, on a bus to Bangkok. The agent from Mae Sai met her at a hotel in Bangkok and took her and Thai Lu to Kanchanaburi.⁽⁸¹⁾ She was brought to the Ran Dee Prom brothel and on the third day told to work.

"Lin Lin" did not know what was going on until the man started touching her breasts and body. He took her to a room and told her to take off her clothes, then forced her to have sex. "Lin Lin" thought perhaps her father knew what kind of work was in store for her, but she herself was completely unaware.

"Lin Lin" was kept in Kanchanaburi to work for one month and then sent to Korat⁽⁸²⁾ to a brothel owned by the sister of the Ran Dee Prom brothel owner. She stayed at the Juja Hotel 109 for nine months. Afterwards, she was sent to another brothel in Kanchanaburi for three months, owned by another relative.

There were over one hundred girls in Kanchanaburi of whom over half were from Burma and about twenty were less than sixteen years old. In Korat, there were about sixty girls with some ten from Burma and twenty who were less than sixteen years old. In Korat, "Lin Lin" was the youngest, but there were even younger girls in the brothels in Kanchanaburi.

The arrangement was the same in each brothel. The owner provided room and food, but everything else was added to "Lin Lin's" debt. She was allowed only to keep her tips. She heard from the other girls that she got about forty percent of the amount each client paid deducted from her debt, but she never saw the accounts or was ever told the amount or details of her "debt."

In all three brothels, "Lin Lin" sat in a windowed room with a number and the clients paid the owner 100 baht ($4) per hour for the number they wanted. Clients could take her out all night for 800 baht ($30) by leaving an identity card or passport at the brothel. During the weekdays she had six or seven clients a day, but on the weekends the number rose to fourteen or fifteen a day.

She saw police in all the brothels in which she worked. They seemed to know the owners very well and were often around with their uniforms, guns and walkie talkies. They also took the girls often to the rooms or out for the whole night.

After thirteen months in Kanchanaburi and Korat, "Lin Lin" agreed to a 5,000 baht ($200) loan to return to Mae Sai for a visit. The loan was for the bus ticket and escort; she never received any cash. When she arrived in Mae Sai she did not have enough money to get all the way home. A couple came up to her and asked her name and said they would help her get home. She agreed and waited for them. When the couple arrived there were four other girls in the car. "Lin Lin" got in and was driven back into Thailand. On the road to Chiangrai, the driver paid a policeman in uniform at a checkpoint. In Chiangrai, the girls were delivered to another agent who had two more girls. All seven of them were then driven to Klong Yai.⁽⁸³⁾

In Klong Yai "Lin Lin" worked with forty other girls and women. About fifteen others were from Burma and almost all of them were sixteen or seventeen years old. The owner told "Lin Lin" she owed him for her transportation from Mae Sai to Klong Yai and her living expenses. She assumed she also needed to get at least 5,000 baht ($200) so she could pay for the transportation home. She also assumed all the owners knew each other and had investments in each other's brothels. She had no idea what she owed to whom.

In Klong Yai "Lin Lin" worked in a restaurant and the men picked out which girl they wanted. "Lin Lin" saw the owner and pimps slap the girls often; she herself was slapped in the face and often warned that she had better do whatever the client wanted. She had to work every day and was only allowed two days off a month when she had her period.

She did not go to the doctor because she had to pay the expenses herself and it cost 200 baht ($8). Once when she had pus and pain in her vagina, she went to the doctor, but she had to borrow money from the owner for the medicine. This amount was added to her debt.

In Klong Yai the police had special arrangements with the owner and could take the girls for free. There were many policemen at the restaurant every night, some in full uniform and others without, but all with guns. They took "Lin Lin" many times without paying. Once when Lin Lin was out with another girl and two policemen for the whole night, the other girl insisted that her client use a condom. The policeman in question put a gun to her head and refused.

"Lin Lin" was never allowed to refuse a client. If she tried, the owner and pimps would tell her, "If you don't pay back your debt, you can stay here forever." She was warned she would be beaten if she ever came out of the room before her client. She never tried to run away; she was afraid the owner would follow her or her family because she had not finished paying off her debt.

"Lin Lin" said that in Klong Yai the brothel was ordered closed by government authorities in November 1992, and the pimps stood outside the door. The clients would still come and negotiate what they wanted with the pimp, leaving an identity card or passport for collateral. The girls stayed in other houses and were collected or delivered to their clients. The clients could take her anywhere they wanted, and "Lin Lin" was often sent out alone, sometimes deep into the jungle.

On January 18, 1993, the Crime Suppression Division (CSD) raided the brothel, as journalists watched and took pictures. The CSD arrested about twenty-seven girls, but no owners or pimps. The brothel was closed at the time, and the police came to the houses where the women and girls were staying and arrested them. They were not allowed to get any of their belongings and "Lin Lin" only had the clothes she was wearing. She was first brought to the Klong Yai police station and transferred the same day to a police station in Bangkok. The next day she was released to the NGO shelter with eleven others under the age of sixteen.

"Lin Lin" said she did not understand much about AIDS. Some clients used condoms, but sometimes the condoms broke; other clients refused to use them. She said she was tested several times for AIDS but was never told the results.

"NYI NYI"

"Nyi Nyi" is from a small farm outside of Keng Tung. She came to Thailand when she was seventeen years old with a friend who had worked in Bangkok before and invited her to go back with her. "Nyi Nyi" never knew what kind of work she would get and never imagined it would be prostitution.

When "Nyi Nyi" arrived in Mae Sai with her friend and sister, the agent gave her 15,000 baht ($600) in advance which "Nyi Nyi" gave to her sister. An hour later, "Nyi Nyi" and the friend left in a truck driven by a policeman to Chiangrai. The policeman was in uniform, carried a walkie talkie, and "Nyi Nyi" assumed he had a gun. There were many police checkpoints between Mae Sai and Chiangrai. "Nyi Nyi" said she was very scared, but her friend assured her that the policeman had everything arranged, and they would not have any problems. The policeman took them to a hotel and told them to wait until the agent came to collect them.

The next day, the agent from Mae Sai arrived and brought them to the Dong Saen Tea Shop. ("Nyi Nyi" never knew where in Bangkok the tea shop was located.) Shortly thereafter, her friend escaped, leaving "Nyi Nyi" alone and frightened. She said she thought about how her brother used to tease her that she was so quiet and easily fooled that one day, someone would sell her. He was right, she thought.

At the brothel she was told she had to repay the 15,000 baht ($600) debt. "Nyi Nyi" never understood that the money the agent gave her was a debt. She assumed it was simply a gift to her family while she was away. The owner bought many things for her in the beginning and told her they were all "free," but later she learned every purchase had been added to her debt. Everything she ate and used in the brothel was added to her bill. She never knew how much she owed or the terms for repaying it. She knew that there was a chance that at the end of the two years, she might have nothing to show for her work.

"Nyi Nyi" and the other girls had to work from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. unless they had clients, then they had to work until they were finished. She took days off only when she had her period. Very occasionally, she said, she refused men who were very drunk and dirty, but the brothel owner had a good heart and never beat her.

Every morning around 9:00 a.m. the owner's wife asked each girl how much money she wanted for the day. "Nyi Nyi" always took as little as possible, 20 to 30 baht ($0.80 to $1.20). She used her tip money for expenses and gave all her extra money to the owner to keep safe, so that she could eventually take it home. She thought she had 2,000 to 3,000 baht ($80 to $120) saved with the owner.

She could go out of the brothel to buy food, but she never ventured very far, nor did she ever dare to talk to anyone. She was always afraid the police would arrest her. She could not speak Thai, could not read or write and did not know where she was in Bangkok or how to get back home. If she had money, she thought, she could probably hire someone to take her away from the brothel, but she had none. There was no telephone at the brothel, and "Nyi Nyi" would not have known how to use one if there was.

The policemen were always in and around the brothel and knew the owner well. They often chose girls to take to the rooms but never "Nyi Nyi" -- fortunately, she said, because she was afraid of them.

One day, after "Nyi Nyi" worked for about one year, her agent told her she had paid her debt, but with only about 400 baht ($16) extra in savings, she had not earned enough to cover transportation costs back to Burma, let alone money to live on when she got there. The owner had promised her that she could go home for Songkran (the Thai and Burmese new year) in April 1993, but she was arrested first.

On July 12, 1992 at 9:00 p.m., four plainclothes policemen from the Crime Suppression Division came to the brothel. They took one girl upstairs, then came down and closed all the doors. "Nyi Nyi" lost everything she had, as none of the girls or women arrested were allowed to get their belongings. Between fifty and sixty girls and women were arrested, together with one pimp. "Nyi Nyi" did not know what happened to the couple who owned the brothel. At the police station, the arrested girls and women were told that the owner had called and offered to bail them out but that they would be taken back to Burma instead.

The police asked each of those arrested for her name, age and address and told them all that they could go home in two or three days. Later the same night, "Nyi Nyi" and the others were transferred to Pakkret, a reformatory for prostitutes set up under the Anti-Prostitution Act of 1960. "Nyi Nyi" spoke of Pakkret as a jail where the Burmese wore purple uniforms and the Thai blue. For most of the six months she was there, "Nyi Nyi" was sick with a high fever. She had no way to communicate with anyone outside, since she was illiterate. In any case, since only visitors with identification cards and permission could visit detainees at Pakkret, none of "Nyi Nyi's" friends would have come, since they were also illegal immigrants.

"Nyi Nyi" was tested once in the brothel and again in Pakkret for AIDS, but she was never told the results. She said she would like to know if she was HIV positive so she could use condoms to prevent spreading the disease, although she has never seen any condoms in Burma and does not know if they are available. She learned about AIDS in Pakkret and is afraid she has it. She was frequently sick and when we interviewed her, she had lost over thirty-three pounds in six months. She never had an injection or met a doctor before she came to Thailand and never knew what to do when she was sick. The only health care she received was medicine taken from the shelf in the brothel on the advice of other girls and women there.

"Nyi Nyi" told us she wanted to go home but did not want anyone to take her all the way back because they would see how her family lives. "Even though I worked like this, " she said, "I still couldn't do anything for my family. I am so embarrassed and ashamed."

"SWE SWE"

"Swe Swe" is from a farm in Wan Bao village near the Chinese border. She came to Thailand when she was seventeen years old with two other friends to find work as maids or laundresses. She did not tell her parents she was going to leave the village because she knew they would not agree.

"Swe Swe" sold her ring for 2,070 kyats ($20) and 40 Chinese yuan (five dollars). She later converted this to 300 baht ($12). Her friend had five silver coins. They took a car to Mae Sai and had to pay all baht they had plus three silver coins.

Once in Mae Sai, a Burmese man asked them where they were going and warned them they could be arrested by police. He said he could help them find work. "Swe Swe" and her friends were not sure they trusted him but knew the risk of arrest was real. They agreed to refuse his offer and try to find Saen Sai Lu, a place known back in their village for its employment possibilities. By the end of the day, after they had been unable to find it, the same Burmese man reappeared, and they agreed to put themselves in his hands. They were then put in a van with two other girls and taken Bangkok via Phayao. They passed through many police checkpoints but were never stopped.

When "Swe Swe" arrived in Bangkok, a brothel agent gave her 9,000 baht ($360) to buy clothes and other personal effects. She still had no idea she was being tricked, because she and her two friends were taken to be maids at the agent's house. At the end of the week, all three were brought to the brothel.

"Swe Swe" did not even realize it was a brothel until she was brought to a room, still with her sarong on.⁽⁸⁴⁾ She said she screamed and kept hitting her head against the wall as her first client forced himself on her. Afterwards, her head was bleeding badly; she said she remembered little else.

"Swe Swe" was too afraid to escape when she realized that she was working in a brothel. The owner and agents were always warning her not to go out because she would get stolen or arrested. She had no idea where she was or how to get home. She could not speak or read Thai. The owner and agents kept telling her to stop crying because the police would hear her. She felt helpless. Her parents had told her that something like this could happen if she left the village, but she did not believe them. The other girls tried to comfort her by saying that they had worked in the brothel for a few years already and that everything would be all right.

IV. TRAFFICKING IN WOMEN AND GIRLS

A. RECRUITMENT

The first phase of the illicit trade in Burmese women and girls is their recruitment and sale into brothels throughout Thailand where they are compelled to prostitute themselves under conditions tantamount to slavery. The actions of the recruiting agent and the brothel owners are clearly in violation not only of international standards on trafficking and forced labor, but also of domestic Thai laws prohibiting trafficking and prostitution. Yet for the most part, these laws are not enforced.

In her pathbreaking study of Burmese women in Thai brothels, Hnin Hnin Pyne classified her subjects by their means of entry into prostitution: voluntary, bonded and involuntary.

Voluntary indicates that the woman, prostitute-to-be, approaches the owner/manager of a sex establishment herself; bonded implies the involvement of parents or guardians, who receive money from an agent or owner for giving away their daughter; and involuntary conveys the use of deception and coercion of the women by an agent or owner/manager.⁽⁸⁵⁾

All but one of the women we interviewed for this report were lured from their homes on a promise of economic benefits. But data from other sources, including police records, indicate that in Ranong in particular, the use of physical force to procure women and girls is common.

We interviewed thirty Burmese women and girls in depth, twenty-six of whom had been trafficked into Thailand through Mae Sai, one who had come through Mae Sot, and three who had been brought in through Ranong. Of the thirty, nineteen had parents or guardians who were peasant farmers or farm laborers.⁽⁸⁶⁾ They came from villages all over Shan State (Taichelek, Keng Tung and Taunggyi); Kachin State near the Chinese border; Kayin State; Sagaing division in central Burma; and even Rangoon, the capital city. They ranged in age from twelve to twenty-two, with the average age around seventeen; only four had ever been to school and could read or write in their own language.

The process of recruitment by agents working for brothel owners is necessarily covert, because of laws restricting the freedom of Burmese citizens to leave their country and laws in both Thailand and Burma making prostitution a crime. The brothel owners thus rely on a network of "small agents" and "big agents", acting in concert -- and for a price -- with Thai and Burmese officials to keep a steady supply of Burmese girls coming across the border.

The Promises

The lure for the Burmese girls is the chance to escape from poverty. Twenty-nine of the thirty women and girls interviewed deliberately set out to earn money in Thailand for themselves or their families. Only four of these knew when they set out from home that they would be involved in some form of prostitution. Of the twenty-five others, eighteen thought they would be working as maids, cooks, laundresses, waitresses or some other job that required few skills. Like seventeen-year-old "Tin Tin" who was invited by a friend to go to Chiangrai to make flowers, or sixteen-year-old "Tar Tar" who was brought to Thailand by a teacher on the promise of making enough money to buy a traditional dress, most were attracted by the promise of an opportunity to help their parents or simply to escape from the grimness of their own surroundings. A Burmese girl, aged fourteen or fifteen, from the Akha ethnic group told a Thai NGO worker how the agents operate:

One day two women came to the village while "Par" was on her way to the fields. They talked to her about how much better it would be to live in the city and work. [They talked to her father as well.] Her father wanted to go along, as he was afraid of her being sold, but the two women said it was not necessary and would be a waste of his time. So her father did not go and her mother cried, because "Par" was her only daughter. Ah Daw [the agent] told her that the daughter would be fine. She would be taking care of children and would get to go to school. Ah Daw's husband came and said the same thing. Finally, "Par's" parents believed Ah Daw. Ah Daw told her that she would study Thai for a month, then learn to speak Thai, make necklaces, take care of children. Ah Daw gave her father 800 baht ($32).⁽⁸⁷⁾

In only two cases we investigated did the girls return voluntarily to prostitution after they had been returned home. In one case, the girl believed that since she had lost her virginity anyway, she might as well earn money for her family. In the other case, the shame of being known in her village as having worked as a prostitute was too great, and she, too, decided to help her family by going back.

In only one case out of the thirty we investigated directly was a girl lured from her home on other than a promise of economic prosperity.

One family, in Wan Mai, south of Taunggyi in Shan State, had two daughters. "Htet Htet" was sixteen years old and unmarried; the younger one, age thirteen, had been married to a man in drug warlord Khun Sa's territory, in the town of Bing Nong. A man from Bing Nong had come to the family's house to tell them that their daughter there was sick. The family agreed to send "Htet Htet" to visit. "Htet Htet" went with the man, but instead of taking her to see her sick sister, he took her to Thailand.

Of the thirty girls and women, eleven had been brought into Thailand by family members. The network for finding work in Thailand appears to be well-known in the rural areas of Burma that supply the women and girls. Relatives knew, for example, to take their daughters or sisters to the "Mekong shop" in Mae Sai or to a particularly well-known agent or to a certain temple. In some cases, women who have returned from Thailand provided the information to potential recruits. In other cases, relatives who live in or near Mae Sai knew the agents and directed the new recruits to them.

Of the remaining nineteen women and girls, eight were recruited by women returning from the brothels, who saw their escape as contingent on their ability to find successors. Those women were likely to reinforce the belief at home that they had worked as waitresses or maids in Thailand to save face. They would emphasize the cash rewards rather than the abuse. Four of our interviewees were recruited by someone known to them in the village, such as a teacher, who was operating as a "small agent" for the "big agent" in Mae Sai. Two set out for the border themselves, without knowing anyone at the other end. It is unclear how the remaining women were recruited.

The Money

For all but two of the twenty-six Burmese women and girls trafficked through Mae Sai, the cash transaction that sealed the recruit's fate took place in the town of Mae Sai itself, the point of entry into Thailand. (In the other two cases, the "small agent" made direct payments to the girl's family in her village.) In most cases, the girls, accompanied by parent, brother, aunt, friend or teacher, met the agent on the Thai side of the border, where the agent gave the girl's companion a sum ranging from 1,000 to 20,000 baht ($40 to $800). The average seemed to be about 5,000 baht ($200). It is not clear whether this payment was understood by the recipient as a recruitment fee, a gift, a purchase (of the woman or girl), reimbursement for travel expenses or a cash advance to buy clothes and other necessities. The terms of the payment were never explained to the woman or girl. It only became clear once she was in the brothel that the owner perceived it as credit against future earnings that she must work off, with interest. In at least one case, it seemed as though the Mae Sai agent functioned as a regular moneylender; while the daughter was working in a brothel in Klong Yai, the agent who had originally given 5,000 baht ($200) to the father reportedly loaned the father another 20,000 baht ($800) at his request. The daughter was to be kept in thrall to the brothel owner until the additional loan was paid off.

Once the money changed hands, the Mae Sai agent often arranged through the local police to send the woman or girl, usually with two or three other new recruits, sometimes with as many as ten, in a truck or van directly to a brothel or to another agent at a way station en route to Bangkok -- usually Chiangrai. Of those we interviewed, twenty ended up in Bangkok. Two went to brothels in Samut Sakhorn; one to Klong Yai near the Thai-Cambodian border; one to Prachinburi; one to Kanchanaburi; one to Chiangrai; one to Mae Lim (Chiangmai province) and three to Ranong.

Sexual Abuse in the Course of Recruitment

Even before they reach the brothels, the women and girls are subject to sexual abuse, including rape. In general, rapes during recruitment may be discouraged by the fact that virginity increases the value of the girls and women to a brothel owner -- and thus, presumably, to the recruiting agent who supplies him or her.⁽⁸⁸⁾ Of the thirty girls and women we interviewed, three reported being raped en route to the brothel; one in Chiangrai, one in Burma en route to Ranong and one on the road to Songkhla.

When "Chit Chit", for example, left her village in Taichelek in 1990 at the age of eighteen, she was taken directly to a policeman named Bu Muad in Mae Sai who himself was the brothel agent. He gave her 10,000 baht ($400) and drove with "Chit Chit" and another woman from the same village to Chiangrai in a police van. Another agent drove the truck. The two women stayed for eleven days with the policeman and his wife, who lived in Chiangrai, before going on to Mae Lim, in Chiangmai, where the brothel was. While they were in Chiangrai, the policeman raped "Chit Chit" while his wife and the other woman were at the market. He warned her that if she ever told anyone, he would beat her. She was afraid of him because he always carried his gun. According to "Chit Chit", this policeman was a regular visitor to the brothel in Chiangmai, beating girls for the owner if they did not cooperate or were recalcitrant in any way.

"Kyi Kyi", a twenty-year-old woman from Rangoon, was invited by Ye Htun, a man she had known in the market where she worked with her mother, to work at a restaurant in Tavoy (in the Tenasserim Division of southern Burma, midway between the city of Moulmein in the north and Ranong in the south). She agreed to go, as long as she could bring a friend with her. The two women and Ye Htun stopped en route to Tavoy at Moulmein where they stayed in a guesthouse for two days. On the second night, according to "Kyi Kyi", Ye Htun raped her. He then took the two on a small boat, not to Tavoy but to Ranong, where Ye Htun sold "Kyi Kyi" to the Victoria brothel for 6,000 baht ($240).

Another woman, "Nan Li Li" whom we met in the Immigration Detention Center (IDC) in Bangkok, but who had been so traumatized that she was unable to speak, had been befriended by another woman, "Muyar" at the IDC. "Muyar" told us "Nan Li Li" was Shan, twenty-three years old and originally from Keng Tung. She had been taken by an agent from Mae Sai to Chiangrai and flown from there to Hat Yai, a trading town on the Thai-Malaysian border, with a woman escort and two other girls. From there she was sent with a driver to Songkhla, only to be raped by the driver en route. After three days in Songkhla, she was arrested and taken back to Hat Yai where she tried to escape. She was captured and detained first in Songkhla and then in the IDC, and was widely believed to be "crazy."

Girls and women are also subjected to various forms of sexual abuse short of rape.

When "Tar Tar's" teacher first brought her to the agent in Mae Sai she was taken into a separate room. The agent said he had to check her virginity -- "Tar Tar" said he did so by touching her breasts and crotch to see "how sensitive she was."

Moving From Brothel to Brothel

The initial destinations of trafficking victims are rarely final; while some women and girls do stay in one brothel for a year or more, many of those we interviewed were frequently moved around by the owners.

"Tar Tar", for example, spent twenty days at the Rong Ram See Tong brothel on Soi Payana in Bangkok; she was then transferred to the Rong Ram 46 on Tawit Soi 1 where she worked for three or four months. She then moved to Rong Ram 48 for two months and Rong Ram 84 for three months. All four brothels appeared to be run by either a single owner or a network of owners who among them employed five hundred girls, most of them Thai.

In another case, "Yin Yin", aged twenty-one, decided to seek work in Thailand in 1992. Accompanied by two other girls and her mother, she traveled from a village in Muang Piak to the district town of Taichelek (Burma). From there, they went by car to an agent in Mae Sai. "Yin Yin" had worked with a relative frying fish in Mae Sai six years earlier, for a period of about six months, so the family already had contacts in the town. The agent advanced 25,000 baht ($1,000) to "Yin Yin" who gave all but 1,500 baht ($60) to her mother. She stayed with the agent for two days, then was taken by a policeman, together with the two girls from her village, to Chiangrai. They stayed overnight at a temple. The next morning, "Yin Yin", her two friends, the agent from Mae Sai, a driver, and the owner of a brothel in Bangkok called the Pai Mai Tea Shop, drove by van to the tea shop. "Yin Yin" worked in Bangkok for ten days. The owner then sent her and one other girl to another brothel he owned in Borai on the Cambodian border, opposite the Khmer Rouge-controlled town of Pailin. She was in Borai for six months before being taken back to Bangkok -- by the original agent from Mae Sai -- to the Dao Kanong brothel where she stayed for six or seven months. "Yin Yin" believed the owner had at least ten brothels, with about eighteen agents operating out of Dao Kanong alone where about fifty women and girls worked.

Ranong

Of the three women we interviewed who entered Thailand from Kawthaung and were delivered to brothels in Ranong, none received any money in advance. All three claimed they were effectively sold to the brothel owner by "friends" who turned out to be agents for a price ranging from 2,000 to 7,000 baht ($80 to $280). The three said they received no money at all from either the agent or owner.

None of the women we interviewed had been forcibly kidnapped, but we obtained enough information from other sources to suggest that the practice is not uncommon. In June 1991, for example, police from the Crime Suppression Division raided a brothel in Ranong's Muang District and "rescued" twenty-five women, most of them Burmese. Two of the women were sisters who, intending to go shopping, had hired a motorcycle to take them to the Ranong market. The motorcycle driver abducted the two and sold them to a brothel. According to a police report filed by the girls' uncle, they were forced to work and threatened with death by the pimps if they tried to escape.

In another case we investigated, a fifteen-year-old girl from Shan State was interviewed by a Thai NGO in October 1992. She had been working in Thai brothels since she was ten. She said that she had been looking after a water buffalo near her home when a man grabbed her and put her in a car, then took her to Keng Tung. She ended up in a brothel in Chiangmai for the next five years; the man who abducted her received 35,000 baht ($1,400). Because she was kidnapped, the owner apparently thought she would try to leave, so she was kept locked up whenever she was not working.⁽⁸⁹⁾

B. THE BROTHEL

As noted above, entertainment places, such as massage parlors, bars and night clubs are considered legal if registered with the government. The girls and women working there have some ability to negotiate the terms of their employment and the nature of the interaction with their clients. Brothels, which can range from seven or eight girls in the back of a noodle shop to a multi-story building with over a hundred workers, are, by contrast, illegal.

In the brothels, the owners use a combination of threats, force, debt bondage and physical confinement to control the women and girls, force them to work in deplorable, abusive conditions, and eliminate any possibility of negotiation or escape. Those seeking to flee legitimately fear capture and punishment by the owners or agents, arrest for illegal immigration or prostitution or abduction and resale to another brothel owner. The clients of the Burmese we interviewed were predominantly Thai, but included foreign workers from neighboring countries such as Burma, Cambodia and Malaysia. According to our interviews, only when the girls were sold as virgins for high prices were clients from wealthier countries involved.

Many of the Burmese women and girls are sold to agents of the brothels by friends or relatives who themselves may be unaware of the nature or conditions of their employment. As noted above, the payment they get from the agent becomes the core of a debt which the women must pay off through prostitution before they are allowed to return home. The debt, often compounded with one hundred percent interest, is the cornerstone of the control exercised by the brothel owners and pimps over the women and girls. None of the women and girls we interviewed understood the nature or extent of their debt. It had never been explained to them. In most cases, they had no idea how much they owed nor could they explain to us the terms of repayment.

Debt Bondage

Debt bondage is one of a number of slavery-related practices set forth and defined in the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery of 1949. The Convention defines debt bondage as the status or condition arising from a promise made by an indebted person to provide personal services or the services of a third party where the length and nature of the services are not limited or defined or the reasonable value of the services are not applied to the debt.⁽⁹⁰⁾ Under customary international law, states must eradicate and make criminal the practice of debt bondage, even if they are not party to the Supplementary Convention, its predecessor or related conventions.

Debt bondage is also prohibited by international law on forced labor⁽⁹¹⁾ and by Section 344 of the Thai Penal Code which states that

Whoever dishonestly induces, by means of deception, ten persons upwards to perform any kind of work for him or for a third person with intent not to pay wages or renumeration to such person, or with intent to pay such persons lower wages or renumeration than those agreed upon shall be punished with imprisonment not exceeding three years or fine not exceeding six thousand baht, or both.

Yet despite these clear prohibitions every Burmese woman and girl we interviewed reported this abuse.

For most of the women interviewed, that debt appeared to consist of the amount they received from an agent of the brothel owner at the Thai-Burmese border, plus transport, protection money or payoffs to police and other officials and any advances given for clothing or other personal items.

The money given to the girl or woman, her family or a secondary agent at the border (in Mae Sai, a standard payment was 10,000 baht [$400]) was typically doubled by the brothel owner to include "interest". None of the Burmese girls or women we interviewed knew of the arrangements between the brothel owner and the agents, but they assumed the "interest" was at least in part the agent's profit. Many of those interviewed had no idea how much money was exchanged and as a consequence had no idea how much they were indebted. All of the Burmese were continually reminded that not only did they have to pay off their debt, but also whatever living expenses they were unable to meet from their meager tips.

Some women never knew how much they earned, how much they were supposed to earn, or what the terms for repayment of the debt were. Even those who did have some idea of the debt/payment arrangement, were not any better off for the knowledge. For example,

"Tar Tar" knew that the going rate in one of the places she worked, the Dao Kanong brothel in Bangkok, was 110 baht ($4.40) per hour. She was told by other women in the brothel that her share was thirty percent, or 36 baht ($1.40) plus any tips from the clients. "Tar Tar" figured of the 36 baht, half went toward repayment of her original cash advance, which was 10,000 baht ($400, doubled to include interest), and half was ostensibly for rent and food, so "Tar Tar" was never actually able to keep any of it. The owner gave her and the other workers 30 baht ($1.20) a day to buy food, but this amount also was deducted from her earnings. She did keep track of how much she had earned, but assumed that she and the owner would settle accounts at the end of the year.

Another woman, "Sein Sein," who was sent to Bangkok when she was sixteen years old, had a similar arrangement. The standard fee for clients was 120 baht ($4.80) a "time." "Sein Sein" was supposed to get a third, but she never received any money. Instead she got one chip per client and counted her chips every night to calculate the amount to be subtracted from her original debt of 10,000 baht ($400). She received 30 baht ($1.20) a day from the owner, plus tips, to pay for food and other expenses. The tips were small except for the first time when she got 300 baht ($12) from the man who took her virginity. At the time she was arrested, she had worked five months, serving ten to fifteen clients a day, and was sure she had paid off her initial debt, but there were no accounts to prove it. She had managed to save 500 baht ($20) from tips, but lost it at the time of the arrest when the police refused to let her take her belongings with her.

Some of the women had a vague understanding that they would have to work for a specific length of time to pay off the debt. "Thanda" was seventeen years old when her mother received 20,000 baht ($800) from a brothel agent in Mae Sai on the understanding that she would work for a year, although the terms of her employment were never spelled out. (She thought she was supposed to receive a third of the income from her clients, but when she was arrested after two months, all of her share was still going to pay off the debt.) The owner of the brothel warned "Chit Chit" that she had to stay one year or else he would follow her back to her village, get her back and beat her. She was so frightened she never even asked him to settle the accounts.

In another case, "Tin Tin" was held responsible for paying back the 5,000 baht ($200) that the owner of the Sanae brothel in Klong Yai had given an agent to bring her there from the border. She had no idea when she left for Thailand that she had effectively been sold into prostitution until she arrived at the brothel, where she was given a number and told to go sit in a windowed room. When she tried to refuse, the owner, Ba Ouan, told her that with interest, she now owed 10,000 baht ($400) and said, "If you want to go home, then you've got to work, or you'll never pay back your debt."

Not only were the girls or women never told the terms of their debt, but also every worker was different: no consistent share or percentage was established for all workers within a brothel. Only two of the thirty women and girls we interviewed had been able to settle their accounts with the owner, despite the fact that some had worked in brothels for years. All were simply waiting to be told their debts were paid and hoping they would have some extra money saved from tips to pay for their transportation costs to return home.

"Than Than" was one of the very few we interviewed who paid off her debt, but her story indicates the exploitation and arbitrariness of the process. An agent in Mae Sai had given her stepfather 10,000 baht ($400) when he agreed to find work for "Than Than." She was seventeen at the time and understood that she would be working in a restaurant. Instead, she found herself in a brothel in Bangkok. She got a red