Sex Workers in Thailand

Sex Workers in Thailand

Thailand ("Land of the Free") is the only Southeast Asian country that has avoided being colonized by a Western power. It is known for its rich culture and hospitable inhabitants. Unfortunately it also has the dubious distinction of being the leading country in sex trade and has even been given the demeaning title of "the whorehouse of the world." Tourism has played a significant role in Thailand's economic growth, particularly in the 1980s. Even now, revenues from tourism make up the largest single component of Thailand's export earnings, with about 10 million tourists visiting the country every year. Most surveys show that a vast majority of the tourists to Thailand are men and many of them are attracted by the country's nightlife. This paper gives a short history of prostitution in Thailand, the historical and current causes behind the widespread prostitution in the country, gives a profile of the sex-workers in Thailand, discusses the health issues of the sex-workers, analyses the effect of prostitution on Thai society, solutions to the problem and the barriers that prevent easy solutions.

History of Prostitution in Thailand

Contrary to popular perception, the history of prostitution in Thailand is a lot older than the Vietnam War and the advent of the U.S. marines to Thailand for "R&R" (Rest and Recreation) during the 1960s. The earliest record of prostitution in Thailand go as far back as 1433 when a Chinese voyager to Siam, Ma Huan, recorded in his writings, instances of married local women getting intimate with the visitors from China with the tacit approval of their husbands.

Other references to prostitution in Siam were recorded by the first European travelers to the country in the early seventeenth century. A Dutchman who visited Pattani in 1604, wrote that "when foreigners come there from other lands to do their business... men come and ask them whether they do not desire a woman" (Quoted by Wilson and Henley, 1994) which is not much different than the present situation in Thailand -- when most visitors to Bangkok are solicited by taxi drivers with offers of exotic sex right at the airport.

In 1680s a Thai official was licensed by the state to run a monopoly of the prostitution business in Ayutthaya in order to earn revenue for the government through taxes. The taxation of prostitutes and brothels was called "tax for the road."

When Rama V abolished slavery at the turn of the century (1900), some female slaves who were previously kept as "slave wives" entered the "oldest" profession. The situation led to the uncontrolled spread of venereal disease and prostitution was legalized in 1934 by Rama VII. The law allowed prostitutes to be registered so that they could receive regular medical care.

At the end of World War II, prostitution was already thriving in Thailand. There were a number of cabarets, strip-clubs, dance halls, and brothels in Bangkok to cater to the Japanese soldiers as well as the local population. The city, in the late 40s, even had the reputation of being one of the blue movie capitals of the world and boasted of one of the biggest brothel houses in the world -- a nine story building. (Wilson and Henley, 1984)

Prostitution in Thailand, nevertheless, got a major boost during the Vietnam War the scale and character of Thai prostitution dramatically altered with the U.S. military presence in the 1960s and 1970s. A 1957 UN report estimated that at the time there were 20,000 prostitutes in Thailand (total population of 22 million). By 1964, the police estimated there were 400,000 prostitutes in Bangkok; the total population of Thailand had only increased to 27 million by then. (Hill, 1993)

Thailand's main role during the war was to serve as a rest and recreation area for American military men. In 1967, a formal treaty between the United States and Thailand permitted the U.S. military to send its men to Thailand for "R & R" (rest and recreation). As a result, about 70,000 U.S. soldiers were flown to Bangkok every year to recover from the stress of warfare and it is estimated that an average of 700,000 American GIs took their R & R. In Thailand between 1962-76 (Ibid, p. 134) The influx of such huge numbers of "tourists" had an equally significant impact on the "services" industry of Thailand as the American soldiers expenditures at restaurants, bars, and brothels exceeded 40% of Thailand's export earnings at the time. (Ibid.)

Hence, while the American soldiers' influx in Thailand during the Vietnam War cannot be blamed for the start of prostitution in the country, it certainly helped to diversify and expand the sex industry. Moreover, the publicity that prostitution in Thailand received as a result, helped to bring in the "sex tourists" in droves after the end of the Vietnam War in the early 1970s -- not only sustaining it but expanding it to the present levels.

Causes of Prostitution in Thailand

The reasons for the continuing "boom" in Thailand's sex industry can be attributed to the patronage of the "sex tourists" as well as the social tolerance for the institution in the country. Another major underlying cause for prostitution in Thailand is the fact that prostitution is still the highest paying job available to most women in Thailand and successive governments have disregarded the development of women's opportunities for economic independence. (Shahabudin, n.d.) The perpetuation of prostitution in Thailand can, therefore, be viewed as a "supply and demand" problem. Let us look at the supply side first.

Poverty and Effects of Globalization

The single biggest cause of prostitution in Thailand is without doubt poverty. Poverty is, as Mr. Shahabudin notes, "a vicious force that drives families to sacrifice their daughters to prostitution." Most surveys of "massage girls" in Bangkok show that over 70% of the girls come from poor farming families and almost all of them send part of their earnings home to feed their families. Many of them come from refugee families who have lost their land on which they farmed previously; now these families have little choice but to send their children out for work in order to survive. The incentive for making income through prostitution in Thailand is overwhelming for poor peasant girls: Catherine Hill (1993) quoting Pasuk Phongpaichit, author of From Peasant Girls to Bangkok Masseuses (1982, 8) writes that prostitution in Thailand offers "wages up to twenty-five times the wages to women in other industries."

Urbanization and the effects of Globalization have created great inequality between the incomes in the rural and urban areas. For example, it is estimated that the income levels in cities such as Bangkok are at least nine times higher than in the northern countryside that provides the bulk of its sex-workers. (Shahabudin) Globalization and government policies have served to perpetuate this inequality. As part of government policy to increase exports and earn precious foreign exchange, the price of rice (the main crop in Thailand and in most of rural areas, the only source of income) is kept artificially low. (Ibid) This results in the flow of capital from the rural to the urban areas, making the countryside even more impoverished. This vicious cycle is further perpetuated by the nature of economic "globalization" that seeks to look for cheap labor around the world -- which again is mostly provided by the rural poor. Moreover, most of the MNCs make investment in industries located in the urban centers of the developing countries such as Thailand -- further accentuating the rural and urban income differential.

Gender Inequality

Age-old gender bias against the females in Asian societies including Thailand results in low-levels of female education. For example, lack of investment in education in the rural areas of Thailand by the government means that most of the education is provided by traditional pagoda education conducted by monks which is not available to girls. This results in lop-sided development of literacy levels leaving most girls illiterate and with little choice in choosing a way of living for themselves.

Religious Teachings

Religious practices of Theravada Buddhism perpetuate the contradictory role of women in the country. Buddhist monks are held in the highest esteem, and over 40% of all Thai men (only men can become monks) spend some portion of their life as a monk in order to accumulate "merit." (Hill, 1993) Buddhist philosophy teaches that those who accumulate enough merit shall be reborn into a higher life and birth as a woman is the result of insufficient merit owing to shortcomings in a past life. Moreover, like most other the other major world religions, Buddhism considers women less spiritual than men. Many Buddhists believe that men are more spiritual and that women are more materialistic and a logical outcome of this tradition is that women are encouraged to engage in the materialistic pursuit of providing for the family while the traditional Thai men pursues the spiritual goal of "earning" merit. (Ibid.) Such religious teachings, coupled with the general belief that the Lord Buddha did not forsake the prostitutes, have also promoted the climate for prostitution in rural Thailand.

So much for the supply side of the causes behind prostitution in Thailand; now for the demand-side reasons:

Publicity and Tourism

When the U.S. soldiers descended on Bangkok as part of the official "R&R" deal between the governments of Thailand and the United States during the Vietnam War, they not only contributed directly to the development of the sex trade in Thailand but also laid the grounds for its continuance in the post-war era. This was done through enormous publicity about the licentious nightlife in Bangkok, and its glamorization as the "City of Angels," and "the sex capital of the orient." The stereotyped perception of the Thai women as "exotic and docile," "elegant and shy," and as "masters of the art of making love," were spread far and wide by the American soldiers who had been to Thailand during the Vietnam War. Add to this the fact that tourism was promoted internationally in a big way during the seventies, and the need of the Thai government to look for some other way to earn foreign exchange when the dollars spent by U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War dried up. The only viable alternative at the time seemed to be the replacement of the departing U.S. GIs with "sex tourists" from Europe, United States and Japan. Thailand made concerted efforts to promote tourism in the decades following the end of Vietnam War and was successful in making its number one foreign exchange earner in the 1980s with a corresponding expansion in its sex industry.

Vested Interests number of people, both within and outside Thailand, have deep vested interests in keeping the sex-trade going. Hotel entrepreneurs, tour operators, travel agents, and the airlines industry are major beneficiaries of the billion dollar tourism industry. Moreover, a large number of local government functionaries including politicians and bureaucrats including the police stand to gain directly or indirectly from the "illicit" trade. It is an "open secret" in Thailand that that a number of policemen own some of the brothels in Northern Thailand and influential politicians are suspected of owning chains of brothels in Bangkok and elsewhere. The complicity is evident in several recorded instances in which police, especially in rural areas, have handed escaping girls back to their abusers.(Shahabudin, n.d.) according to one estimate, Bangkok's massage businesses pay a staggering 3.2 billion bahts a year in bribes to the police.

Local Male Attitudes towards Prostitution

The international aspect of the sex trade is no doubt important, but all prostitution in the country does not exist to cater for the foreigners. Most of the clientele, patronizing the cheapest brothels, are local Thai men. Prostitution in many cases has become integrated with initiation rights: "For many Thai men, a trip to the neighborhood brothel is a rite of passage, a tradition passed from father to son." (Hall, 2004) Most studies show that the majority of Thai men have their first sexual experience with a prostitute - the act is often a part of high school or university rituals in which a freshman is taken to a prostitute by his older colleagues. Other studies show that 95% of all men over 21 have slept with a prostitute. In addition to rites of passage, the activity of visiting a whorehouse has become a social activity in many cases: A night out with friends may include sharing drinks and food and ending with having sex with a prostitute. (Ibid.)

Profile of the Sex Worker in Thailand

The total number of sex workers in Thailand remains a matter of conjecture. Since prostitution in the country is illegal, the government remains in denial and "officially" no prostitutes exist in the country as massage parlors, tea houses and other hospitality centers do not "count" as brothels. Another problem that prevents an accurate estimate of prostitutes is that a number of them are "temporary" workers and the migratory nature of the profession in the country. Estimates of the numbers of women and children engaged in prostitution vary widely: according to the Public Health Department, there are approximately 75,000 prostitutes in Thailand; some estimates put the figure at over 2 million. Most nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) put the figure of prostitutes in Thailand, at any given time, in the one million range, which seems to be closer to the truth.

The majority of female Thai prostitutes come from the rural North and Northeast regions of Thailand, out of which the North is the predominant source (Lyttleton, 1994). Historically, young women from North Thailand have been valued for their light skins and softness of demeanor and in the old days were often chosen as court concubines. Statistics also show that beauty contests in Thailand are won by women from the North; and apart from their beauty their soft-mannered and soft-spoken nature are considered ideally suited for the profession. (Ibid.) Surveys of massage parlors in Thailand show that about 70% of them come from the poor rural families of Northern Thailand. Most of them enter the profession due to poverty, but many of them are forced, tricked or sold into prostitution by their families or recruiting pimps. Average age of new recruits range from 10-20 years, and the trend in recent years has been towards recruitment of younger girls despite efforts of crack-down against "child prostitution" by the government. One reason for this trend is the preference for younger girls by visitors to brothels who mistakenly believe that having sex with younger girls is safer with to regard to transmission of AIDS and other venereal diseases.

A typical recruiting procedure for roping in prostitutes from the North is as follows: Most village girls are recruited at the age of 12-13 years, soon after they finish primary school. The recruiting agent, who may be a resident of the local district or may travel from Bangkok to the area, is the key person in the recruiting process. After striking a deal with the parents of the girl, the agent takes the girl to work in brothels or massage parlors, usually in Bangkok or the South. The girls send part of their earnings to their parents, who put their new-found "wealth" on display, typically by "building ostentatious houses." (Lyttleton, 1994) The girls support their younger siblings through school and sometimes recruit them into the profession when they come of age.

It is not unusual for such village girls to return home after several years, and even marry to raise families. In some areas of northern Thailand, no social stigma is attached to prostitution and the women are often viewed "as successful and worldly-wise." (Ibid.) The returning women may even wash away their sins by contributing large sums of money to village temples. A common rationale for the acceptance of such behavior is the "merit" provided by the girls' earnings for their families which more than compensates for their transgression.

Other sources of sex workers in Thailand include Burmese refugees and girls from the Burma-Thailand border. According to figures cited in a 2001 study by anthropologist David A. Feingold, there were as many as 30,000 Burmese commercial sex workers in Thailand, and the number was believed to be growing rapidly. These "foreign" recruits are susceptible to even worse exploitation than the Thai girls as they are poorer and cater to the cheaper brothels frequented by the locals. Refugee girls are more likely to be kidnapped or tricked into the sex industry by promises of other jobs in the cities. The desperately poor families are sometimes given loans of as low as U.S.$100 and their daughters taken away and forced or cajoled into prostitution to pay off the loans. (Shahabudin, n.d.)

Health Issues

Sexually transmitted disease is a health hazard to which sex workers in Thailand are constantly exposed. Before the advent of the deadly AIDS epidemic in the 1990s, gonorrhea was already rampant with rampant, infecting over 70% of Thai prostitutes with an increasingly antibiotic-resistant strain. (Hill, 1993, p 142)

AIDS started to spread in Thailand in 1987. Apart from intravenous drug users, it spread at the fastest rate among the sex workers. In the early nineties, the epidemic was threatening to get out of hand and assume the catastrophic levels similar to that of the worst-hit African countries. Sex workers were most at risk, particularly due to the aversion of Thai males to the wearing of condoms. At the peak of the AIDS epidemic in Thailand in the mid / late nineties, over half of the sex workers in the city of Chiang Mai were ill with HIV / AIDS and 80 to 90% of the AIDS cases in the country were being transferred through unsafe sex with the prostitutes. Until 1995, the spiraling infection rate of HIV in Thailand was running at a hundred thousand a year. More than a million people have been infected with HIV / AIDS in Thailand so far and well over 300,000 have died of the disease.

The effect of AIDS has been most devastating on the sex workers, the most vulnerable being the poorest and the youngest since the clients of the cheapest whorehouses are averse to the wearing of condoms. Also, lesions and injuries during sexual intercourse are most likely among the youngest, making them more prone to infections. (Shahabudin, n.d.) Realizing the gravity of the situation, a concerted campaign was launched about compulsory use of condoms by clients of sex workers (the 100% condom use program) through the combined efforts of the WHO, and a number of NGOs. Although the AIDS epidemic among the general population or the sex workers in Thailand is far from over, the condom-use campaign has yielded impressive results over the last few years. Now only about 15% of the HIV / AIDS cases are transmitted through the sex workers, compared to the 80-90% at the peak of the epidemic.