Sex Work in Thailand: History, Causes, and Health Issues

Introduction

Thailand ("Land of the Free") is the only Southeast Asian country that has avoided colonization by a Western power. It is known for its rich culture and hospitable people. Unfortunately, it also carries the dubious distinction of being a leading country in the 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 approximately 10 million tourists visiting the country every year. Most surveys show that a vast majority of tourists to Thailand are men, and many are attracted by the country's nightlife.

This paper provides a short history of prostitution in Thailand, examines the historical and current causes behind the widespread sex trade, profiles sex workers in Thailand, discusses their health issues, analyzes the effect of prostitution on Thai society, and considers solutions to the problem along with the barriers that prevent easy remedies.

History of Prostitution in Thailand

Contrary to popular perception, the history of prostitution in Thailand is far older than the Vietnam War and the arrival of U.S. marines for "R&R" (Rest and Recreation) during the 1960s. The earliest record of prostitution in Thailand dates to 1433, when a Chinese voyager to Siam, Ma Huan, recorded instances of married local women becoming intimate with visiting Chinese men, 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)—a situation not unlike the present, when many visitors to Bangkok are solicited by taxi drivers with offers of commercial sex right at the airport.

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

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

By the end of World War II, prostitution was already thriving in Thailand. A number of cabarets, strip clubs, dance halls, and brothels in Bangkok catered to Japanese soldiers as well as the local population. In the late 1940s, the city even had the reputation of being one of the blue-movie capitals of the world and boasted one of the largest brothel houses in the world—a nine-story building (Wilson and Henley, 1984).

Prostitution in Thailand nonetheless received a major boost during the Vietnam War, when the scale and character of the industry dramatically altered with the U.S. military presence in the 1960s and 1970s. A 1957 UN report estimated that there were 20,000 prostitutes in Thailand at the time, when the total population was 22 million. By 1964, police estimated there were 400,000 prostitutes in Bangkok alone, while the total national population had only grown to 27 million (Hill, 1993).

Thailand's principal role during the war was to serve as a rest and recreation area for American military personnel. 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. As a result, approximately 70,000 U.S. soldiers were flown to Bangkok every year, and it is estimated that an average of 700,000 American GIs took their R&R in Thailand between 1962 and 1976 (Ibid., p. 134). The influx of such large numbers of "tourists" had a correspondingly significant impact on Thailand's services industry: American soldiers' expenditures at restaurants, bars, and brothels exceeded 40% of Thailand's total export earnings at the time (Ibid.).

While the American military presence in Thailand during the Vietnam War cannot be blamed for originating prostitution in the country, it certainly helped to diversify and expand the sex industry. Moreover, the publicity that Thai prostitution received as a result helped to draw "sex tourists" in large numbers after the war ended in the early 1970s—not only sustaining the industry but expanding it to its present scale.

Causes of Prostitution in Thailand

The continuing boom in Thailand's sex industry can be attributed to the patronage of sex tourists as well as broad social tolerance for the institution within the country. Another major underlying cause is that prostitution remains the highest-paying job available to most women in Thailand, and successive governments have neglected 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.

Poverty and the Effects of Globalization

The single largest cause of prostitution in Thailand is, without doubt, poverty. As Shahabudin notes, poverty is "a vicious force that drives families to sacrifice their daughters to prostitution." Most surveys of massage workers in Bangkok show that over 70% come from poor farming families and that nearly all of them send part of their earnings home to support their families. Many come from refugee families who have lost the land they once farmed; these families have little choice but to send their children out to work to survive. The financial incentive is overwhelming for poor rural girls: Catherine Hill (1993), quoting Pasuk Phongpaichit, author of From Peasant Girls to Bangkok Masseuses (1982), notes that prostitution in Thailand offers "wages up to twenty-five times the wages to women in other industries."

Urbanization and globalization have created severe income inequality between rural and urban areas. Income levels in cities such as Bangkok are estimated to be at least nine times higher than in the northern countryside, which supplies the bulk of the country's sex workers (Shahabudin, n.d.). Government policies compound this inequality: in order to increase exports and earn foreign exchange, the price of rice—the main crop in Thailand and often the only source of rural income—is kept artificially low (Ibid.). This drains capital from rural to urban areas, deepening rural poverty. The cycle is reinforced by economic globalization's relentless search for cheap labor, which is predominantly rural, and by multinational corporations that concentrate investment in urban centers, further widening the rural-urban income gap.

Gender Inequality

Long-standing gender bias against women in Asian societies, including Thailand, produces low levels of female education. The lack of government investment in rural schooling means that most education in those areas is provided through traditional temple schooling conducted by monks—an education that is not available to girls. This produces a lopsided development of literacy, leaving most rural girls illiterate and with little real choice about how to earn a living.

Religious Teachings

The practices of Theravada Buddhism perpetuate the contradictory role of women in Thai society. 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 lives as monks in order to accumulate "merit" (Hill, 1993). Buddhist philosophy teaches that those who accumulate sufficient merit will be reborn into a higher life, and that birth as a woman results from insufficient merit owing to shortcomings in a past life. As with many other major world religions, Buddhism regards women as less spiritual than men. Many Buddhists believe that men are more spiritual and women more materialistic; 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 man pursues the spiritual goal of earning merit (Ibid.). Such religious teachings, combined with the widespread belief that the Lord Buddha did not forsake prostitutes, have also fostered a climate of tolerance for prostitution in rural Thailand.

Publicity and Tourism

When U.S. soldiers arrived in Bangkok under the official R&R agreement between the governments of Thailand and the United States during the Vietnam War, they not only directly stimulated the sex trade but also laid the groundwork for its continuation in the post-war era. They did so through enormous publicity about Bangkok's licentious nightlife, glamorized through labels such as "City of Angels" and "the sex capital of the orient." Stereotyped perceptions of Thai women as "exotic and docile," "elegant and shy," and "masters of the art of making love" were spread widely by returning soldiers. Combined with aggressive international promotion of tourism in the 1970s and the Thai government's need to replace the dollars spent by departing U.S. troops, the only viable alternative appeared to be attracting sex tourists from Europe, the United States, and Japan. Thailand made concerted efforts to promote tourism in the decades following the Vietnam War and succeeded in making it the country's number-one foreign-exchange earner by the 1980s, with a corresponding expansion of the sex industry.

Vested Interests

A large 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 airline industry are major beneficiaries of the billion-dollar tourism sector. Additionally, many local government functionaries—including politicians, bureaucrats, and police—gain directly or indirectly from the trade. It is an open secret in Thailand that a number of police officers own some of the brothels in northern Thailand, and influential politicians are suspected of owning chains of brothels in Bangkok and elsewhere. The complicity of authorities is evident in several documented instances in which police, particularly in rural areas, returned escaping girls to their abusers (Shahabudin, n.d.). By one estimate, Bangkok's massage businesses pay a staggering 3.2 billion baht a year in bribes to the police.

Local Male Attitudes toward Prostitution

The international dimension of the sex trade is undeniably important, but not all prostitution in Thailand exists to serve foreigners. The majority of clients at the cheapest brothels are local Thai men. In many cases, visiting a brothel has become integrated into social rituals: "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 part of high school or university rituals in which older students take a freshman to a brothel. Other studies indicate that 95% of men over the age of 21 have slept with a prostitute. Beyond rites of passage, visiting a brothel has in many cases become a social activity: a night out with friends may include shared food and drinks followed by sex with a prostitute (Ibid.).

References

Hall, Justin Allyn. (1994). "Prostitution in Thailand and Southeast Asia." Justin's Links. Retrieved May 2, 2004, from http://www.links.net/vita/swat/course/prosthai.html

Hill, Catherine. (1993). "Planning for Prostitution: An Analysis of Thailand's Sex Industry." Chapter 8 in Women's Lives and Public Policy: The International Experience. Edited by Charlotte Bunch. Praeger: Westport, CT.

Lyttleton, Chris. (1994). "The Good People of Isan: Commercial Sex in Northeast Thailand." The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 5(3), 257+.

Shahabudin, Sharifah H. (n.d.). "Strategies of Civil Society to Address AIDS in Asia: Emphasis on the Sex Sector." Retrieved May 2, 2004, from http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/hivaids/Shahabudin.html

Wilson, Donald, and Henley, David. (1994). "Prostitution in Thailand: Facing Hard Facts." Bangkok Post, 25 December, 1994.