The New Slavery
Thailand
excerpted from the book
Disposable People
New Slavery in the Global Economy
by Kevin Bales
University of California Press,
2004, paper
p5
... slavery has not, as most of us have been led to believe, ended.
To be sure, the word slavery continues to be used to mean all
sorts of things, and all too often it has been applied as an easy
metaphor. Having just enough money to get by, receiving wages
that barely keep you alive, may be called wage slavery, but it
is not slavery. Sharecroppers have a hard life, but they are not
slaves. Child labor is terrible, but it is not necessarily slavery.
We might think slavery is a matter of
ownership, but that depends on what we mean by ownership. In the
past, slavery entailed one person legally owning another person,
but modern slavery is different. Today slavery is illegal everywhere,
and there is no more legal ownership of human beings. When people
buy slaves today they don't ask for a receipt or ownership papers,
but they do gain control-and they use violence to maintain this
control. Slaveholders have all of the benefits of ownership without
the legalities. Indeed, for the slaveholders, not having legal
ownership is an improvement because they get total control without
any responsibility for what they own. For that reason I tend to
use the term slaveholder instead of slaveowner.
In spite of this difference between the
new and the old slavery, I think everyone would agree that what
I am talking about is slavery: the total control of one person
by another for the purpose of economic exploitation. Modern slavery
hides behind different masks, using clever lawyers and legal smoke
screens, but when we strip away the lies, we find someone controlled
by violence and denied all of their personal freedom to make money
for someone else.
p7
Slavery is an obscenity. It is not just stealing someone's labor;
it is the theft of an entire life. It is more closely related
to the concentration camp than to questions of bad working conditions.
p8
My best estimate of the number of slaves in the world today is
27 million.
This number is much smaller than the estimates
put forward by some ( activists, who give a range as high as 200
million, but it is the number I feel I can trust; it is also the
number that fits my strict definition of slavery) The biggest
part of that 27 million, perhaps 15 to 20 million, represented
by bonded labor in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Bonded
labor or debt bondage happens when people give themselves into
slavery as security against a loan or when they inherit a debt
from a relative (we'll look at this more closely later). Otherwise
slavery tends to be concentrated in Southeast Asia, northern and
western Africa, and parts of South America (but there are some
slaves in almost every country in the world, including the United
States, Japan, and many European countries). There are more slaves
alive today than all the people stolen from Africa in the time
of the transatlantic slave trade.
... These slaves tend to be used in simple,
non-technological, and traditional work. The largest group work
in agriculture. But slaves are used in many other kinds of labor:
brickmaking, mining or quarrying, prostitution, gem working and
jewelry making, cloth and carpet making, and domestic service;
they clear forests, make charcoal, and work in shops. Much of
this work is aimed at local sale and consumption, but slave-made
goods reach into homes around the world. Carpets, fireworks, jewelry,
and metal goods made by slave labor, as well as grains, sugar,
and other foods harvested by slaves, are imported directly to
North America and Europe. In addition, large international corporations,
acting in ignorance through subsidiaries in the developing world,
take advantage of slave labor to improve their bottom line and
increase the dividends to their shareholders.
p11
... in some countries there are ethnic or religious differences
between slaves and slaveholders. In Pakistan, for example, many
enslaved brickmakers are Christians while the slaveholders are
Muslim. In India slave and slaveholder may be from different castes.
In Thailand slaves may come from rural parts of the country and
are much more likely to be women. But in Pakistan there are Christians
who are not slaves, in India members of the same caste who are
free. Their caste or religion simply reflects their vulnerability
to enslavement; it doesn't cause it. Only in one country, Mauritania,
does the racism of the old slavery persist-there black slaves
are held by Arab slaveholders, and race is a key division. To
be sure, some cultures are more divided along racial lines than
others. Japanese culture strongly distinguishes the Japanese as
different from everyone else, and so enslaved prostitutes in Japan
are more likely to be Thai, Philippine, or European women-rarely,
they may be Japanese. Even here, the key difference is not racial
but economic: Japanese women are not nearly so vulnerable and
desperate as Thais or Filipinas. And the Thai women are available
for shipment to Japan because Thais are enslaving Thais. The same
pattern occurs in the oil-rich states of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait,
where Muslim Arabs promiscuously enslave Sri Lankan Hindus, Filipino
Christians, and Nigerian Muslims. The common denominator is poverty,
not color. Behind every assertion of ethnic difference is the
reality of economic disparity.
p19
... three basic forms slavery:
1. Chattel slavery is the form closest
to the old slavery. A person is captured, born, or sold into permanent
servitude, and ownership might be asserted. The slave's children
are normally treated as property as well and can be sold by the
slaveholder. Occasionally, these slaves are kept as items of conspicuous
consumption. This form is most often found in northern and western
Africa and some Arab countries, but it represents a very small
proportion of slaves in the modern world.
2. Debt bondage is the most common form
of slavery in the world. A person pledges him- or herself against
a loan of money, but the length and nature of the service are
not defined and the labor does not reduce the original debt. The
debt can be passed down to subsequent generations, thus enslaving
offspring; moreover, "defaulting" can be punished by
seizing or selling children into further debt bonds. Ownership
is not normally asserted, but there is complete physical control
of the bonded laborer. Debt bondage is most common on the Indian
subcontinent.
3. Contract slavery shows how modern labor
relations are used to hide the new slavery. Contracts are offered
that guarantee employment, perhaps in a workshop or factory, but
when the workers are taken to their place of work they find themselves
enslaved. The contract is used as an enticement to trick an individual
into slavery, as well as a way of making the slavery look legitimate.
If legal questions are raised, the contract can be produced, but
the reality is that the "contract worker" is a slave,
threatened by violence, lacking any freedom of movement, and paid
nothing. The most rapidly growing form of slavery, this is the
second-largest form today. Contract slavery is most often found
in Southeast Asia Brazil, some Arab states, and some parts of
the Indian subcontinent.
p22
... slavery can be found in virtually every country. A recent
investigation in Great Britain found young girls held in slavery
and forced to be prostitutes in Birmingham and Manchester. Enslaved
domestic workers have been found and freed in London and Paris.
In the United States farmworkers have been found locked inside
barracks and working under armed guards as field slaves. Enslaved
Thai and Philippine women have been freed from brothels in New
York, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Almost all of the countries where
slavery "cannot" exist have slaves inside their borders-but,
it must be said, in very small numbers compared to the Indian
subcontinent and the Far East. The important point is that slaves
constitute a vast workforce supporting the global economy we all
depend upon.
p24
One of the drawbacks of the old slavery was the cost of maintaining
slaves who were too young or too old. Careful analysis of both
American cotton plantations and Brazilian coffee farms in the
1800s shows that the productivity of slaves was linked to their
age. Children did not bring in more than they cost until the age
of ten or twelve, though they were put to work as early as possible.
Productivity and profits to be made from a slave peaked at about
age thirty and fell off sharply when a slave was fifty or more.
Slavery was profitable, but the profitability was diminished by
the cost of keeping infants, small children, and unproductive
old people. The new slavery avoids this extra cost and so increases
its profits.
The new slavery mimics the world economy
by shifting away from ownership and fixed asset management, concentrating
instead on control and use of resources or processes. Put another
way, it is like the shift from the "ownership" of colonies
in the last century to the economic exploitation of those same
countries today without the cost and trouble of maintaining colonies.
Transnational companies today do what European empires did in
the last century-exploit natural resources and take advantage
of low-cost labor-but without needing to take over and govern
the entire country. Similarly, the new slavery appropriates the
economic value of individuals while keeping them under complete
coercive control-but without asserting ownership or accepting
responsibility for their survival. The result is much greater
economic efficiency: useless and unprofitable infants, the elderly,
and the sick or injured are dumped. Seasonal tasks are met with
seasonal enslavement, as in the case of Haitian sugarcane cutters."
In the new slavery, the slave is a consumable item, added to the
production process when needed, but no longer carrying a high
capital cost.
This shift from ownership to control and
appropriation applies to virtually all modern slavery across national
or cultural boundaries, whether the slave is cutting cane in the
Caribbean, making bricks in the Punjab, mining in Brazil, or being
kept as a prostitute in Thailand. Mirroring modern economic practice,
slavery in this respect is being transformed from culturally specific
forms to an emerging standardized or globalized form. The world
shrinks through increasingly easy communication. The slaveholders
in Pakistan or Brazil watch television just like everyone else.
/hen they see that industries in many countries are switching
to a "just in time" system for the delivery of raw materials
or necessary labor, they draw the same conclusions about profitability
as did those corporations. As jobs for life disappear from the
world economy, so too does slavery for life. The economic advantages
of short-term enslavement far outweigh the costs of buying new
slaves when needed.
***
Thailand
p45
... Thai men go to brothels in increasing numbers. Several recent
studies show that between 8o and 87 percent of Thai men have had
sex with a prostitute. Up to 90 percent report that their first
sexual experience was with a prostitute. Somewhere between 10
and 40 percent of married men paid for commercial sex within the
past twelve months, as have up to 50 percent of single men. Though
it is difficult to measure, these reports suggest something like
3 to 5 million regular customers for commercial sex. But it would
be wrong to imagine millions of Thai men sneaking furtively on
their own along dark streets lined with brothels: commercial sex
is a social event, part of a good night out with friends. Ninety-five
percent of men going to a brothel do so with their friends, usually
at the end of a night spent drinking. Groups go out for recreation
and entertainment, and especially to get drunk together. That
is a strictly male pursuit, as Thai women usually abstain from
alcohol. All-male groups out for a night on the town are considered
normal in any Thai city, and whole neighborhoods are devoted to
serving them. Most Thais, men and women, feel that commercial
sex is an acceptable part of an ordinary outing for single men,
and about two-thirds of men and one-third of women feel the same
about married men.'
For most married women, having their husbands
go to prostitutes is preferable to other forms of extramarital
sex. Most wives accept that men naturally want multiple partners,
and prostitutes are seen as less threatening to the stability
of the family.' Prostitutes require no long-term commitment or
emotional involvement. When a husband uses a prostitute he is
thought to be fulfilling a male role, but when he takes a minor
wife or mistress, his wife is thought to have failed. Minor wives
are usually bigamous second wives, often married by law in a district
different than that of the first marriage (easily done, since
no national records are kept). As wives, they require upkeep,
housing, and regular support, and their offspring have a claim
on inheritance; so they present a significant danger to the well-being
of the major wife and her children. The relationship may not be
formalized (polygamy is illegal) but it nevertheless will be regarded
as binding, and the children still have legal claims for support.
For the minor wife from a poor background, attachment to a well-heeled
older man is a proven avenue to upward social mobility. The potential
disaster for the first wife is a minor wife who convinces the
man to leave his first family, and this happens often enough to
keep first wives worried and watchful.
Given that sex is for sale everywhere,
and that noncommercial sex threatens the family more gravely,
it is little wonder that Thai wives maintain a "don't ask-don't
tell" policy about prostitution. As greater spending power
means their husbands can buy sex at will, most Thai women are
resigned to it, simply hoping that his interest doesn't shift
to a minor wife. Within this context, their husbands' occasional
visits to brothels with the boys are overlooked by wives. Because
it is part of a normal outing, most men feel little or no shame
in buying sex. Certainly any hesitation they might feel is quickly
melted by alcohol and peer pressure. Not all nights out lead to
the brothel, of course, but a promotion, pay raise, or any sort
of celebration makes a visit more likely. Not all groups of friends
will go to brothels on their night out Some groups of married
men never do, but others will go often, their drinking parties
naturally evolving into trips to the brothel. And once Thai men
are out drinking, it is normal for one reveler to pay for the
group, thereby hosting the party; picking up the tab is also a
form of conspicuous consumption, deployed to impress one's colleagues.
This carries over to the brothel as well and often makes the difference
in whether a man will use a prostitute. Interviewed in a recent
study one man explained, "When we arrive at the brothel,
my friends take one and pay for me to take another. It costs them
money; I don't want to waste it, so I take her." Having one's
prostitute paid for also brings an informal obligation to repay
in kind at a later date. It is something many men would avoid
because of the expense, if sober, but in the inebriated moment
of celebration most men go along for the ride.
Buying prostitutes for someone else happens
for other reasons as well. Businessmen in negotiations will provide
or expect sex as part of the bargaining process. For most Thais
this is a perfectly unremarkable part of business practice and
necessary if one's firm or job is to continue and prosper. Men
who travel on business are also more likely to use prostitutes,
taking advantage of being away from their hometown or village.
Government officials touring rural areas are offered local "flowers"
as hospitality, and there is a saying that a man has not really
been to a place until he has had a "taste" of it. Even
first-year university students will be taken en masse to brothels
in their first week as part of an initiation by upperclassmen.
All of this behavior is made easier by the assumption that men
are not responsible when they are drunk, and groups of friends
egg each other on in heavy drinking-an opened whiskey bottle can
never be resealed. In the macho Thai culture, drunken accusations
that a reluctant man is afraid of his wife almost always push
him to accept an offered prostitute. Thai culture also emphasizes
group solidarity and conflict avoidance, so acquiescence in commercial
sex is often seen as better than disagreement or embarrassment.
And whatever happens, men keep their secrets. Friends never admit
to their wives or others what happens when the group is out drinking.
For most Thai men, commercial sex is a
legitimate form of entertainment and sexual release. It is not
just acceptable: it is a clear statement of status and economic
power. Women in Thailand are things, markers in a male game of
status and prestige. It is thus no surprise that some women are
treated as livestock-kidnapped, abused, held like animals, bought
and sold, and dumped when their usefulness is gone. When this
customary treatment is combined with the relentless profitmaking
of the new economy, the result for women is horrific. Thousands
more must be found to feed men's status needs, thousands more
must be locked into sexual slavery to feed the profits of investors.
And what are the police, government, and local authorities doing
about slavery? Every case of sex slavery involves many crimes-fraud,
kidnap, assault, rape, sometimes murder. These crimes are not
rare or random; they are systematic and repeated in brothels thousands
of times each month. Yet those with the power to stop this terror
instead help it grow Land grow in the very lucrative world of
the modern slaveholder.
p49
The brokers and agents that buy girls in the villages and sell
them to brothels are only short-term slaveholders. Their business
is part recruiting agency, part shipping company, part public
relations, and part kidnapping gang. They aim to buy low and sell
high, while maintaining a good flow of girls from the villages.
Brokers are equally likely to be men or women and usually come
from the regions in which they recruit. Some will be local people
dealing in girls in addition to their jobs as police officers,
government bureaucrats, or even schoolteachers. Positions of public
trust are excellent starting points for buying young girls. In
spite of the character of their work they are well respected.
Seen as job providers and sources of large cash payments to parents,
they are well known in their communities. Many of the women brokers
were once sold themselves, spent some years as prostitutes, and
now, in their middle age, make a living by supplying girls to
the brothels. These women are walking advertisements for sexual
slavery. Their lifestyle and income, their Western clothes and
glamorous sophisticated ways, point to a rosy economic future
for the girls they buy. That they have physically survived their
years in the brothel may be the exception-many more young women
come back to the villages to die of AIDS-but the parents tend
to be optimistic. Whether these dealers are local people or traveling
agents, they combine the business of procuring with other economic
pursuits. A returned prostitute may live with her family, look
after her parents, own a rice field or two, and buy and sell girls
on the side. Like the pimps, they are in a good business, doubling
their money on each girl within two or three weeks, but like the
pimps, their profits are small compared to those of the long-term
slaveholders.
The real slaveowners tend to be middle-aged
businessmen. They fit seamlessly into the community; and they
suffer no social discrimination for what they do. If anything,
they are admired as successful, diversified capitalists. Brothel
ownership is normally only one of many business interests for
the slaveholder. To be sure, a brothel owner may have some ties
to organized crime, but in Thailand organized crime includes the
police and much of the government. Indeed, the work of the modern
slaveholder is best seen not as aberrant criminality but as a
perfect example of disinterested capitalism. Owning the brothel
that holds young girls in bondage is simply a business matter.
The investors would say that they are creating jobs and wealth.
There is no hypocrisy in their actions, for they obey an important
social norm: earning a lot of money is a good enough reason for
anything.
p51
The ways of Western markets and economics are avidly imitated
by the new businesspeople throughout Thailand. Looking to the
developed countries they see investors putting their money into
stock-market mutual funds on the basis of returns above all else-and
that the portfolio might include firms making land mines or instruments
of torture need not concern anyone. But the amount of distance
needed to plead ignorance doesn't have to be so great; a single
step is enough to separate an investor from his or her conscience.
p52
To understand the business of slavery today we have to know something
about the economy in which it operates. In spite of the economic
boom, the average Thai's income is very low by Western standards.
'Within an industrializing country, millions still live in rural
poverty. If a rural family owns its house and has a rice field,
it might survive on as little as 500 baht ($20) per month. Such
absolute poverty means a diet of rice supplemented with insects
(crickets, grubs, and maggots are widely eaten), wild plants,
and what fish they can catch themselves. Below this level, which
can be sustained only in the countryside, is hunger and the loss
of any house or land. For most Thais an income of 2,500 to 4,500
baht per month ($100 to $180) is normal. Since the economic crash
in 1997, the poor have only gotten poorer and more numerous as
jobs evaporated: in the cities rent will take more than half of
the average income, and prices climb constantly. At this income
there is deprivation but no hunger since government policies artificially
depress the price of rice (to the impoverishment of farmers).
Rice sells for 20 baht cents) a kilo, with a family of four eating
about a kilo of rice each day. They might eat, but Thais on these
poverty wages can do little else. Whether in city, town, or village,
to earn it they will work six or seven twelve- to fourteen-hour
days each week. Illness or injury can quickly send even this standard
of living plummeting downward. There is no system of welfare or
health care, and pinched budgets allow no space for saving. In
these families the 20,000 to 50,000 baht ($800 to $2,000) brought
by selling a daughter represents a year's income. Such a vast
sum is a powerful inducement and blinds parents to the realities
of sex slavery.
p53
Brothels are just one of the many outlets for commercial sex,
but because of their rapid turnover they serve a large proportion
of men buying sex. The average brothel keeps between ten and thirty
prostitutes, and most average around twenty. In the countryside
the brothel may just be someone's house with three or four women
working, but it is the brothels in cities and towns that hold
girls in debt bondage. Many brothels benefit from economies of
agglomeration, bunching together in a red-light district. If they
have any sign outside (and most don't), it will be cryptically
neutral. One working-class brothel I visited had a small lighted
sign hanging by its gate that read "Always Prospering";
below it in smaller type and different paint had been added "restaurant."
This addition, I was told, had been made at the suggestion of
the police, though no food was for sale inside. The buildings
themselves are as a rule dilapidated, dirty, leaky, and cobbled
together from scrap. Rats and roaches infest them and sanitation
is minimal. The women who must work in them are young, rarely
over thirty and often younger than eighteen. There is little difference
between them and their customers. Both are from poor backgrounds,
though the girls are more likely to be from the northern region.
In the far south of Thailand the men may be Malay or Singaporean
Muslims, but the girls will still be northern Thai Buddhists.
The exception to the regular use of northern Thai girls is the
recent increase in women trafficked from Burma and Laos, and enslaved
in brothel.
p57
Girls are so cheap that there is little reason to take care of
them over the long term. Expenditure on medical care or prevention
is rare in the brothels, since the working life of girls in debt
bondage is fairly short-two to five years. After that, most of
the profit has been drained from the girl and it is more cost-effective
to discard her and replace her with someone fresh. No brothel
wants to take on the responsibility of a sick or dying girl.
Enslaved prostitutes in brothels face
two major threats to their physical health and to their lives:
violence and disease. Violence-their enslavement enforced through
rape, beatings, or threats-is always present. It is the typical
introduction to their new status as sex slaves. Virtually every
girl interviewed repeated the same story: after being taken to
the brothel or to her first client as a virgin, any resistance
or refusal was met with beatings and rape. A few girls report
being drugged and then attacked; others report being forced to
submit at gunpoint. The immediate and forceful application of
terror is the first step in successful enslavement. Within hours
of being brought to the brothel, the girls are in pain and shock.
Like other victims of torture they often go numb, paralyzed in
their minds if not in their bodies. For the youngest girls, with
little understanding of what is happening to them, the trauma
is overwhelming. Shattered and betrayed, they often have little
clear memory of what has occurred.
After the first attack the girl has little
resistance left, but the violence never ends. In the brothel,
violence and terror are the final arbiters of all questions. There
is no argument, there is no appeal. An unhappy customer brings
a beating, a sadistic client brings more pain; in order to intimidate
and cheat them more easily, the pimp rains down terror randomly
on the prostitutes. The girls must do anything the pimp wants
if they are to avoid being beaten. Escape is impossible. One girl
reported that when she was caught trying to escape, the pimp beat
her and then took her into the viewing room; with two helpers
he then beat her again in front of all the girls in the brothel.
Afterward she was locked into a room for three days and nights
with no food or water. When she was released she was immediately
put to work. Two other girls who attempted escape told of being
stripped naked and whipped with steel coat hangers by pimps. The
police serve as slave-catchers whenever a girl escapes; once captured,
girls are often beaten or abused in the police station before
being sent back to the brothel. For most girls it soon becomes
clear that they can never escape, that their only hope for release
is to please the pimp and to somehow pay off their debt.
In time, confusion and disbelief fade,
leaving dread, resignation, and a separation of the conscious
link between mind and body. Now the girl does whatever it takes
to reduce the pain, to adjust mentally to a life that means being
used by fifteen men a day. The reaction to this abuse takes many
forms: lethargy, aggression, self-loathing and suicide attempts,
confusion, self-abuse, depression, full-blown psychoses, and hallucinations.
Girls who have been freed and taken into shelters are found to
have all these. Rehabilitation workers report that the girls suffer
emotional instability; they are unable to trust or form relationships,
to readjust to the world outside the brothel, or to learn and
develop normally. Unfortunately, psychological counseling is virtually
unknown in Thailand, as there is a strong cultural pressure to
keep any mental problems hidden, and little therapeutic work is
done with girls freed from brothels. The long-term impact of this
experience is unknown.
A clearer picture can be drawn of the
physical diseases that the girls accumulate. There are many sexually
transmitted diseases, and prostitutes contract most of them. Multiple
infections reduce the immune system and make it easier for infections
to take hold. If the illness affects their ability to have sex
it may be dealt with, but serious chronic illnesses are often
left untreated. Contraception often harms the girls as well. Some
slaveholders administer contraceptive pills themselves, continuing
them without any break and withholding the monthly placebo pills.
Thus the girls stop menstruating altogether and work more nights
in the month. Some girls are given three or four contraceptive
pills a day; others are given Depo-Provera injections by the pimp
or the bookkeeper. The same needle might be used for injecting
all of them, passing HIV from girl to girl. Most girls who become
pregnant will be sent for an abortion. Abortion is illegal in
Thailand so this will be a backstreet operation, with all the
obvious risks. A few women are kept working while they are pregnant,
as some Thai men want to have sex with pregnant women. When the
child is born it can be taken and sold by the brothel owner and
the woman put back to work.
Not surprisingly, HIV/AIDS is epidemic
in enslaved prostitutes. Thailand has one of the highest HIV infection
rates in the world. Officially, the government admits to 800,000
cases, but health workers insist there are at least twice that
many. From 1997, a campaign to reduce HIV infection had a significant
effect. While the target was 100 percent condom use for commercial
sex, the reality was a reduced but steady cross-transmission between
men and prostitutes. The epidemic has passed beyond the high-risk
groups of sex workers and drug users, who now have infection rates
as high as 50 percent in some areas. The group with the greatest
increase in HIV infection today is wives exposed through their
husbands' visits to prostitutes. In some rural villages where
the trafficking of girls has been a regular feature, the infection
rate is over 20 percent. Recent research suggests that the younger
the girl, the more susceptible she is to HIV due to the lack of
development of the protective vaginal mucous membrane. In spite
of the distribution of condoms by the government, some brothels
do not require their use. Many young girls understand little about
HIV and how it is contracted. Some feel that using condoms is
too painful when they have to service ten to fifteen men a night.
In fact, the abrasion of the vagina brought on by repeated sex
with condoms can increase the chances of HIV infection when unprotected
sex next occurs. Even in brothels where condoms are sold or required,
girls cannot always force men to use them. Most northern villages
house young girls and women who have come home from the brothels
to die of AIDS. There they are sometimes shunned and sometimes
hounded out of the village. There are a few rehabilitation centers
run by charities and the government that work with ex-prostitutes
and women who are HIV-positive, but they can take only a tiny
fraction of those in need. Outside the brothel there is no life
left for most of these women, and some will stay in the brothel
even when they have the chance to leave.
p63
This belief in an omniscient pimp is supported by the other, more
distant, relationships each girl has with slaveholders and the
government. From the policeman who comes each day to the brothel,
to the police chief in the city or district, to the political
boss that the police chief must answer to, and so on up the ladder
of government, the machine of the state is the machine of enslavement.
That is not to say that the police or government directly enslaves
girls in brothels; instead they provide a system of protection
and enforcement for the slaveholders that makes slavery possible.
At all levels of government, officials turn a blind eye to the
crime of slavery. A complete set of laws on the statute books
lies unenforced: they forbid trafficking in women, prostitution,
rape, sexual abuse of minors, establishment of brothels, kidnapping,
forced labor, debt bondage, and slavery. Some officials profit
from bribes; others regularly use the brothels. The result is
an unofficial but highly effective system of state enforcement
of sex slavery. The power of the pimp is enormously enhanced by
the power of the national police. Thailand's Prime Minister Chuan
Leekpai admitted in 1992 that "the problem [of sex slavery]
would be less if those who have the weapons and enforce the law
were not involved," but he added that "if the problem
cannot be solved, I won't order the authorities to tackle it.""
Since 1992 police involvement has, if anything, increased
p65
[Slaveholders] are faced with an increase in demand for prostitutes
and a diminishing supply the price of young Thai girls is spiraling
upward. Their only recourse is to look elsewhere, to areas where
poverty and ignorance still hold sway. Nothing, in fact, could
be easier, for there remain large oppressed and isolated populations
desperate enough to believe the promises of the brokers. From
Burma to the west and Laos to the east come thousands of economic
and political refugees searching for work; they are defenseless
in a country where they are illegal aliens. The techniques that
have worked so well in bringing Thai girls to the brothels are
again deployed, but now across the borders.
p75
Throughout the 1960s, the interior minister publicly championed
expansion of the sex industry to promote tourism. Not long after
prostitution was made illegal in 1960, a Service Establishments
law was passed that legitimated "entertainment" as an
industry. The law explained that women in entertainment were expected
to provide "special services"-in other words, sex. This
law gave power to brothel owners as "entertainment providers"
(legal) over the women who had been prostitutes (illegal). It
drove independent women sex workers into brothels and set up a
legal category for these "service establishments." In
the 1960s and early 1970s these service establishments did very
well from the 40,000 American soldiers who were stationed in Thailand
and the large numbers that were sent there on R&R leave during
the Vietnam War. As the U.S. bases closed down in the late 1970s,
the Thai government looked to tourism and to sex as important
sources of income that might replace those lost earnings. In 1980
the vice premier encouraged the provincial governors to create
more sex establishments to bring tourism to the provinces: "Within
the next two years we need money. Therefore, I ask all governors
to consider the natural scenery in your provinces, together with
some forms of entertainment that some of you might think of as
disgusting and shameful, because we have to consider the jobs
that will be created." Thailand's economic boom included
a sharp increase in sex tourism tacitly backed by government.
International tourist arrivals jumped from 2 million in 1981 to
4 million in 1988 to over ii million in 2003.30 Two-thirds of
tourists are unaccompanied men: in other words, nearly 5 million
unaccompanied men visited Thailand in 1996. A significant proportion
of these were sex tourists. Because they feared it would diminish
the large foreign exchange earnings gained from sex tourists,
government officials consistently denied the "rumor"
of a worsening AIDS crisis throughout the 1980s. As late as 1989
the prime minister declared that AIDS was "no problem"
in Thailand." Helped along by sex tourism, HIV/AIDS is now
epidemic in Thailand, but sex tourism continues to be a major
source of foreign exchange and not one that the government would
want to restrict.
p78
Thailand is a country sick with an addiction to slavery. From
village to city and back, the profits of slavery flow. Once authorities
and businesspeople become accustomed to this outpouring of money,
once any moral objection has been drowned in it, a justification
of slavery is easy to mount, and Thai culture and religion stand
ready to do so. The situation is similar to that of the United
States in the 1850s-with a significant part of the economy dependent
on slavery, religion and culture are ready to explain why this
is all for the best.
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