Thailand is of course not included as one of these four countries, despite Chiang
Mai, a big city in the north of Thailand, being a particular hub for boy victims.
Many people in the north of Thailand live in hill tribes and rural areas where they
unfortunately do not have proper government identification to be able to gain legal
employment. Boys are thus often trafficked to tourist centers like Chiang Mai, to
work in four major sectors of the male sex industry: show bars, freelance bars,
karaoke bars, and male massage parlors (Glotfelty 2013 ).
After seeing many of the vulnerable boys in Chiang Mai, and realizing that there
were no services offered to them, Alezandra Russell started Urban Light, a
non-profit organization located just a few blocks from Chiang Mai’s red light
district, dedicated to empowering the lives of boys who are the victims of human
trafficking (urbanlight.org). At the Urban Light Youth Center, boys aged 14–24 are
provided with multiple services such as emergency housing, transitional housing,
meals, health services, education, vocational training, and alternative employment.
The need to help boys who are sex trafficking victims is clear, but Urban Light is
still the only organization in Thailand that recognizes this need (more details in
Servaes 2015 ). The skewed gendered approach to researching human trafficking
ignores the hundreds of thousands of boys and men who are stuck in this cruel
industry due to social beliefs, lack of education, poverty, and corruption.
8.4 Child Trafficking in Thailand............................
Although child trafficking in Thailand is not as well known as in neighboring
countries like Cambodia (Boden 2012 ), there is no doubt that child trafficking
victims can be found in Thailand’s brothels, bars, hotel rooms, massage parlors,
karaoke lounges, and private residences. Approximately 53% of identified traf-
ficking victims in Thailand are children (U.S. Department of State 2016 ), with
many trafficking cases reportedly facilitated by family members and friends. As a
result, trafficking cases frequently begin as voluntary migration, with those most
vulnerable being foreign migrants, children from hill tribe communities and other
ethnic minorities in northern Thailand (ECPAT International 2016 ). Children
between the ages of 15–17 are most involved in the Thai sex industry (ECPAT
International 2015 ), and many children are forced to work in domestic servitude in
urban areas or forced by parents and brokers to sellflowers and beg on the streets.
Those most vulnerable are children from hill tribe communities and other ethnic
minorities in northern Thailand (ECPAT International 2016 ).
However, there are gaps in Thailand’s monitoring of commercial sexual
exploitation of children because of lack of law enforcements, largely due to corrupt
police, prosecutors, and judges. For instance, police rely heavily on NGOs and
INGOs tofind and rescue sexually exploited children (ECPAT International 2016 ).
As a result, there are also limited specialized services for child sex trafficking victims
(Trafficking in Persons Report 2015 ) and the justice system is not child-sensitive. As
explained in ECPAT International’s Global Study on Sexual Exploitation of
120 8 Human Trafficking in Thailand: A Culture of Corruption