8.2 Sex Trafficking in Thailand.............................
The rapid expansion of sex tourism in Thailand is largely to blame for the begin-
ning of the sex trafficking issue. The Thai government poured millions of dollars in
the country to promote tourism in the 1980s. Sex massage parlors had already
become popular during the Japanese occupation during World War II, and, after-
ward, during the Vietnam War in the latefifties, sixties, and early seventies, US
military servicemen used Thailand as a“rest and recreation (R&R)”destination.
This generated a booming sex industry in the cities. By 1982, sex tourism had
become Thailand’s top foreign exchange earner (Jayagupta 2009 ).
Several cultural factors support the continuation of Thailand’s commercial sex
industry in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Pattaya and other urban and tourist areas, which
involves recruitment of mainly girls and women from the poorest regions of the
north of Thailand and the Greater Mekong Subregion countries: war-torn
Cambodia, Laos, China, Myanmar, and Vietnam. Deep cultural practices exist
within family and kinship relations that encourage sex trafficking of women and
girls in Thailand and Southeast Asia in general.
Shame is used as a weapon; it is culturally embedded and used to manipulate
girls (Jeffrey 2002 ; Long 2004 ). Women’s sexuality and bodies are treated as
commodities, and traditional values place a high value on purity and virginity, as is
evident in traditional practices such as bride payments and dowries, which allow an
increase in the bride and her family’s social and economic status. Mail-order brides
are also common in Thailand, creating the opportunity for the brides to be exploited
by the husbands (Long 2004 ).
Although prostitution has been illegal in Thailand since the 1960s, the law has
consistently been ignored. Due partly to the enormous amount of money generated
in the sex industry, prostitution has become“socially accepted”in Thai society,
with prostitutes facing a lesser degree of stigmatization than in other countries.
Traditionally, children of Thai parents have an obligation to help their family
financially. Thus, if prostitution is the only way to ensure the family’s well-being
and status, prostitution is simply seen as a job. As human trafficking is a process
that typically begins with recruitment by false promises of good jobs and higher
wages, victims fall prey to the practice as they seek enhanced economic opportu-
nities to better their quality of life. Many trafficking victims enter the sex industry as
sex work provides material wealth, allowing poor and uneducated persons to
generate more income than other wage labor available to them. According to the
International Labor Organization (International Labour Organization 2014 ), adult
sex workers are able to earn more than the average monthly salary in Thailand,
often making them the main wage-earners in their families.
It is also quite common in Thailand for existing sex workers to act as recruiters
and have a cascading deceptive recruitment process involving a gradual socialization
into selling sex. An example of this is that it is common for the workplace to simulate
family sociality and have afictive family ethos of a family home. The venue owners
often view the recruitment process as a form of helping sex workers out of poverty to
118 8 Human Trafficking in Thailand: A Culture of Corruption