Girls Bought, Sold in Southeast Asia
Prostitution a thriving underworld business

From CNN Bangkok Bureau Chief Tom Mintier, October 1, 1995.
Web posted at: 6:15 p.m. EDT (2215 GMT)

BANGKOK, Thailand (CNN) — In Southeast Asia, selling women for sex is big business, a business with links to international organized crime.

In Thailand, young girls are bought and sold as commodities, destined to become prostitutes. Parents, contacted by employment agents, may be offered a new house to sell their daughters into the sex industry. Some agents "even come out with the catalogs of the houses and offer it to the parents and say 'OK, which house do you want, I'll build it for you. May I have your girls for three years?' It's like the girls are loaned," said Saisuree Chutikul, an advisor to Thailand's prime minister.

Thailand, where some of the girls come from, also is where others are taken. Young women from Burma hide their faces as a camera captures nearly 100 of them, imported to work at a brothel in southern Thailand. One Burmese girl, 11, told CNN she was sold by her father to work at a Bangkok bar as a prostitute. "This bar had a lot of kids working there," she said. "My mother thought I was going to school. ... I can't remember how many customers. Sometimes I would go with two customers a night."

"It's become a business," said Thailand child advocate Samprasith Koomprapan.

The largest and most lucrative market is Japan. Many of the young women recruited in Thailand wind up in downtown Tokyo, where hundreds of pubs, coffee shops and restaurants are fronts for prostitution. The most conservative estimates put the number of Thai women working as prostitutes in Japan at 27,000.

Japanese businesses that feature Thai women are well advertised, with names like Bangkok Pub and Siam Restaurant. Some put pictures of the hostesses on the sidewalk outside. Others use bilingual advertising.

Mizuho Matsuda of the Asia Women's Shelter in Tokyo said the underworld is deeply involved in bringing the women to Japan. "Particularly between Thailand and Japan there is an international syndicate for trafficking women, and that is the major problem which most of the Thai women face after they arrive in Japan," she said.

Flesh peddlers, including the Japanese mafia, known as the Yakuza, may provide the girls with fake passports or marriage licenses. Many of the women sign contracts to work as hostesses in night clubs. The contracts are designed to last forever by putting the women in debt and never allowing them to work it off. "None of them receive any money," Matsuda said. "But when they arrive to the employer's place they were told that they should pay back 3 million yen, 3.5 million yen, sometimes 4 million yen, which is (a) huge amount. And until then, they cannot go home."

Four million yen works out to nearly $48,000 in U.S. money. The figure never goes down when housing and food costs are added daily.

CNN talked with one woman who worked as a prostitute in Japan for more than three years before she managed to escape back to Thailand. She said she was sold several times to different brothels: "I was sold like an animal -- like a pig or dog. 'How much is this girl?' they would ask. I was shocked; I didn't know beforehand it would be like this. I feel pity for myself. They even bargained for the price. We were often tortured by our customers. They were Yakuza. They're sadists."

The woman also told us several girls who attempted to escape were killed by Yakuza members after they were captured and returned to the brothel.

In an effort to stem the flow of women sold into prostitution, several non-governmental organizations go into Thai villages to plead with parents not to sell their daughters. They offer scholarships to 11-year-old girls to keep them in school. And they provide job training and job placement services.

But the lure of bright lights and big money is difficult to compete with. The young women will continue to be sold until governments take stronger action to stop the flesh trade.

Copyright © 1995 Cable News Network, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

This article originally appeared online at CNN,
http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9510/thai_prostitutes/index.html.

"The young women will continue to be sold until governments take stronger action to stop the flesh trade."

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