R&R: From Rest and Recreation to Rescue and Rehabilitation

Although sex work is illegal in Thailand, since 1996 penalties have only been applied to workers who are recruiting or arranging other workers, or workers found to be soliciting or advertising sexual services. The maximum penalty applied to workers is 10 days in jail or 1,000 Baht ($32.15), which for many is about the same price as one job. There are also penalties against customers having sex with girls or boys i.e. under 18 years.

Since these changes to the laws in 1996 the police don’t find it as lucrative to arrest us. However they occasionally take action against a few of us. Perhaps in an effort to prove they are doing their jobs or perhaps because they are dedicated officers of the law, they will entrap one or two women. Invariably these women will be freelance workers so no bosses or businesses are harmed. As the onus is on the police to prove that the sexual act for money has taken place, undercover policemen have had sex with the worker(s) then use a combination of their own sperm filled condoms and marked money as evidence. It isn’t unusual for a local reporter to be invited in to take photos of the undressed worker as further evidence.

In the past year police have used this method in order to entrap an owner of a massage parlor. He responded by insisting the workers file rape charges against the police. Nothing has resulted from the police charges or the workers’ counter-charges.

In the meantime many of us no longer sell sex, we sell condoms and provide a free demonstration instead!

By and large since 1996 police action has moved on to our sisters who have migrated from Burma, China, Laos and Cambodia — the penalties for illegal entry into the country are much higher than those for prostitution. The easiest illegal migrants to target are those working in sex work — due to the nature of our work we have to be visible. Anti-prostitution groups especially those supported by the prejudices of the USA government have joined this shift and now focus on migrant sex workers under the guise of doing anti-trafficking work.

So here we are, instead of being targeted as sex workers, we are being targeted as trafficking victims and illegal immigrants!

We are seen as empty pages that the anti-prostitution lobbyists and other mislead bleeding hearts can write upon. They do not respect us as an adult woman with full histories, lives, skills, plans and dreams of our own. They think we are stupid, ignorant and pity us and judge us as powerless. We are not recognized as working women and the family providers who support five to eight other adults.

The way we migrant sex workers are perceived and treated as victims of trafficking reflects the attitudes towards our work. Anti-prostitution lobbyists refuse to believe we want to do sex work. They see sex work as dirty and disgusting. This leads them to believe we should be trained to do something else. They force us to learn, whether we want to or not, never stopping to consider whether we already have the skills they are so anxious to thrust upon us or not. For example most of us can already sew, weave and cook. In the past the Thai government gave funding to Thai sex workers to start small businesses after we had been re-trained. After 3–6 months these businesses failed. The government learned what we already knew that the economy is flooded with such small businesses. They no longer give funding, but the training continues even though it is pointless.

They can call the places that they keep us whatever they like but they are, in reality, jails. We are not free to leave. We are not free to eat what and when we like, to bathe how and when we like, to sleep and wake as we wish. In many of these places the staff, our protectors — those with power over us — are men and so we don’t really choose who we have sex with either. At some point decided by others, we will be sent back to our home countries regardless of our safety or our situation. They call this repatriation but we know this is deportation.

For those of us who come from Burma deportation is especially frightening. Burma is ruled by a military regime with systematic human rights abuses including institutionalized rape and attempts at ethnic cleansing. We leave our homes and come to Thailand to escape these abuses and to find a way to relieve the suffering of our families. It is bad enough that often as illegal migrants our work is exploited within the industry; if we are also "rescued" things get a whole lot worse. After an open ended period of detention, in which time Burmese officials, either formally or via the grapevine, are alerted to the fact we left the country illegally and were found to be selling sex, we are sent home.

In October 2004 a mutiny in the ranks of the military regime resulted in the Prime Minister being arrested. Until then his wife had been employed as the head of the official Antitrafficking Department. We have heard that she was shot and wounded during the mutiny. We wonder how reliable the news is of our much-publicized "safe and happy repatriations".

Many of us have never been forced to live as victims before our experience of the dreaded R&R, …rescue and rehabilitation.

EMPOWER CHIANG MAI, Winter 2005