Mr. Chai sold his 13-year old daughter into prostitution for the price of a television set, and had no regrets. His wife had one.
When Mrs. Chai discovered that her eldest daughter wasn't working in a bar in a nearby city, as the agent who'd bought her daughter had promised, but instead was forced to sell her immature body in a Bangkok brothel to as many as eight men a day -- many of them sex tourists from Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan -- she wept. But the tears were not for her daughter.
"I should have asked for 10,000 baht [NT$7,871]," she said. "Not 5,000 baht [NT$3,935]. He [the agent] robbed us."
Mr. and Mrs. Chai live in a thatched hut in Pa Tek Village on the outskirts of Mae Sai, a bustling township situated along Thailand's northernmost border with the military state of Myanmar. Tensions here can run high between the rival armies and occasionally lead to the trading of gunshot across the muddy waters of the Mae Sai River that separates the two countries.
Yet the sporadic outbreak of hostilities has done nothing to deter the two main trades in town -- drugs and daughters. Though it's the smuggling of vast quantities of amphetamines and heroin from Myanmar into Thailand that has given this region it's infamous tag -- The Golden Triangle.
The explosion in the recruitment of young girls into the Thailand sex industry that has put this border town, and the nearby crossing to Laos, on the map.
The subject is expected to be high on the agenda at the Second World Congress Against the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, to be held from Dec. 17 to 20 in Yokohama, Japan, where country representatives from around the world, together with interested child protection agencies, will meet to review policy and research on child sexual exploitation.
A report released this week by the UN Children's Fund -- a sponsor of the Congress -- estimated that one-third of all sex workers in Southeast Asia are children, aged between 12 and 17 years old. In Thailand, government statistics have revealed that a slight increase in the total number of sex workers in the country over the past two years has been overshadowed by a significant jump in the number of children now involved in the industry.
According to the International Labour Organization (ILO) many of these children are being trafficked from, and through, Mae Sai. Every year hundreds of young girls in Mae Sai -- and thousands from across the border in Burma and Laos, and further afield in Yunnan province in southern China -- are sold by their parents into prostitution and spirited away to brothels in Bangkok where they feed the insatiable appetite of the multi-billion dollar commercial sex industry.
Few villages in the region have contributed as many daughters as Pa Tek. Populated by Burmese immigrants who have crossed the border illegally to escape persecution and poverty at the hands of the ruling military junta, most are permitted by the Thai government to live and work in the border area yet they have no legal status. Many work in menial jobs, like picking tobacco and rice, or construction work.
Local government statistics reveal that Burmese immigrants living in the Mae Sai District -- roughly 50 percent of the population -- can expect to earn less than 7,000 baht [NT$5,510], a year. The depths of poverty make the area easy pickings for brothel agents, or Aunties, as the procurers of young girls are known locally.
The Development and Education Program for Daughters and Communities [DEPDC], a Mae Sai-based NGO working with local children at risk of being sold, estimate that of Pa Tek's 800 families, seven in every 10 has sold at least one daughter into the trade.
"Agents will come to the village with orders to fill," said Sompop Jantraka, director of the DEPDC. "The people in Bangkok -- mostly foreigners -- can order girls like they order pizza. They will say `I want a girl with thin hips and big bosoms and a round bottom' and the agents will come up here and find her. And they always deliver."
Virginity is highly prized. Fuelling the demand for young girls is ignorance about HIV/AIDS transmission and myths about the curative powers of virginity. Some brothel clientele -- particularly those from Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Middle East -- believe that sex with a child is less risky because the child is more likely to be "clean" and unable to transmit disease.
In reality, said Phil Marshall, manager of the Bangkok-based UN inter-agency project on trafficking women and children in the Mekong sub-region, children are physically more prone to bleeding, infection and disease.
"Biologically children are more vulnerable to HIV," he said. "Clients are less likely to use a condom on a 15 year old girl [which increases the risk]."
Somporn Khempetch, coordinator of the Child Protection and Rights Center in Mae Sai, has seen the devastating impact of the practice first hand. She estimates that of every 20 girls who return home from Bangkok, 15 have contracted the HIV/Aids virus. This year alone 50 girls in Pa Tek Village have died from the disease. Not one of them was over 18.
Yet despite the risks, there is no shortage of parents willing to sell their children. With prices varying from 5,000 baht to 40,000 baht," -- almost six years wages for most families -- paternal bonds of trust are easily broken.
So established has child trafficking become that many of the brothel agents live in the village, and are often friends or relatives of the family from which they buy the children.
"We tend to think of trafficking as involving sophisticated crime networks but much of it is really a cottage industry involving small time profiteers," said Marshall.
A new report from the ILO, in conjunction with UN Development Project, supported his claim. The report's findings, to be released later this month, challenge existing thinking on combating the recruitment of children into prostitution in Asia, suggesting that current policy to target and eradicate sophisticated people smuggling networks is misguided.
The report's authors claim that the majority of girls leaving their villages do so through informal networks, and with the approval of their parents. Perhaps most controversially the report found that many of the girls are willing participants in the exercise.
"What we have found is that many girls want to leave home and work elsewhere, preferably in cities," said Hans van de Glind, deputy project manager for the ILO in Bangkok, and one of the report's authors.
"They don't want to work in agriculture like their parents, and are bored with village life. It's not so much a poverty issue because we found that girls from one village would migrate while girls from another, equally poor, village, wouldn't. Consumerism plays a part [in their decision]. A girl with access to a television and that lives close to a road is more likely to migrate. Suddenly they want to have nice clothes, a motor bike and an entertaining life like the people on TV."
Yet the corrosive impact of modern communication technology on village life is secondary to traditional social values in the region that holds that children must support their parents by any means available to them. In Thai it is called todtan bunkhun, or repaying the breast milk.
"When I was at work [in the brothel] 50 percent of me hated what I was doing," said one 14-year-old girl, now housed at the DEPDC and who said she had mixed feelings about being "rescued" by police during a raid on the brothel she was sold to in Chiang Mai.
"But the other 50 percent wanted to stay so that I could earn money for my parents. My father cannot work. He is very old and I must support the family. It is my job."
DEPDC director, Sompop, insisted the only way to deter girls from going into prostitution is through education.
He pointed to the success of the 1997 Thai Constitution which stipulates 12 years of free education for all citizens. Prior to that, he maintained, the majority of girls leaving Mae Sai were Thai. Now, he said, Thai's account for less that 2 percent of the trade in the area.
"We must stop seeing these illegals as persona non gratas and provide education for their well being," he said. "We allow them to do our menial tasks, but we don't allow them to be educated."
At the Mae Sai Pasitsart High School the children of Burmese migrants -- though not technically allowed -- can attend school, but are not eligible for graduation. While enrollments of migrant children are small, those who do attend are eligible for a privately backed scholarship fund established by guidance counselor Apichaya Nakwong.
She said that few who make it through their first year of high school are sold into prostitution. "They will say `No' to their parents when they try and sell them," she said. "They convince them that they can earn more money in a proper job when they leave school."
With fewer girls in Mae Sai leaving for the bright lights of Bangkok, agents have cast their nets wider. Hundreds of girls from Burma, and Yunnan and Guangxi provinces in southern China, are now crossing the bridge over the Mae Sai River into Thailand every month. The border guards and immigration checkpoints inside Thailand have done little to curb the influx.
"How can we stop it?" asked Wichai Promsilpa, Mae Sai's police chief. "This is an open border. Thousands of people cross here every day. We cannot tell the difference between a girl coming here to buy eggs and a girl coming to work as a prostitute."
He claimed that the trade has exploded since the Thai government opened its borders with Burma, and promoted an active engagement policy with the military junta in Rangoon.
"When I was based here 10 years ago, and the border was closed, there was no trade in people trafficking," he said.
The DEPDC's Sompop was not so sure.
"The border was always easy to get across," he said. "What has changed is the demand for these girls. As long as there are foreign men coming to this country and spending large amounts of money for girls, this trade will exist. And not just exist. It will flourish."
Andrew Perrin is a freelance writer based in Thailand.
Congratulations to China’s working class — they have officially entered the “Livestock Feed 2.0” era. While others are still researching how to achieve healthy and balanced diets, China has already evolved to the point where it does not matter whether you are actually eating food, as long as you can swallow it. There is no need for cooking, chewing or making decisions — just tear open a package, add some hot water and in a short three minutes you have something that can keep you alive for at least another six hours. This is not science fiction — it is reality.
A foreign colleague of mine asked me recently, “What is a safe distance from potential People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Rocket Force’s (PLARF) Taiwan targets?” This article will answer this question and help people living in Taiwan have a deeper understanding of the threat. Why is it important to understand PLA/PLARF targeting strategy? According to RAND analysis, the PLA’s “systems destruction warfare” focuses on crippling an adversary’s operational system by targeting its networks, especially leadership, command and control (C2) nodes, sensors, and information hubs. Admiral Samuel Paparo, commander of US Indo-Pacific Command, noted in his 15 May 2025 Sedona Forum keynote speech that, as
In a world increasingly defined by unpredictability, two actors stand out as islands of stability: Europe and Taiwan. One, a sprawling union of democracies, but under immense pressure, grappling with a geopolitical reality it was not originally designed for. The other, a vibrant, resilient democracy thriving as a technological global leader, but living under a growing existential threat. In response to rising uncertainties, they are both seeking resilience and learning to better position themselves. It is now time they recognize each other not just as partners of convenience, but as strategic and indispensable lifelines. The US, long seen as the anchor
Kinmen County’s political geography is provocative in and of itself. A pair of islets running up abreast the Chinese mainland, just 20 minutes by ferry from the Chinese city of Xiamen, Kinmen remains under the Taiwanese government’s control, after China’s failed invasion attempt in 1949. The provocative nature of Kinmen’s existence, along with the Matsu Islands off the coast of China’s Fuzhou City, has led to no shortage of outrageous takes and analyses in foreign media either fearmongering of a Chinese invasion or using these accidents of history to somehow understand Taiwan. Every few months a foreign reporter goes to
RSS