When senior bureaucrats visited the remote northern Thai province where local official Boonyarit Nipavanit worked, the routine was often the same: Welcome them with the finest food and drink and then bring out the teen girls, often referred to as “dessert.”
The tradition — known by the euphemistic Thai phrase “treat to food, lay down the mat” — refers to the expectation that underlings lavish superiors and VIPs with local delicacies, top-notch accommodation and sex services.
Until recently, the most sinister part of that tradition — the procurement of underage girls — was well-known, but rarely discussed.
However, a trafficking scandal involving teens, police and officials in Boonyarit’s province has flung the practice onto the nation’s front pages, prompting calls to root out a culture that helps fuel the kingdom’s infamous flesh trade.
“This tradition became common a long time ago,” said Boonyarit, a district official in Mae Hong Son Province.
“When groups of senior officials come for seminars or work trips, there is a custom of ‘treating them,’ which means welcoming them with food, and then ‘laying down the mat,’ which means providing girls,” he said.
“Sometimes we received information about what type of girls they liked... Sometimes officials had to prepare five to 10 women for a senior to chose from,” he added.
Boonyarit is comfortable speaking freely about the practice now that detectives have opened 41 cases into an alleged police-run prostitution network in his province.
The probe was launched after the mother of a victim fled to Bangkok and told the media that her then 17-year-old daughter and other teens were blackmailed into sex work and forced to entertain officials and police officers.
Some of the victims, she said, were branded with owl tattoos by the gang masters as a kind of ownership stamp.
Under pressure from the press, national police arrested a Mae Hong Son police sergeant accused of trafficking girls into the sex ring and charged eight other officers with sleeping with minors.
Five administrators from Nonthaburi Province have also been charged for allegedly hiring the teens with government funds during an official visit to Mae Hong Son.
“Since this story broke, many officials feel relieved that we don’t have to do it anymore,” Boonyarit said.
The practice of arranging sex for superiors comes from “a culture that sees girls not as human beings, but as property,” Thai social columnist Lakkana Punwichai said. “She is a present. She is the same as food, as beautiful clothes — something that has a price.”
In the wake of the Mae Hong Son scandal, the Thai Ministry of Social Development said it would “lead by example” as an agency “opposed to the ‘treat to food, lay down the mat’ practice.”
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