Project Fights Lure Of Child Prostitution Job Training Program, Scholarships Battle Appeal Of Quick Money For Parents In Poor Villages
Selling her daughter into prostitution would have netted Chansom Kheunkhamsang a quick $1,000 - enough to make her family one of substance in their poor village.
Instead, Chansom sent her to work in a project to stop the traffic in young women from Thailand’s impoverished northern villages to the garish brothels of Bangkok and elsewhere.
First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was to lend her support to the program during a visit to northern Thailand starting today, before joining President Clinton in Bangkok on Monday for the first state visit to Thailand by an American president since 1969. Clinton was attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in the Philippines this weekend.
Hillary Clinton’s visit will highlight one of Southeast Asia’s most heartbreaking problems: the sale of girls - some not yet in their teens - by their families seeking income for status or survival. Boys are also sold into prostitution, but there is less demand for them than for girls.
In the hillside villages around Chiang Rai, population pressures have made traditional subsistence agriculture more difficult. Nationwide, rapid industrialization has fostered a get-rich-quick mentality.
The girls are sold to middlemen who resell them to brothels frequented by Thai men and so-called “sex tourists” from overseas. They are often chained, beaten, drugged, denied food and raped by pimps before joining the ranks of Thailand’s estimated 500,000 to 700,000 prostitutes.
Besides the initial payment, the girls also send remittances home.
Chansom Kheunkhamsaeng, 38, is a divorced mother of a boy and a girl living in a tiny bamboo-lattice house.
Barely able to feed her family on the $60 she earned as a maid and by taking in laundry, Chansom was approached by a middleman three years ago.
“An agent offered a $120 commission for each girl I could provide,” Chansom said. “I refused, as I also have a daughter.”
A friend also asked Chansom if she’d like to sell her daughter, Suthinee Manikhat, now 18, for $1,000. The woman was willing to sell her own girl, seeing that lots of other people were doing it, Chansom said.
Chansom turned to Thai Women of Tomorrow, a project giving perhaps 1,200 girls and their parents financial opportunities via scholarships, vocational training and jobs to reduce the economic appeal of the sex trade.
The project was established in 1993 by Chakrapand Wongburanavart, dean of social sciences at Chiang Mai University.
“We should not have child prostitutes in our society,” Chakrapand said. “Should 12-year-old children become sexual objects?”
Chakrapand’s counselors try to persuade parents to let their daughters learn skills that will earn about $200 a month, a tenth of what some prostitutes make.
The U.S. Agency for International Development contributed $300,000 toward the program. Other funding came from Japan and the International Labor Organization.
The program offers 1,000 scholarships a year for girls to finish the ninth grade. It steers them toward careers like nursing assistant, textile worker and gem cutter.
Vichai Assarasakorn, managing director of the gem factories, said the training also involves shaking the belief that prostitution is just another trade.
Chansom’s daughter now works with 38 other girls from the project at two gem factories near Bangkok.
One of them, Chanpen Bualaphan, 18, said that she and many of her friends once found the idea of becoming prostitutes appealing.
“You’d see people who left the village to be prostitutes come back with nice clothes, gold chains, money to build new houses for their parents,” she said. “It made me want to do the same.”
Chanpen, however, had a change of heart when a prostitute cousin returned home infected with the AIDS virus.