Buying Innocence: child-sex tourists in Thailand

Abstract

Based on ethnographic work in a small community in Thailand, this article looks at different categories of sex tourists, analysing what particular qualities they find attractive in Thai children and women. It will argue that the boundaries between tourists who have sex with children, and those who have sex with adults, are extremely permeable and that there may not always be a distinct difference between the two categories of men. Child-sex tourism does not occur in a vacuum and cannot be separated from more general social, economic and cultural concerns, which are often overlooked in analyses. There is a premium on youth among many clients of Thai prostitutes and the actual age of the child is usually irrelevant to all but a small minority of abusers. Instead a situation has developed in which women are infantilised while children are seen as precociously adult, and the distinctions between child and adult and innocence and experience are deliberately blurred.

Notes

1 These stories appeared in Freedom Review, March–April 1994; The Sunday Age (Melbourne), 18 April 1993; and The Bangkok Post, 29 July 1993, respectively. For a discussion of the portrayal of child prostitution in the international media, see R Bishop & L Robinson, Night Marker: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle, New York: Routledge, 1998.

2 Australia allows people to be imprisoned for up to 17 years when convicted of sexual crimes against children overseas under the 1994 Crimes (Child Sex Tourism) Amendment Act. CM Hall, ‘The legal and political dimensions of sex tourism: the case of Australia's child sex tourism legislation', in M Oppermann (ed), Sex Tourism and Prostitution: Aspects of Leisure, Recreation, and Work, New York: Cognizant Communication, 1998, pp 87–96. For discussions of extraterritorial legislation in other countries, see D Hodgson, ‘Combating the organized sexual exploitation of Asian children: recent developments and prospects', International Journal of Family and the Law, 9 (1), 1995, pp 23–53; National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Prostitution of Children and Child-Sex Tourism: An Analysis of Domestic and International Responses, Virginia: National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 1999; J Hoose, S Clift & S Carter, ‘Combating tourist exploitation of children', in S Clift & S Carter (eds), Tourism and Sex: Culture, Commerce and Coercion, London: Pinter, 2000, pp 74–90; and J Seabrook, No Hiding Place: Child Sex Tourism and the Role of Extra-territorial Legislation,London: Zed Books, 2000.

3 Rosario Baluyot was an 11- or 12-year old girl living on the streets of Olangapo in the Philippines. She sold sex to a variety of men including an Austrian doctor, Heinrich Ritter, who in 1986 took her to a hotel room and abused her with a vibrator. He did not remove it and it became infected, causing septicaemia. This, in conjunction with liver failure caused by glue sniffing, led to Rosario's death in 1987. Ritter was charged with her rape and murder and sentenced in 1989, the first foreigner to be convicted of child sexual abuse in the Philippines. Rosario's story has since been retold a number of times, often as an example of the typical fate of a child prostitute with foreign clients by, for example, R O'Grady, The Child and the Tourist, Bangkok: ecpat, 1992; M Axelsson, Rosario is Dead, Manila: Anvil Publishing, 1997; and J Kane, Sold for Sex, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998.

4 M Oppermann, ‘Who exploits whom and who benefits', in Oppermann, Sex Tourism and Prostitution, pp 153–160.

5 J O'Connell-Davidson, Children in the Global Sex Trade, Cambridge: Polity, 2005.

6 Ibid.

7 Most international legislation and ngos define a child prostitute as anyone under the age of 18 who sells sex. See, for instance, K Ireland, Wish You Weren't Here: The Sexual Exploitation of Children and the Connection with Tourism and International Travel, London: Save the Children Fund, 1993.

8 J Ennew, The Sexual Exploitation of Children, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986, p 111.

9 Ibid; D Finkelhor & S Araji, A Source Book on Child Sexual Abuse, London: Sage, 1996; GD Wilson & DN Cox, The Child Lovers: A study of Paedophiles in Society, London: Peter Owen, 1986; and Hoose et al, ‘Combating tourist exploitation of children'.

10 I discuss here men who travel abroad for the purposes of having sex with children. Although there have been some suggestions that female sex tourists will also buy young boys, for instance in O'Grady, The Child and the Tourist, the proof of this is shaky. There is some evidence of women travellers in the Caribbean and West Africa buying sex from younger men, who may or may not be over 18. See J Phillips, ‘Tourist-oriented prostitution in Barbados: the case of the beach boy and the white female tourist', in K Kempadoo (ed), Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex work in the Caribbean, Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999, pp 183–200. In Thailand, however, I never came across such women.

11 H Montgomery, Modern Babylon? Prostituting Children in Thailand, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001.

12 Ibid.

13 H Montgomery, ‘Child sex tourists: myths and realities’, in D Harrison (ed), Tourism and the Less Developed World, Wallingford: cabi, 2001, pp 191–202; J Ennew, K Gopal, J Heeran & H Montgomery, The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children: Background Papers and Annotated Bibliography for the World Congress on the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, Oslo: Childwatch International, 1996.

14 Ennew, The Sexual Exploitation of Children; N Heyzer, Working Women of Southeast Asia: Development, Subordination and Emancipation, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986; and V Muntabhorn, Sale of Children, report submitted by the Special Rapporteur, New York: United Nations, 1992.

15 This figure is based on a statement made by the Norwegian government to the Council of Europe that read: ‘Every year, one million children are kidnapped, bought, or in other ways forced to enter the sex market'. M Black, ‘Home truths’, New Internationalist, February 1994, p 12. No source was given for this figure, nor was there any indication of how it was calculated and other research coming out of Norway suggested the unreliability of such figures. See, for example, O Narvesen, The Sexual Exploitation of Children in Developing Countries, Oslo: Redd Barna, 1989.

16 Quoted in A Murray, ‘Debt-bondage and trafficking: don't believe the hype’, in K Kempadoo & J Doezema (eds), Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance and Redefinitions, New York: Routledge, 1998, p 55.

17 W Sittitrai & T Brown, The Impact of hiv on Children in Thailand, Bangkok: Thai Red Cross Society, 1994.

18 One historical study of sex tourism in Thailand stated: ‘Although prostitution as an organised business in Thailand only started in the 1930s with the import of Chinese prostitutes into the country to cater for Chinese immigrants, prostitution became a big problem in the 1960s with the presence of the United States military bases during the Vietnam war. It was taken over by local demand, and spurred on by the promotion of tourism’. United Nations, Promotion of Community Awareness of the Prevention of Prostitution, Bangkok: United Nations, 1991, p 45. Other commentators, however, have pointed out a longer history of prostitution in Thailand. See, for example, W Boonchalaksi & P Guest, Prostitution in Thailand, Bangkok: Institute for Population and Social Research, Mahidol University, 1994. The League of Nations was so concerned about the presence of organised brothels catering for both foreign and local men in the 1920s that it commissioned a report called The Traffic in Women and Children in the East (1933). By 1949 a book called Dream Lover, written by the pseudonymous Black Shadow, described to the foreigner where and how he could obtain the sexual services of Thai and Chinese women, including ‘the Chinese of today and tomorrow indeed, very fresh, young and gay’. Black Shadow, Dream Lover—The Book for Men Only, Bangkok: Vitayakorn, 1949, p 26.

19 Quoted in Ennew, The Sexual Exploitation of Children, p 99.

20 Ennew, The Sexual Exploitation of Children; and Montgomery ‘Child sex tourists’.

21 Montgomery, Modern Babylon?.

22 M Muecke, ‘Mother sold food, daughter sells her body: the cultural continuity of prostitution’, Social Science and Medicine, 35 (7), pp 891–901, emphasis in the original.

23 I carried out research between 1993 and 1994 by going daily into this community and conducting ethnographic, participant-observer-style fieldwork with the children. At night I returned to the local ngo, which had established links with this community over the previous five years, and whose members had introduced me to the people there. Such research clearly raises very important ethical and methodological issues which I have addressed elsewhere. See H Montgomery, ‘Working with child prostitutes in Thailand: problems of practice and interpretation’, Childhood, 14 (4), 2007, pp 415–430. It is important to emphasise that all names used in this article are pseudonyms and I have deliberately not named, or given clues as to the identity of, the larger resort town, the ngo I worked with, or the region in Thailand in which it is situated.

24 Montgomery, Modern Babylon?.

25 Ibid.

26 There have been claims that some Western paedophiles have access to well organised networks which arrange package holidays, complete with the sexual services of children. O’Grady, The Child and the Tourist. The evidence for this latter is very weak, however, and there have been no documented cases of child-sex tourist bureaux. See O'Connell-Davidson, Children in the Global Sex Trade, for an evaluation of this evidence.

27 It is of course possible that their clients made them wash before they had sex with them but I often saw the children return from clients’ apartments looking unkempt and quite dirty. Likewise the men may have given them money and asked them to spend it on medical treatment, although, given the distrust of authority, and the fear of drawing attention to themselves, I never saw any children spending their money on doctors or medical help.

28 M Crick, ‘Representations of international tourism in the social sciences: sun, sex, sights, savings and servility’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 18, 1989, pp 307–344; M Oppermann, Sex Tourism and Prostitution; C Ryan & CM Hall, Sex Tourism: Marginal People and Liminalities, London: Routledge, 2001; and J Nagel, Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

29 M Gilkes, ‘Prostitution in Thailand’, unpublished BA dissertation, Long Island University, 1993, p 30.

30 J O'Connell-Davidson, ‘British sex tourists in Thailand’, in M Maynard & J Purvis (eds), (Hetero)sexual Politics, London: Taylor and Francis, 1995, pp 42–64; and Montgomery, Modern Babylon?.

31 Montgomery, Modern Babylon?, p 141.

32 C Odzer, ‘Patpong prostitution: its relationship to, and effect on, the position of women in Thai society’, unpublished PhD thesis, New School for Social Research, New York, 1990, p 180.

33 D Walker & R Ehrlich, Hello My Big, Big Honey: Love Letters to Bangkok Bar Girls and their Revealing Interviews, Bangkok: White Lotus, 1994, p 51.

34 O'Connell-Davidson, ‘British sex tourists in Thailand’, p 55.

35 Wilson & Cox, The Child Lovers, p 19.

36 O'Connell-Davidson, ‘British sex tourists in Thailand’.

37 Ibid, p 54.

38 Ibid, p 51.

39 J O'Connell-Davidson, ‘Sex tourism and child prostitution’, in Clift &Carter, Tourism and Sex, p 62.

40 Montgomery, Modern Babylon?, p 142.

41 Similar comments were also made to Julia O'Connell-Davidson when she interviewed sex tourists in the Dominican Republic. One of these men told her: ‘Everyone's at it, fathers do it with their daughters, brothers do it with their sisters, they don't care. They'll do it with anyone, they do it with everyone, they don't care who it is or how old they are. They're like animals … By the time a girl is 10 years old, she's had more experience than … well, an American woman or an Irish woman won't never have that much experience in her whole life. Girls learn it's the way to keep a man happy. It's natural to them, it's a natural way to please men.’ O'Connell-Davidson, ‘Sex tourism and child prostitution’, p 64.

42 See, for example, the stories in Walker & Ehrlich, Hello My Big, Big Honey.