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Story Publication logo September 1, 2009

Sex Tourism, Exploited Women

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Thailand
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Thailand: Sex Tourism, Exploited Women

Deena Guzder exposes how the economic crisis has changed the nature of sex tourism in Thailand.

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Thailand's sex tourism industry is primarily driven by acute poverty. “All forms of prostitution are about comparatively rich men buying poor women,” says feminist scholar and law professor Catharine MacKinnon. “Anything that accentuates that inequality increases the abuse that can be demanded.'
One reason the Royal Thai Government is not more proactive about curbing sex tourism is because the underground industry comprises 2 - 14% of the countries' economy, according to the ILO.
In the world’s largest Red Light District, Bangkok, there are stark differences between the go-go dancers—who are similar to those prevalent in every global city across the world—and sex workers subjected to egregious forms of human zoo tourism at “ping pong shows,” an extreme form of sex entertainment that often involves sexual torture for guffaws of Westerners.
Centuries of soldiers, seamen, priests, and teachers have used their wealth to fully exploit the erotic possibilities of the Far East. “Thailand becoming a sex tourism destination was condoned and sanctioned by Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War,” says Taina Bien-Aime, Executive Director of Equality Now.
Thailand is often called “Disneyland for pedophiles.” UNICEF surveys indicate that 30 to 35 per cent of all sex workers in the Mekong sub-region of Southeast Asia are between 12 and 17 years of age. Sex tourism targeting children creates huge monetary incentives for traffickers, which impacts an estimated 1.2 million child victims annually.
While some Thai women admittedly view Western men as status symbols or economic benefactors, the majority of women trapped in Bangkok’s seedy underbelly are single mothers from desperately poor families who have benefited from very little formal education and have no other financial alternatives.
Many sex workers are economic refugees from northeastern Thailand, the country’s poorest region; some women are trafficked from repressive countries such as Burma; still others come voluntarily from Thailand’s poorer neighbors such as Cambodia and Laos.
Thai women who have lost their jobs in villages during the economic downturn often work at “ping pong shows.” These shows, a form of human zoo tourism, are inherently misogynistic. Women are hired as circus animals and their sexuality is reduced to a spectator sport.
Behind the brothels posing as massage parlors and strip clubs is a painful story involving women trafficked from Burma, minors exploited by pimps, and global economic disparities that force women to sell their bodies.
Even if a migrant laborer secures an increasingly elusive unskilled factory job, the paltry salary is typically ten to twenty times lower than that paid to the lowest level sex worker employed at “beer bars” that attract wealthy tourists, according to the nonprofit organization Ashoka.

Women and girls from poor rural families make up the majority of sex workers in Thailand. As a result of the current economic downturn, hundreds of factories and projects have closed across Thailand, leaving thousands of workers—both Thai and non-Thai—unemployed, according to the Far Eastern Economic Review. Unemployment is rising at a rate of about 100,000 workers a month, and may climb to 1.5 million by the end of the year. 
The vast economic disparities between Thai locals and Thailand's tourists have long enabled affluent foreigners to request massages with "happy ending specials" or "rent a girlfriend/boyfriend" for a holiday. Now, the global economic crisis has spawned new, dangerous ways of objectifying, commoditizing, and demeaning women. Thailand's sex tourism industry is more risqué, less regulated, and more dangerous than ever before.

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