Fueling the Darkness
The cycle of sex trafficking in Southeast Asia
By Adam Sjoberg
“…We are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water?” John Steinbeck, East of Eden
I can still see the red glow of the bouncing light. I can hear the pulsating drive of music as the shadows of the young, nearly naked girls slide across each other in rhythmic symbiotic erotic thrusts. And I can see that red glow painting his pale flesh, which stretched thin over his fingers, slides back and forth, idly thumbing an unlit cigarette. I can see an army of a brown spots covering his arms. I can see dense, thick, graying hair draping down over his shoulders. And I can vividly see his dark, colorless eyes sitting deep within the folds of his yellow face. The only hint of color the raw pink from his dried out skin and the tiny red veins in his cheeks—I can only imagine from years of excessive alcohol consumption.
He sits, dangling his bare, bony legs over the edge of a stool. Leaning on his right elbow, his fingers are cradling a beer bottle delicately between two fingers, an extension of himself, another appendage. I didn’t actually smell his stench, but it still somehow remains vivid in my memory. Poor hygiene, beer soaked breath, and unwashed clothes.
______________________
The neon lights of Soi Cowboy scan the night sky and bounce off of the thick humid Thai air back down onto the dank streets below.
From my barstool a few feet away I examine my friend—a specimen of self-loathing and discontentment. The continued pulsating glow from behind him stretches across his palid features, making his face amorphous. The shadows cause him to be at one moment sinister and ferocious, and the next minute, sad-eyed and lonely.
His hands. They were chubby and bony at the same time—round-tipped with joints like baseballs. I can see, with frighteningly vivid accuracy, what these hands have done. The slow caress of his palms along smooth skin accompanied with a quieting whisper. An activity done in shadows in the festering cistern that is Bangkok’s redlight district. A silent and fluid dance his limbs have learned and his brain now ignores. The rape of a seven year old.
A short walk down the vibrant street of Soi Cowboy reveals that it is relatively tame—a small Las Vegas. But a moments inspection through the swinging doors of these establishments make it clear that, though prostitution is technically illegal in Thailand, under the surface it is still there—just policed, restrained, viewed as nothing more than a must-see tourist attraction.
Naïve, Midwest-raised man that I am, it took me some time to get over the whole scene: the strip bars filled with flirtatious young girls (and transsexual boys nicknamed “lady-boys” by backpackers), the hordes of European 40-something men, the urges and invitations to partake in the city’s decadence. Lambasted and shocked by it at first, it took me some time to blink away the glitz and glamour of the soft-core side of prostitution and remember that this was not why we had come here.
I was the hired photographer on a crew of seven people shooting a documentary about human sex trafficking among children in Thailand. We were all armed with ambition, hope, and apparently a taste for danger. We were a rag-tag team of young film-makers, eager for purpose. A renegade crew shooting a guerilla-style documentary. No permits. No exact shot schedule. No storyboards. Little experience. No one over 27. If idealism is blind, stupid hope, then we were the epitome of idealism—personified, incarnated into a bubbling, diverse van-full of young people eagerly expecting the dawn of change.
Idealism fades quickly, though, when you’re getting solicited in a strip-club by a young STD—ridden prostitute, eager to go home with you.
Not five minutes ago she was thrusting away on a pole wearing nothing but a small thong and tiny bikini top. Now she is less scantily clad and is pressed up against my side whispering Thai-English come-ons to me. She has a number pinned to her mini-skirt.
“Hey mistah, you happy?” She giggles and pokes her finger quickly against my groin and then pulls it away.
She’s bold but strangely shy too.
“Why are we here? What the hell are we doing?” I’m screaming inside.
Another drink. Another drink. For her. For me. To stay here, we have to keep ordering drinks. It’s one of the few rules.
I get a phone call from our Director. “We found her.” Good. They found her. Now how am I going to wiggle my way out of this place?
“I’m sorry. No money!” She looks upset. She keeps trying, tugging at me. I get away. The mamasan stares at me from across the room. Shoving my way through a throng of nearly naked girls I push my way out into the red streets of Nana Plaza and gasp for fresher air. Before I leave the plaza an older woman prostitute and a young lady-boy give my groin a firm, round grab.
Stumbling back towards our hotel down the street I await further instructions. We have our girl. We think she’s young enough to—to count. To count as a “child.” Now we’ll “hire” her for the night, interview her for a few minutes, and then let her have the night off, on us. I’m not condoning the method. Looking back, I don’t know what were doing. We were kids, shooting a film. We needed a story. We need the story that would shock the people back home. We wanted to tell a story. But—where are the young girls?
They’re there. Deep beneath the surface of Vegas-like decadence there is a seedier, well-hidden network of child prostitutes. They are the flower girls on the streets peddling their goods with a pimp keeping a watchful eye nearby. They are underneath the city, lying in wait, in darkness, watching cartoons in a tiny room on an old fuzzy television. They too have numbers pinned to their shirts. They are the street-boys at the gates in Chiang Mai.
And these girls in the strip clubs may not be small children, but they weren’t always 17. From the pieces we were able to assemble from endless interviews—interviews with prostitutes young and old, mamazans, human rights advocates, missionaries, recovery center workers, counselors, a Harvard law graduate, a Lonely Planet author, and the sex offenders themselves (quotes one man in a bar to me, “If they’re old enough to bleed, they’re old enough to breed”) and many more—we pieced together the general story.
It starts with a poor village family in the north, or on the Burmese or Cambodian border. Maybe it’s a Burmese refugee with little to no rights. Maybe it’s a down-and-out family with no money—or maybe it’s an alcoholic mother who can’t afford to house her only child any more.
Tradesmen come. They offer hope. Hope of a better life. Your daughter can come work in a restaurant in Bangkok or Pattaya. She will make a decent living. Sometimes there’s even a flat rate to give the girl up for good. What can a poor family do? Even if they suspect the innocence belies a darker plan, they have little other hope but starvation and death. And in a country where sex holds little significance outside of its necessity for pleasure and procreation, what’s the harm? They can’t afford school for their child, so what else?
I do not wish to over-simplify the issue. Read one of the many books, journals, and articles that have already been written about the issue if you want to begin to understand its complexity. I simply want to draw a line of trajectory. A line that stretches from a young girl’s birth into a possibly loving family, to the prostitute working on Soi Cowboy, in Patpong, or Nana Plaza. It is a predictable pattern of poverty leading to depravity. For the sake of brevity I’ll simplify it to two issues: porvery, and (for lack of a better term) “The Law of Cyclical Injustice.”
The first is ostensably simple. Poverty and unwelcome circumstances are clearly significant causes of sexual exploitation among children. Yes, molestation happens—probably quite often—among people of affluence. But sex trafficking, I can assure, is far rarer there. However, it seems that poverty is just adding fuel to a pre-existing, insidious condition. The man at the beginning of this article is not fictional. Quite the opposite. I remember him distinctly one night as I sat outside of a strip club.
Imagine that man forty years ago. Imagine that despicable man—smelly, grey-haired, a child-molester. Imagine him— as a child. He’s nine or ten, living in the run-down outskirts of one of America’s many industrialized cities. A victim of the foster care system he is currently back with his only relative—his uncle. His uncle is an auto mechanic and an alcoholic. And nearly every night, like clock-work, his uncle comes into his room, shuts the door, covers the boys mouth, and in the quite dampness of their dirty house, molests the boy.
It does not, I don’t believe (and I’ve thought about this quite a bit) excuse the behavior of the child molestor—even if they too underwent such treatment. But it does, or should, move us towards unlikely compassion for them. Statistically, violent child victimizers are substantially likely to have been sexually or physically abused as children.* In fact, some statistics say 57%** of child molesters have been molested themselves, with other statistics saying far more.
I’m reminded of another example. Geng, a young boy our film crew met at a recovery live-in center for street boys, ran away recently. He’s no more then 12 years old and he willingly ran away—back to the lifestyle of the street kids. He peddles his body for money—offering his tiny, developing self up to the darkest of deeds. He has gone back to prostituting himself on his own accord. Why? Because it is all he knows. And he will raise other small boys around him to do the same. The cycle will continue.
The sex trafficking market would cease to exist if there wasn’t a supply an demand. A supply of impoverished kids with no other options, and a demand from a sickening number of men around the world who have fallen into darkness.
The cycle will continue. Victims will continue to become victimizers. The things that men—that all of us—are capable of will always be there. That potential is a throbbing darkness. And it lies in wait for those of us that are more perceptible to it. And poverty, that is—lack of education and basic needs—will always, always greatly magnify that potential. And those of us that are less disposed to that potential—those of us less exposed—are morally culpable for helping put an end to these cycles in any way we can.
It means giving these children, locally and abroad, the opportunity to escape. It doesn’t mean that they will. But without an opportunity they can hardly be blamed for the cycle they will perpetuate.
______________________
There is a beautiful beach that still remains unscarred by Thailand’s bubbling tourist industry. It sits off the shores of the tiny island of Ko Phi Phi Don on the western coast. Some that have seen it have called it the most serene beach in all of Asia. I, however, see it as the tender flesh at the point of a dagger—nature’s calming blue serenity waiting to be pierced by the savage beast of civilization. This slice of paradise is the innocence of a child; the deep brown eyes of unscathed tragic destiny.
Somewhere else the lights shimmer, the drinks and drugs settle in on the bustling travelers, and the joy of celebration condescends over the humble Thai people.
But here, here in the quiet of the gentle lapping shore, a cry can be heard through the silence. It is the muffled whimper heard barely above the yawn of dusk. It is the cry of a child. I have seen those brown eyes, silk-black hair, tiny, tender fingers. These waters have bathed that young gentle child in purity as true and deep as it’s own serenity. And yet she writhes—her body aching to push through the hardship ahead. The hardship that closes in like the bustling farang’s that invade Thailand every year.
So let the sand’s cry out in agony against the oncoming rage of civilization. Leave your carefully packaged tours, your western foods, your black-market trinkets, your buckets of booze. Shake from your sandals the filth of humanity and turn your tired gaze toward the weary, untouched, brown-eyed beaches that cry out for refuge from the darker side of man.
*BJS Survey of State Prison Inmates, 1991.
**Goldstein-Harte Study 1973; Carter et al, “Use of Pornography in the Criminal and Developmental Histories of Sexual Offenders,” 1984.Please check out these organizations that are working to make a difference:
