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Gender Concerns a Case Study of Thailand by Sudarat Sereewat FACE (Fight Against Child Exploitation) This paper is for Asia and Pacific Alliance of YMCAs Regional Consultation on Gender Concerns focussing on Girls Trafficking and Forced Prostitution, 14 - 19 September 2001, Bangkok, Thailand
PART ONE Thailand
Case Study I.
A Case of Laotian Girls being trafficked into Thailand for prostitution
January 22, 2001 FACE was informed by a social worker about a case of 5 Laotian girls who were forced to work in a massage parlour in Pattaya. It was one of the customer, after learning that these Laotian girls were lured, trafficked and forced to work in this massage parlour, called the Embassy of the Lao P.D.R. and asked for a rescue as requested by one of the girl. The Embassy contacted an official of the Public Welfare Department who discussed the matter with FACE for the assistance and rescue . The Rescue: FACE contacted the Provincial police and the Police Region 2. . These 5 girls were rescued in the afternoon. The manager and a pimp were arrested .and charged with the Prostitution Act 1996 and Trafficking Act 1997 The girls were interrogated on the next day by the police, a prosecutor and a social worker which formed a multi-disciplinary team according to the new procedural law regarding child witness investigation FACE coordinated with the police, prosecutor and the judge for the arrangement of the "deposition" of these victims The girls testified at the court hearing on February 1st . Then they were transferred to Baan Kred Trakarn, a shelter of the Public Welfare Department for the victims of trafficking, near Bangkok await for repatriation. The Embassy were trying to get the confirmation from Lao P.D.R regarding the addresses and the location of the families of these girls. Finally they were repatriated back to Lao P.D.R. on March 8th
The Laws:
The Coercion and the Exploitation: These 5 girls, aged 15, 16, two 20 and 23, testified that they were lured to work as waitress in a restaurant and will get about 15,000 Baht per month. They traveled in different trips and different days but were coerced and accompanied by the same Laotian woman trafficker across the border to Nong Kai Province. Then the same driver drove them in the same van straight to Cholburi Province. The trafficker received a thick envelop of cash - the girl did not know how much, but the ‘Mama san’ told them that she gave 10,000 Baht for each girl.which made these girl owe her and must pay her back when they could earn the money from the customers. On top of that, the16 years old and the one of 20 were forced to make a nose surgery against their will. They were afraid that it will hurt. The 20 years old were forced to make the ‘new nose’ three times ( as the "Mama san" said that ‘not beautiful/ not good’ after the first two surgeries) . After the surgery, they were told that they had 15,000 Baht debt for each surgery. The 20 years old girl was told that she owed the "Mama san" altogether 45,000 Baht from three surgeries! These girls could not leave the place on their own. The place where they slept was not too far from the working place…the massage parlour, but they were always put in a car which drove them between the two places. The 15 years old girl were there for about 5 months, longer than the others. One of them had been there for only about 20 days before being rescued. Repatriation: The officers of the Bann Kred Trakarn Shelter of the Public Welfare Department accompanied these 5 girls to the Lao authorities at the border in Nong Kai Province.
Summary of the co-operation
FACE can continue to work with the law enforcement officers regarding the attempt to prosecute the traffickers, procurers and the brothel owners who exploit, detain and force the victimize girls and women for prostitution. In many cases, the international co-operation is required. So far, this part is not very successful; we need more attention on the part of the authorities or officers in charge of this matter from both side, both countries of origin and destination. However, the civil society and NGOs can play many important roles in this matter.
Official Involvement of Authorities: In Thailand, some high rank officers confirm their supports to fight against trafficking. This led to the formation of a few committees dealing with the problems. A Sub-Committee of the National Youth Bureau of the Prime Minister’s Office works as the National Committee on this issue; its full name is : the National Committee on Combating Trafficking in Children and Women (in which FACE is a member as mentioned earlier) With the careful consideration about the component of the Committee, it has involved various and meaningful government agencies and NGOs, local - national and international NGOs and international organizations like UN. This Committee can push forward the national policy, national plan of action and some concrete actions regarding the problem of trafficking. This Committee is now trying also to push forward the co-operation between countries in Mekong Sub-Region such as the bilateral agreement between Thailand and Cambodia for instance. What we need more is the political will of our government and other governments concerned in dealing with the problem of trafficking by regarding it as a transnational organized crime. It is not just the small individual criminal cases anymore. The international cooperation is needed.
II. FACE Organization FACE is a small NGO which aims to work both at the policy and implementation levels, linking with other local and international NGOs working directly, in the beginning, with children in all parts of Thailand and neighboring countries. Later on, FACE has also involved in monitoring the cases of trafficking of both children and women especially for prostitution. FACE works in the best interests of the children and women with Thai governmental organizations (GOs) as well as concerned agencies of other governments.
The goals of FACE are:
In order to achieve these goals FACE aims to concentrate our activities on monitoring and advocacy work. We monitor cases of child sexual abusers/ pedophiles and traffickers arrested in Thailand in cooperation with government agencies and NGOs of other countries and especially with countries in Mekong Sub-Region regarding trafficking cases. FACE monitors the cases of arrested traffickers/ procurers and pedophiles to ensure that they go through the legal process until final judgment. FACE coordinates and encourages law enforcement officers to perform their duty more effectively. FACE assists in obtaining evidence, especially from the victimized children no matter they were children in commercial sex or not. FACE usually accompanies these children to court, helps solve their personal problems, and sometimes, family problems as well. FACE often travels to provinces all over Thailand to attend court hearings, especially when child victims must testify. With the new procedural law regarding "child friendly atmosphere" in investigation and court hearings, FACE also monitors, coordinates, and facilitates the child-victims participation in the legal process so that they receive better protection. All these actions are applied to the women who are victims of trafficking as well. For cases requiring international cooperation on crimes against children and women, FACE helps police from foreign countries monitor cases and coordinates participation in the legal process with concerned Thai governmental offices. FACE locates and cares for the children and women victims of abuse and trafficking.
For trafficking problems, specific purposes are as follows:
III The Relevant Laws and regulations 1) The Penal Code According to the Penal Code of Thailand, the offence of rape is punishable with four years to life imprisonment and the age of consent is over fifteen years. In case the victim is death the penalty is death penalty. However, the element of the law stipulated that only woman and girl can be raped. Thus, an offender who rapes a boy can only be charged with committing an indecent act of which the maximum penalty is fifteen years. Anyone, who procures, seduces or leads away a woman (with or without her consent) for an indecent act in order to gratify sexual desire of another person is punishable with 1-20 years imprisonment. If the victim is a girl under 18, 15 or 13 the penalty are heavier depending on the age of the victim. 2)The Prostitution Prevention and Suppression Act B.E.2539 (1996) The present Act was effective on December 21, 1996 and replaced the former Act. The main concept of the new Act is that prostitutes are victims of poverty, social problems and organized crime. Therefore, the Act concentrates on punishing procurers, brothel (both traditional and disguised brothels) owners, mama sans, pimps, customers, and parent who sold their child for prostitution. A procurer or trafficker is liable to 1-20 years imprisonment. An owner, manager, pimp and mama san or controller is liable to be imprisoned from 3-20 years. A customer who buys sex from a child under 18 year old can be imprisoned from one to six years. A parent who sells their child to be prostitute is liable to imprisonment of 4-20 years and their guardianship may be revoked by a court’s order.
3) The Measure for Prevention and Suppression of Trafficking in Women and Children Act B.E. 2540 (1997) This Act was passed and enact in November 1997. It replaced the outdated the Women and Girls Trafficking Act which was in use since 1928. The new Bill stipulates that the conspiracy to commit an offence concerning traffic in women and children is a crime punishable with imprisonment. Creating the offence of conspiracy will enable law enforcement to initiate legal proceeding provided by the law from the beginning. An aider or abettor of the commission of any offence in the Act will face with the same punishment as the principal offender. This Act broadens its requirement of the purposes of trafficking from commercial sexual abuse to cover all indecent acts against women or children. The penalty of the trafficker, conspirator, aider or abettor is imprisonment from one to twenty years. The Bill gives officials more authority to stop and confine the suspected victim for questioning and check the real purpose of travelling that can be interrupt trafficking process. The officials are authorized to search various places and vehicles to facilitate the prevention, suppression and assistance to those victimized women and children. The court is empowered to take deposition of a victim’s testimony soon after she was rescued from the offender.
4) The Criminal Procedural Law Amendment No. 20 This Act proposes three measures to protect children and fight with criminals in child sexual abuse cases. Firstly, video tape recording will be used to take statement of a child victim or witness, with the help of a psychiatrist or a social worker, in order to prevent the child from second victimization. Secondly, video link trial will be used while a child victim or witness gives his/her testimony in a trial with the help of a psychiatrist or a social worker. Thirdly, the court is obliged to take early deposition of the child victim or witness in a case upon a request of a prosecutor before the offender is indicted if it would be difficult to bring the victim or witness to testify later on. These three measures will help reduce hardship of the child victim or witness in the procedure and the victim or witness can give testimony before the offender or his peers have a chance to bribe or intimidate the victim or witness.
5) Memorandum of Understanding on Common Guidelines of Practices for Agencies Concerned with Cases Where Women and Children are Victims of Trafficking B.E. 2542 (1999) This MOU first aims to be used in dealing with the cases where the victims of trafficking are foreign children and women especially those who enter Thailand without legal document or permission. In the past, when these girls were rescued from the exploitative and/or abusive situation (such as illegal factories or brothels, they were still charged with ‘illegal entry’ according to the Immigration Act even though they were the ones who asked for help. They would be put into the International Detention Center (IDC) during the legal procedure. They normally were sentenced to pay fine and/or imprisonment for a period of time especially if they had no money to pay fine. After they finished the jail-term in the local prisons, they were then transferred to the IDC awaited for deportation. The NGOs which work with the children and women - victims of trafficking- felt that it was not right nor appropriated to treat them that way . We, therefore, had a series of consultation with the authorities concerned. Then this MOU was drafted and adopted by government agencies involved, namely, the Police Department (now it is the Royal Thai Police), the Public Welfare Department and the Office of the Permanent Secretary of the Prime Minister’s Office. On the day of Signing Ceremony which was 30th June 1999, apart from these three governmental agencies, there were also two NGO Networks, Thai-Cord (Thai Coordinating Committee on Migrant Children) and GAATW (Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women) who signed as witnesses of this Memorandum of Understanding…the Agreement among the three government agencies. IV
ISSUES OCCURRED 1. The definition of
2. The issue of
These are the issues that need to be discussed when we work in the area of trafficking. There are a few others issues that may come up in connection with this kind of problems of trafficking issue, depends on the context of the situation in your own countries or what happen in your country , or what kind of laws you have which may be different. This is just only an example from Thailand.
3. The defendants International Cooperation: a) Mutual Legal Assistance FACE pursue on the prosecution of the defendants… those who procure, traffick girls and women for any exploitative purposes whether for prostitution, labour or abuse. In some certain cases, like the Laotian girls who were trafficked by the traffickers in Lao, we need the international cooperation, we need to work with Interpol. "The Extradition Act B.E. 2472" and "the Mutual Legal Assistance Act B.E. 2535" are used widely with some successful cases, though not every case. b) Extraterritorial Law The process to use this law is mainly for the cases with foreign abusers. The cases FACE worked on this law so far was not the cases of brothel or prostitution , but with the cases involved children in commercial sex who were used by foreign abusers or what we call ‘paedophile’ FACE encourages and helps in the process to use the Extraterritorial law when it is needed. With this law, one can use it to prosecute the child abusers who were arrested in Thailand and got bail, then managed to jump bail and escaped from the country. If they could not escape from Thailand, they would be prosecuted here in Thailand with Thai laws. But if they could manage to escape from Thailand, the extraterritorial law of their own country can be used to prosecuted them in their own country for the crime they committed in other country. However, right now, not every country has this law. For Thailand, FACE had brought 2 child-victims of abuse to testify in court abroad twice, one was a boy to the court in Stockholm in June 1995 for the crime that Swedish man committed in Thailand since February 1993; another was a girl to the Criminal Court in Paris in October 2000 for the crime committed against her in 1994 by a French man. Both cases, the child-victims of abuse got compensation ordered by the courts of both countries. The third case is with the Japanese man who abused a boy of 11 years old in September 1996, and could manage to jump bail and left Thailand. The court hearing in Japan is schedule in February 2002. FACE will take the boy victim who is now 17 years old to Japan then. We have not used the extraterritorial law with the trafficking case yet.
V
Advocacy work and Networking The work on monitoring cases, on legal matter. From the lessons learned, like the loophole of the laws, the loopholes of the mechanism, the cooperation the coordination among agencies concerned, then we can put the recommendation for the amendment of the law and amendment of the legal mechanism. So, that becomes advocacy work. Another part which is important part is "networking". We work with many other NGOs, local. National and international; governmental agencies and authorities. The thing which I think is one of the most important things in working with the network is not just "an awareness" but it is "consciousness." If we have just only awareness, we know what it is, what are the problems, but we have no ‘consciousness’ to start to do any action. Things/ changes would not happen!! So for me, when we raise awareness, we need to raise consciousness as well. An example of networking- advocacy- with the consciousness of the authorities and civil society regarding the extraterritorial law. Before I worked with ECPAT ( International Campaign to End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism), we had problem of child prostitution, but it was regarded as a local problem. It was your own problem…..’If your Thai children become child prostitutes, it’s your own problem!’ But when I worked on tourism issue. We tried to show to the world that the ones who abused our children were foreigners from your.. your… your.. country! …a part of it. It may be a smaller part of those ‘ foreign customers’ than the ‘local customers’ But the money involved in tourism business is much, much bigger than the money from the local people. And the competition of the owners of the places who want to promote their ’goods’, who want to compete with each other that we had the younger ones, the fresher ones , was so high! This was the incentive for them to try to drag in the young children into prostitution in the tourism industry even until now. So we tried to link with them and showed them that YOU.. government of the sending countries of the tourists had to have responsibility of your own people, your own citizen who came to rape our children!! I think that it was the consciousness that came up in their own mind, in their own responsibility. That’s why ECPAT Campaign was quite successful in drawing people from sending and receiving countries to come up and worked together in the same "movement" which aimed to eradicate the sexual exploitation of children in tourism industry. Many government have come up and worked on extraterritorial law so that they can prosecute their own people who committed crime somewhere else. .beyond their own territory. By now, I think, there are more than 20 countries which have the extraterritorial law. For advocacy work and networking in Thailand, I feel that the Thai government has been using the strategy of cooperation with various NGOs, and in many cases, seek help and expertise from the NGOs specialized in certain issues. Many NGOs were appointed as members of various committees and propose their view-points, suggestions and recommendation both on the policy level and action level. This is just one example of the way we work here in Thailand. And I have to stress here that if only the NGO like us work, no matter how active we are, how committed we are, but if we do not have the authorities who understand and support our work, we may not be able to achieve this much. In Thailand, the person who takes a leadership role on the issue of child abuse, child protection and trafficking in women and children is Dr Saisuree Chutikul who is appointed, since March this year (2001) to be a member of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.
National policy and plan of actions The last part of the advocacy work I would like to mention here is that now Thailand also has a draft of national policy and plan of actions on trafficking which is the result of the cooperation among the concerned governmental agencies and various NGOs working on the issue, including FACE. As we do not have much time for this, I can mention only very briefly about this national policy and plan of actions. The areas we will work on involve the aspects of prevention, protection, recovering or rehabilitation, and repatriation including the reintegration in to their own society. That will be the plan for the problem of trafficking both within the country and between the countries in this region. This plan is not yet final draft; we have been working on for many drafts. We hope to finalize it very soon. After that, this draft needs the official approval by the cabinet. PART TWO More Action Needed Worldwide
Girls and women Trafficking into commercial sex and forced prostitution has been going on for several decades. It is not new phenomena. What is new may be ;
Challenges
to YMCAs
‘Many YMCAs in the region have run various kinds of activities including
I first understood that the YMCAs members come to join in this regional consultation this time in order to discuss and share their gender concerns focussing on girls trafficking and forced prostitution. However, during the discussion and sharing on the first two days, I realized that there are two things involved. One is the concerns for the violence occurred to the female gender in the forms of forced prostitution and trafficking; another is the concerns for the limited numbers of female gender in the administrative position within the YMCAs circle. I have already shared a lot with you on the issue of forced prostitution and trafficking. Lessons learned of FACE work, as an example, which become the recommendation for advocacy work and networking regarding laws amendment and the improvement of the legal mechanism were also shared. I believe that, with the appropriate measures to raise the awareness and consciousness of the millions of members of YMCAs, who seem to me as one of a biggest movement group with strong participation, close link with each other, advantages up to influential status in the society, the YMCAs worldwide can make a big difference in the global society. And if this aim of ‘making the world better’ is one of the aims and objectives of YMCAs communities, I believe that you will take up the issue with strong commitment. What is YMCA charter, or constitution? What are the indicators of the ‘worthwhile’ or meaningful activities of YMCAs? Of course, not just the numbers of the members. I have noticed that YMCAs have groups of members with commitment who want to do good things, to improve the world together. However, one may need to look more seriously at the "quality" of those members and not just the "quantity" If I misunderstand the word "YMCA members" and expect too much, I have to apologize. Some friends here said to me that the "YMCA members" sometimes means only "customers" who come to YMCA to use the services or facilities provided. Whatever, as I am quite familiar with some activities of YMCAs, I don’t think I misunderstand that you have a big number of committed and devoted people in your group who want to do something good, with their heart, their head, their own hands and with the whole spirits. The important point might be how to make these millions of members have stronger link and stronger network to achieve the common goal. What strategies can be used for this aim? By whom? Male or female, for me, is not the most important point. There are many women who do not do for women , while there are a number of men who do many things for the best interest of the women and children who are considered to be more disadvantaged than men. Among the people around you, whatever circle, you may witness this phenomena quite well. Trying to push for more numbers of female in the administrative positions can mean to decrease numbers of male administrators. Then the gender competition will occur and can create the conflict in the community. For me, to concentrate more, among the community members, on the quality, social values and good attitude for good action, social justice and just development for the whole society is more creative strategy than to emphasis on male- female issue. Those who have gender concerns in whatever they do consist of both sex, female as well as male. As an outsider of YMCAs community, though being a long time friend, I cannot say more about your YMCAs community worldwide. It is a challenge for yourselves to look for an appropriate strategy (or many strategies) to work together peacefully, effectively and creatively for the world to be better and more just which can make you feel being proud of being YMCA people! I feel honored that I am allowed to be among you here for this meaningful event and share with you my life, my fight for children and woman victims, my experiences and my working strategies. It’s only a modest example in a specific context of me in Thailand which I hope to be useful somehow.
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