Pertinent articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
- Article 1.All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
- Article 2.Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
- Article 3.Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
- Article 4.No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
- Article 5. No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Pertinent articles of the U.N. Convention of the Rights of the Child
- Article 32 (Child labour): The government should protect children from work that is dangerous or might harm their health or their education. While the Convention protects children from harmful and exploitative work, there is nothing in it that prohibits parents from expecting their children to help out at home in ways that are safe and appropriate to their age. If children help out in a family farm or business, the tasks they do be safe and suited to their level of development and comply with national labour laws. Children's work should not jeopardize any of their other rights, including the right to education, or the right to relaxation and play.
- Article 33 (Drug abuse): Governments should use all means possible to protect children from the use of harmful drugs and from being used in the drug trade.
- Article 34 (Sexual exploitation): Governments should protect children from all forms of sexual exploitation and abuse. This provision in the Convention is augmented by the Optional Protocol on the sale of children, child prostitution, and child pornography.
- Article 35 (Abduction, sale and trafficking): The government should take all measures possible to make sure that children are not abducted, sold or trafficked. This provision in the Convention is augmented by the Optional Protocol on the sale of children, child prostitution, and child pornography.
- Article 36 (Other forms of exploitation): Children should be protected from any activity that takes advantage of them or could harm their welfare and development.
For full text of the Convention of the Rights of the Child, go to http://www.unicef.org/crc/files/Rights_overview.pdf
You should also consider the importance of the 2004 UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime and the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking of Persons, Especially Women and Children, http://www.unodc.org/documents/treaties/UNTOC/Publications/TOC%20Convention/TOCebook-e.pdf. This relatively new convention is important to how you understand your mission. On the one hand, it is strong legislation against trafficking, however, as you will note, it falls within the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, not its human rights wing, and it strengths the role of police and border officials in curtailing trafficking. Some activists argue that these two aspects of the Convention and the Protocol work against the women they seek to protect.
TED, the Trade and Environment Database hosted by American University, presents a case study on the exploitation of Thai women imported to Japan as sex workers (http://www1.american.edu/TED/thaiwomen.htm). Beginning in the 1960s, Japanese men flocked to join organized sex tours of Thailand and the Philippines. By the late 1970s, the sex tours from Japan declined because of increasing pressure from NGOs and feminist groups protesting tourism that exploited women and children. In response to the heat, gangsters and traffickers began importing women and girls from Thailand to work in Japanese brothels.
Despite increased awareness and pledges to combat sexual abuse, the sex trade in Thailand represents a significant source of tourist income. According to another case study on the sexual slavery, thousands of women and children of both sexes from Myanmar (formerly Burma) are sold each year to work in brothels along the Thai border and in Bangkok. Although organized criminal gangs now control most of the sex industry in Thailand, the practice originated with an entrepreneurial group of wives of Thai military officers who set up a travel agency to organize sex tours for American GIs on leave from Vietnam.
Tourism in Thailand in general has grown from 250,000 in 1965, to over 13 million international visitors in 2006, according to statistics of the Tourism Authority of Thailand. Because of embarrassing news reports and pressure from human rights agencies, the Thai government began in the early 1990s to curb prostitution. Out of 220,000 women estimated by the Thai government to be engaged in prostitution, no one really knows how many are underage. Thai agencies insist that the numbers of child sex workers have declined significantly, thanks to the vigilance of NGOs and UN agencies that have lobbied for legal protections. Currently the government is developing stricter policies to prevent sexual exploitation of children and to collaborate with international agencies to eliminate trafficking and abuse.
The sex trade is not limited to Southeast Asia and Thailand. World-wide trafficking in women and children for the sex industry may yield as much as $12 billion a year, according to Donna Hughes, the U.S. delegate to the International Conference on Violence against Women that met in November 2000 in Valencia, Spain. Crime groups actively promote and invest in sex tourism because of its low risk and high profits, fueling a global human rights crisis that exploits perhaps 4 million women and children a year (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/1038877.stm).
Training Resources – Sexual exploitation of women and children
The following list of films, books, articles and web resources will help your prepare for the trip to Thailand, conduct your investigation, and write your report. If you find additional resources that you find especially reliable and helpful, be sure to include them in your report to the Director.
Novel:
Michel Houellebecq, Platform, New York: Random House, 2002.
Wendy Law-Yone, The Road to Wanting, New York: Vintage, 2011.
Books:
Kamala Kempadoo et al, Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights, Paradigm Publishers, 2005.
Karen Beeks and Delila Amir, Trafficking and the Global Sex Industry, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006.
Julia O’Connell Davidson, Children in the Global Sex Trade, Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005.
Kathryn Farr, Sex Trafficking: The Global Market in Women and Children, New York: Worth Publishers, 2005.
Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Siriphon, Sakhrobanek, The Traffic in Women: Human Realities of the International Sex Trade, London: Zed Books Ltd., 1997
Films:
Sacrifice, The Story of Child Prostitutes from Burma, Ellen Bruno Film Library, 2000. To view clip or order film, see http://www.brunofilms.com/films/sacrifice/.
Trade, Marco Kreuzpainter, 2007. Sundance Film Festival, on sex trafficking in the U.S.
Articles and web resources:
The Library of Congress Country Studies – Thailand (Library of Congress Call Number DS563.5 .T4563 1989), available at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/thtoc.html.
Human Rights Watch: Thailand, “A Modern Form of Slavery: Trafficking of Burmese Women and Girls into Brothels in Thailand,” 1993. Somewhat dated but thorough. http://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/thailand/. See also Human Rights Watch website for most current reports (http://www.hrw.org/). Pay particular attention to section on women’s rights http://hrw.org/women/ and trafficking of women and children.
Alex Renton, “Learning the Thai Sex Trade,” Prospect Magazine, May 2005, http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/learningthethaisextrade/#.Um9Koyg4RUQ
Maggie Jones, “Thailand’s Brothel Busters,” Mother Jones, November/December 2003.
“Life as a Thai Sex Worker,” Feb. 22, 2007, BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6360603.stm.
Donna Hughes, “Trafficking, Slavery, and Sexual Exploitation,” in Dignity Deferred, a website that lists online publications by the author, a scholar at University of Rhode Island, http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/pubtrf.htm. There are several articles on the use of the internet for global sexual exploitation of women and children, two from Feminista! The Online Journal of Feminist Construction, www.feminista.com.
As always, look for other reputable sources to help you understand the full dimension of this issue and to assist with your research.