Shawn Abrahamson

Writing 39C: Comp 2 Draft 1

Professor Kaminski
May 15, 2014

A Challenge to Overcome in Thailand

Anecdote

According to the U.S. Department of States Trafficking in Persons Report 2011,
Maira was 15 when two well-dressed men driving a nice car approached her and two
friends in a small village. They told the girls they were businessmen and offered to take
them to the United States to work in a textile factory. Maira thought it was the perfect
opportunity to help her single mother, who struggled to support seven children. But upon
arriving in Houston, the girls were held captive, beaten, raped, and forced to work in
cantinas that doubled as brothels. Men would come to the cantina and choose a beer and a
girl, sometimes as young as 12. They would pay for the beer and sit with the girl while
she drank it. If they wanted to have sex with the girl, they would take her to the back and
pay cash for a mattress, paper towels, and spermicide. The captors beat the girls daily if
they did not make enough money. After six years, Maira was able to escape the cantina
and return to her mother with the help of a kind American family. Her two friends remain
missing.


Problem/ Causation (i.e., the solution will address the root cause of the problem):
The problem statement
Sex trafficking has become the new modern-day slavery. Many conventional
lifestyles of sex trafficking consist of millions of women and children being coerced,
deceived, and/or forced by debt bondage into prostitution, by traffickers. In many cases
of the exploitation, perpetrators trick or kidnap them, forcing them into sexual slavery,
prostitution, or commercial slavery that contributes to the growing international epidemic
of sex trafficking around the world; the United Nations Convention against Transnational
Organized Crime defines sex traffic as:

Trafficking in persons shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer,
harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other
forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or
of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits
to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the
purpose of exploitation.

Sex trafficking has been a major conflict worldwide, due to the uncertainty of the
definition itself to many and due to the dehumanizing effects on women. Enslaved
prostitutes face two major threats to their physical health and lives: Violence and disease.
These victims of torture often go numb, paralyzed in their minds if not their bodies. In
2004, UNICEF, a non-profit organization that strives to create a world where everyone
can live free from harm, estimates that 500,000 women and children are trafficked in
Asia each year, sources by BBC News. Thailand is one of the most notorious countries
for sex trafficking because of their overwhelming numbers of prostitutes and brothels,
along with the significant amounts of abuse, disease, and violence. Escape is impossible
because the brothels control nearby police and when these females try to run away they
face consequences without a blink of an eye. Global Womans: Because She Looks Like a
Child describes the consequences through Siris experience, She was quickly caught,
dragged back, beaten, and raped. That night she was forced to take on a chain of clients
until the early morning. (209 The brothels that hold these girls are but a small part of a
much wider sex industry.

Comparison/historical (i.e., the solution has worked before in another, similar
context) History

As a result to the Thailand governments poor regulation and desperation for
profits, they indirectly bring back the cultural acceptance for sexual tourism, usually
known to result in sex slavery, prostitution, or commercial use, to gain profits and
exemplify the historical inflation of sex tourism that happened during the Vietnam War
from 1955 to 1970 when the Thai government and the U.S.military signed a treaty to
allow U.S. soldiers stationed in Vietnam to come on Rest and Recreation. Since then,
Thailand has been socially viewed as the top destination for sex tourists in the world. In
Allison Meades blog article within The Borgen Project called Thailands Trouble with
Human Trafficking, she states that, With an influx of anxious, homesick, and bored
soldiers into the country, spilling over from Vietnam, the demand for prostitution
skyrocketed, resulting in the growth of the human trafficking industry which still remains
today. An evident example that it still remains today is within a recent article by Sean
Kimmons, Sex Trafficking Victims Go Unnoticed in Laos published March 26, 2014,
where an uneducated 15-year old girl sought for work at a farm in central Thailand but
was misled and ended up in a Thai brothel, she ended up at a Thai brothel, where she
was forced to have sex with a client who paid to take her virginity. So this significant
problem still remains today because the Thailand government is doing less than minimal
by not enforcing laws and not putting regulations in full effect, giving power and
advantages to the traffickers that benefit from this. The government effortlessly sets rules
for human trafficking and prostitution.

Solution Analysis

Thousands must be obtained to feed mens status necessities, thousands more need to be
put away into sexual slavery to fulfill the benefits of these organized transnational crimes.
For many years, women and girls have been kidnapped from their homes and exploited
sexually while perpetrators use violence to inject terror into them and to gain profit for
their organized crime/businesses, all of which these life-endangering practices still occur
in the year 2014. Then secondly, they benefit from the governments desperation for
profit, allowing and creating a high demand for sex workers. Instead of reinforcing the
punishment, they reinforce the crime for economic reasons. These organized
transnational crime investors benefit in ways that allow them to become puppet
masters that control every single move made.




























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