Come commemorate Burma Human Rights Day
on March 9 in Berkeley for dinner, film and speakers
focusing on 40 years of dictatorship and Child Sex Trafficking
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Here)
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Stories on Child Slavery by Time Asia, Feb 4, 2002
The Shame (Cover Story, Indentured for Life)
As the gap between rich and poor grows wider, destitute
Asians are increasingly selling their most valuable property: their children
By ALEX PERRY Mae Sai
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JONATHAN TAYLOR FOR TIME
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Across Asia, tens of thousands of children are being sold into prostitution or
hard labor
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Mama San won't budge from $1,000. There's the food, the clothes, the makeup,
the perfume and the condoms, not to mention the fees of the middlemen. At
$1,000, she's making nothing, she says. She taps out the figure in baht on a
calculator and holds it up: 43,650. You won't get a pair of 14-year-old Burmese
girls for less in this town.
"Thirty thousand," I suggest.
"Forty-three," counters Mama San. She tells Tip (whose name means
"heavenly light") and Lek (meaning "small") to fetch their
chips. The two tiny figures squatting at her feet jump up, dart under the two
pink strips that provide the only light in the bar, run upstairs and return
breathlessly clutching gambling counters. "What the customers paid,"
explains Mama San. In the three months since she was brought to this backstreet
brothel in the northern Thai town of Mae Sai, Lek has collected eight white
chips and four blues—a total of $59.50. Tip has done better: 20 whites, 10
blues and four reds make $163. "Not a bad little earner," says Mama
San.
"Thirty-five thousand?" I venture.
With her scarlet fingernails, Mama San pinches her plunging black V-neck
sweater by the shoulder pads, hitches up her matronly bosom and smooths the
sweater over her belly. "Forty-two thousand, five hundred, and I'll be
losing money," she sighs. "I sent 5,000 home to Lek's parents and
10,000 to Tip's." Conveniently ignoring the silver Mercedes parked in the
forecourt outside, she repeats she makes nothing from prostitution. She's in it
because she cares. She takes the girls in, puts a roof over their heads.
"What can I do? I feel sorry for them. Somebody has to protect them."
Tip, like many of the girls in Mae Sai, is from Kentung in Burma's eastern
Shan state. Mama San is also from the Shan region and grew up with some of the
girls' mothers. As a 20-year Mae Sai resident who graduated from working the
brothels to owning one, she is regarded as a success and a valuable contact on
the other, richer side of the border. It's a responsibility, she says. Her
conscience won't let the two girls go for anything less than 41,500.
"Forty-one thousand?"
Done. We shake hands.
On the floor where they have been listening in wide-eyed silence, Tip and Lek
embrace. Lek claps, hoarsely barks something in slang at the 15 other girls
lined up on a bench in front of the bar and runs, shrieking and giggling into
the street, with her waist-length black hair trailing. The teenagers ignore her,
locked into a Thai adventure-romance on the television overhead. For a moment,
Tip stays where she is, her childlike hands clasped in front, bony elbows
between her knees. Then she shuffles over to join the row of moon faces turned
up toward the screen. She and Lek have been sold. Again.
This time to Jonathan, the photographer working on this story, and me.
Fifteen minutes later, facing an unknown future with just a pink plastic
basket holding a few clothes and a bottle of shampoo, Lek starts to cry.
Suddenly sensing a need to do everything properly, she runs into the bar, kneels
in front of Mama San and begins to bow and chant, a good Buddhist girl in
smudged makeup giving thanks for her freedom. Mama San laughs, flattered by the
display of supplication. She isn't worried about finding replacements.
"Their mothers or the middlemen bring them to me," she says.
"There are always fresh ones."
Mama San is right: there is no shortage of kids for sale. Across Asia, tens
of thousands of children are peddled into slavery each year. Some toil with
their families as bonded laborers on farms. Others are sold by their
parents—or tricked by agents—into servitude as camel jockeys, fisher boys or
beggars. In Burma, some are kidnapped by the state and forced to become
soldiers. And, according to the International Labor Organization, at least 1
million children are prostitutes, with the greatest numbers in Thailand, India,
Taiwan and the Philippines. It's a growing problem, fueled by the Asian economic
boom and the subsequent bust, which has fostered an increasingly yawning gap
between rich and poor, countryside and city, isolated hinterlands and wealthy
coasts. On the continent, alongside the millionaires of Bangkok and Hong Kong,
live two-thirds of the world's extreme poor—790 million people earning less
than $1 a day. In the race to escape their deprivation, whole villages are
sometimes complicit in the sale of their children. The procurers, says Sompop
Jantraka, a leading Thai activist who has saved thousands of girls from being
sold into brothels, might be the wives of village heads. Teachers know which
children are vulnerable, and some alert procurers for a fee. He has seen pickup
trucks full of girls sold to brothels leaving from schools in what is called tok
keow, or the green harvest. A police officer is often at the wheel. "This
is a war," Sompop says. "A war for our children."
The sordid traffic
touches nearly every part of Asia. But Thailand and India in particular serve as
hubs of the flesh trade: exporters and importers of children and adults on a
massive scale. An estimated 7,000 Nepalese children are smuggled into India each
year to join the sex industry. In the age of AIDS, children increasingly earn
the biggest profits. With a girl's virginity selling for as much as $3,500 in
Bangkok, recurring recessions have ensured a ready supply of daughters sold by
poverty-stricken families. The number of child prostitutes in Thailand is at
least 60,000, though estimates go as high as 200,000. Almost all are working
under duress: 21st century slaves.
The numbers are wrenching, but to comprehend the problem, one need only watch
the sordid hour-by-hour lives of girls like Lek and Tip. As we talked with them
over a few days, our sense of being impartial observers gave way to a feeling of
being uncomfortable voyeurs and then grew to a gnawing sense that just by
watching the children's degradation we were somehow implicated. I'm not sure at
what point we decided that, although we couldn't guarantee their futures, we
could buy their freedom. We could help them escape.
Lek had already tried. On her second day, after instruction from Mama San on
how to apply makeup and satisfy a client, a drunken Bangkok businessman beat her
when she complained he was being too rough. She fled when she was released from
the hospital. "I went to the temple," she says, pointing to the golden
stupas on a hill high above the eastern outskirts of Mae Sai. "Mama San
paid the police to come and arrest me. They held me there with only bread and
water for three days. After that I was too afraid to run away. Mama San knows
people everywhere, on both sides of the border. She could arrange for me to be
taken back to her anytime. Tip knew this: she told me not to go."
Although Lek and Tip have been in Mae Sai for only a few months when we meet
them, they have already learned to hide their inner thoughts. "We don't
have feelings anymore," says Tip. "We cleared them out." But they
can still dream of freedom, can still tell us they want out. They talk about how
hard they would hug their mothers if they ever get home, so tightly no one could
ever separate them again. "My mother would be really upset if she knew what
I was doing and I desperately want to tell her," says Lek. "But I
can't because it would break her heart. Every time I speak to her, she pleads
with me to come home."
That's how Jonathan and I found ourselves driving to the ATM, withdrawing
$930—41,000 baht—and buying Lek and Tip. It wasn't merely the prospect of
these two children steadily building up their collection of chips over the next
decade that compelled us. It was partially witnessing the despair of the other
girls who had buried all hope with their childhoods. Girls like Pim, who works
in a brothel a few meters up the road.
When we ask, Pim insists she is 19. She's probably closer to 12. Less than
1.5 m tall, her platform heels only highlight how short her legs are. Her
tissue-stuffed bra emphasizes her flat chest. And the bright green eye shadow
and heavy rouge she wears give her all the vampishness of a seventh-grader
playing the clown in a school play. The most popular of the girls in her
brothel, picked out by up to three customers a day, she insists she has never
been happier. But sitting in a restaurant by the Nam Ruak River, the 10-m-wide
watery frontier at Mae Sai's northern end, Pim can't stop gazing at her homeland
on the opposite bank. For a few moments, the mask drops. "No one is here
because they want to be here," she murmurs. "Everyone's here because
they have to be." Looking away, she starts quietly weeping. Without a good
command of Thai or the right documents allowing her to return to her village in
Burma, Pim has given up all hope of leaving. Besides, her Mama San insists Pim
owes her $2,000, her purchase price. And how could she get money to pay? When
asked if she wants to go home, she looks away at something far off in the
distance. Staying, on the other hand, carries its own paralyzing fear. "My
regular customers are Thai, the visitors are Japanese," she says.
"When they're drunk, none of them want to wear condoms. You can't force
them."
Like Tip, Pim comes from eastern Burma. A member of the Akha minority, one of
the hill tribes that populate that region, she was born in a settlement outside
Kentung, an area of wild jungle mountains that doubles as rebel country and
forms the heart of the Golden Triangle opium and amphetamine production zone.
Pim remembers a tough but happy childhood raising chickens and working the rice
fields on her parents' land, which clings to a steep ridge above a clear rushing
stream.
One day a trader came to the village. He spoke of riches beyond a poor
farming family's dreams: $2,000 now and more to follow when Pim sent money home
from Thailand. Her mother told her she would be working as a mae bai, a maid.
Pim, who had no reason to doubt her, found herself being packed off. The trader,
keen to make a trip so far up-country pay, had hired a minivan: Pim describes
how her first day in captivity was spent driving from village to village as the
man picked up a total of 12 girls. Bribing his way past the many Burmese road
checkpoints and buying forged visitor papers allowing the girls to work in Mae
Sai proved to be routine. The rebel threat and drug running give even honest
Burmese security forces in the area other priorities.
Selling an 11-year-old virgin turned out to be even easier. At the first
place they came to in Thailand, less than a kilometer from the bridge over the
Nam Ruak, a brothel owner bought Pim.
Pim now suspects her mother knew her true destiny. Lek and Tip, on the other
hand, appear unaware, or unable to admit, that their mothers sold them into
sexual slavery. Lek says she came to Mae Sai because she wanted to earn money to
help her widow mother buy their rented house. A friend approached her in a
market near her house in Rangoon, she says, and asked simply whether she wanted
to make money in Thailand. She jumped at the chance. Tip, like Pim, was
recruited by an agent but insists her mother thought she was going to be
cleaning houses. Both girls say they can never tell their families they are
prostitutes. They would be too ashamed.
The price that Kentung's daughters pay for their parents' poverty can be
found in its graveyards. The idyllic-looking hillside hamlet of traditional
wooden houses and carved balconies brimming with mountain flowers is four hours
north of the Thai border by car. In a town of perhaps 5,000 people, the AIDS
epidemic imported from over the frontier reached the point in the late 1990s
where someone died every day, according to one Western aid worker. The rate has
since fallen, but it's not a sign of improvement. Rather, it's a reflection of
the earlier devastation. World Vision is one of the few nongovernmental
organizations to brave international condemnation for working under, and
inevitably sometimes with, Burma's military junta to try to counter trafficking
and its effects in the area. One of its workers says that since 1997, out of 400
AIDS patients it registered in the nine village districts around Kentung, 380
have died. The government tries to hide the reality, but even where deaths are
counted, the embarrassed Burmese authorities fudge the true total—listing
complications brought on by AIDS as the cause of death. "No one will ever
know how many people have really died around here from AIDS," the aid
worker says.
But even though the terrible price of prostitution has become evident by the
sheer force of numbers, the flow of girls has not slowed. The economic
imperative is such that for most families, sending daughters illegally to
Thailand is a must, says Cherry Waing of World Vision's Kentung office. And with
no education or training, girls have little earning power outside the flesh
trade. "Every village has a broker for sex workers," says Waing.
Little thought is given to the girls' return. Many simply don't. But for
those who survive with their health intact, the journey home can be fraught.
Most lack the requisite identity cards, which are issued solely in the district
of residence and only to people aged 18 or older. "Either the girls have to
bribe their way home, if they have enough money, or more usually they need to be
sponsored by their parents or the village head," says Waing. Such
arrangements, she adds, are extremely rare. "Generally these are the very
people who sent them away in the first place." Since starting up a
repatriation program early last year, World Vision has managed to bring only
three girls back from Mae Sai.
Taking Lek and Tip over the border turns out to be easy. Both girls insist
they want to go to Kentung to live with Tip's family. They would feel safest
there. With trepidation, we agree. While we arrange visas for ourselves, they
pick up a pass to Tachileik, the Burmese border town opposite Mae Sai. With the
heavy traffic across the bridge, the four of us cross unnoticed. Fearing
problems with checkpoints if we go by road, we buy the two girls flights to
Kentung. It is with relief that we watch the plane take off.
Only later do we learn that Lek and Tip never made it past the departure
lounge. Minutes before the aircraft is to take off, as we wait obliviously
outside in the parking lot, the airport authorities throw them out. By the time
we hear of their missed flight, we have discovered something even more
wrenching: the mothers of both girls have been receiving regular payments from
Mama San.
Lek and Tip are still in Tachileik, where they have taken shelter with an
older friend. Perhaps it's better that they didn't return home. Their mothers
sold them once; would they have tried again? It's not a happy ending. And many
could argue that we did the wrong thing, that by paying money for the girls we
were only perpetuating the trade, that helping them take only one step toward
freedom was not enough. But unlike Pim, Lek and Tip might, at least, have some
choices this time.
Camel Jockeys
Sold for a rich man's sport
By ALEX PERRY
Two years ago Yousuf Sadiq, then eight years old, and his brother Suleman, 7,
were sold by their father for the sporting fun of a wealthy Gulf sheik. An agent
who scours the poor villages and nomad camps of southern Pakistan bought the
diminutive brothers to race camels in the United Arab Emirates. They fit the
agents' ideal: aged between five and eight and weighing less than 17 kilos
apiece.
Smuggled on false documents to Dubai from Karachi airport, the brothers were
put on a regimen of white beans, and beaten regularly. They joined many other
boys: the camel jockeys are kept in desert houses in groups of 20. Barefoot and
sleeping together on mattresses on the floor, they exercised and grazed the
camels 18 hours a day. During races, falls are frequent and the boys are often
injured or even trampled to death. Yousuf, who has racing scars on his hands,
ankles and chin, describes the routine: "The sheiks would drive along with
the camels and give us instructions: 'Beat, beat, beat. You are slow. Beat,
beat. Otherwise I will beat you.' And we used to beat [the camels]
severely."
The Pakistani government has tried to clamp down on the trafficking. In 2000,
authorities stopped 74 children en route to Dubai. But families willingly go
along. The going rate—$500-$1,000 a child plus $120 a month for the two to
three years a boy usually races—can propel a family out of poverty in a
country where the average annual income is $470.
Yousuf and Suleman were rescued after 16 months. When their father abandoned
the family, their mother was free to protest their sale to Pakistani officials.
Although joyous at the boys' return, the family, which had received a total of
$240 for their labors, remains too poor to give the children an education, their
one hope for a better future. Says their grandfather: "They will become
laborers like me and their father."
In the face of few options, the sad trade continues. Every six months or so,
according to Karachi airport immigration officer Haji Abdul Razzak, the broken
and twisted body of a child jockey arrives back from the Gulf. Haji can't act
without a complaint from a relative, and the $25,000 that accompanies a corpse
buys many a family's silence. "They take the money and bury their
child," says the official. Child smuggler Mohammed Aslam, 26, who was
arrested in Karachi last spring, puts it this way: "We get money, the
parents get money, the children get money. When everybody gets money, why be
sorry?"
Reported by Ghulam Hasnain/Karachi
Fisher Boys
Lured out on the water
By JASON TEDJASUKMANA North Sumatra coast
What exactly is slavery? does it have to last a lifetime, or is a child who
is sold for a set period of time also enslaved? If parents are promised money
for the child's labor, is that a salary or a purchase price? Lured by an agent
with promises of money, 14-year-old Andy Irawan's parents forced him to join a
group of eight other boys living on a jermal, a tennis-court-sized platform of
rotting wood and leaky, rusted roofs 10 km off the north coast of Sumatra in the
Malacca Strait. The boys are promised pay—around $30 at the end of a
three-month stint. But after deductions are made for food, the agent's cut and
other fees and expenses, the boys are left with little or nothing. They are
captives on the jerry-built island. Syahman Purba, who runs a school for former
jermal workers, has no doubt the employment is modern slavery: "These kids
aren't treated like human beings. They're given just enough food so they can
work and won't die."
There are an estimated 250 million child laborers in the world. No one knows
how many are in forced labor like Andy, sold by their parents for weeks or years
to agents who promise salaries that turn out to be inflated, are whittled away
by fictitious expenses or are nonexistent. But for mind-numbing work like
netting fish on a jermal, children are the ideal employees—cheap, docile and
easily cowed. "They said I could go home after three months," Andy
recalls, clutching his right hand still swollen from a sea snake bite. "But
there was no replacement so they said I had to stay."
A working day on a jermal lasts 18 hours and the boys are isolated; their
only contact with the outside world is when operators pick up the catch and drop
off water, rice and instant noodles. Flattened cardboard boxes serve as
mattresses. Mangy dogs defecate on the platform surface where fish are sorted
from the sea snakes and jellyfish. In the past five years, six boys have died at
sea, the victims of accidents and failed escapes. Andy was rescued last July,
one of scores of boys who have been removed from the jermals since the
International Labor Organization began an anti-child-labor program in Indonesia
a year ago. Despite the increased monitoring, employers continue to lie about
children's ages, and working conditions are worsening. Overfishing is causing
stocks of squid and fish to dwindle, which means, says one foreman, a jermal
veteran of 18 years: "We have to work the kids twice as hard as we used
to."
Domestics
A target of fury
By ALEX PERRY
As a separated mother in middle-class New Delhi, Shobha Batra struggled to
make ends meet. She worked as a nurse, helped run the family's kindergarten and
spent hours cleaning, cooking and looking after her six-year-old. She needed
someone to help out, but worried that a man in the house could be dangerous and
a woman might bring home boyfriends. Far better, and cheaper, she decided, to
buy a child.
Finding one wasn't difficult. She met Babita through a friend who had
employed the child's mother. Babita's father, Parikshit, was happy to let her
leave the family of eight's slum home for a few dollars and the offer of free
clothes, food and board. The 10-year-old's mother, Janaki, was glad she would be
going to school. "Batra said she would love my daughter like her own,"
says Janaki.
Hundreds of young girls are brought from distant villages in rural India—or
taken from nearby slums—to work as maids in private homes each year. The
children see no money: what little there is, their families claim. Walled off
from the outside world, they are especially vulnerable to physical and sexual
abuse.
Three months after Babita's departure, her 14-year-old brother, Shekhar,
watched Batra pull up outside the house in an auto-rickshaw, walk Babita to a
bench, sit her down and leave. "I thought Babita had come home for a
visit," says Shekhar. But when he walked over, he found Babita slumped,
barely conscious. The right side of her head was so swollen it hung over her
ear. Her body was covered in nail scratches and bruises. Her thumb was broken.
Shekhar ran to fetch his mother, and they rushed Babita to a hospital, where a
doctor diagnosed a severe concussion. Then, gathering a furious crowd of
neighbors, the family went to the police. Faced with an angry mob, Batra and her
brother were arrested after eyewitnesses confirmed that the child was abused and
overworked, forced to do the cleaning for the household and kindergarten. If the
little girl complained, she got a thrashing.
Out on bail after two weeks in prison and awaiting trial, Batra is distressed
by her position, insisting she is innocent and that she was framed by jealous
neighbors. "My life is over," she sobs. "People will always know
I have been to jail. Now my husband will definitely ask for a divorce. Who could
have thought these poor people, living in a slum, would have dared to file
charges against us?" The accusations against her, of violent fits of fury
directed against Babita, have ignited a controversy over the use of child
servants. "This is modern slavery," says Kailash Satyarthi of the Save
Childhood Movement, "It's a fallout of the expanding middle class where
working couples need reliable servants." Too many of whom view
children—in their powerlessness—as the no-risk option. All the risk is taken
by the children. Parikshit, meanwhile, is looking for another employer for his
daughter.
Reported by Meenakshi Ganguly/New Delhi
Conscripts
Soldiers of misfortune
By ALEX PERRY
For years, sein win's job in the burmese army was to guard citizens who had
been forced into hard labor, building the nation's roads, railways, helipads and
barracks. "We threatened them with guns to make them work," says Sein
Win, now 20, who recently deserted from the military. "No soldier would
dare be kind to the villagers because the officers would beat us if we showed
them any mercy."
Burma has long been a pariah state—a target of human rights activists
worldwide after the military junta slaughtered democracy protesters in 1988 and
voided the 1990 election. Increasingly isolated economically, the regime has
dramatically expanded its reliance on forced civilian labor for infrastructure
and revenue-generating projects. By 1996 an estimated 3% of Burma's GDP was the
fruit of conscripted gangs. In an additional, cruel twist, many of the soldiers
themselves—part of a mobilization that expanded the army from 185,000 troops
to nearly half a million today—were little more than child slaves. Sein Win
was press-ganged into service at age 12. He wasn't allowed to contact his family
and never once was granted leave. When he initially tried to escape, he was
roughed up. "Soldiers in my battalion were beaten every day," he says.
Kyaw Aung, who was kidnapped by the military at age 14, says his company once
tied a Karen elder suspected of being a rebel sympathizer to a post. His
sergeant ordered Kyaw Aung to gut the prisoner from neck to groin. "I had
no choice," says Kyaw Aung, another recent deserter. "If I hadn't done
it, the sergeant would have had the other soldiers tie me up and cut me
open."
Such abuses continue to haunt the lives of both victims and those forced to
persecute them. Says Sein Win: "I have nightmares about what we have
done."
Reported by Robert Horn/Karen state, Burma
Related Links
For more information, or to find out how you can help,
visit one of the sites below
Anti-Slavery
Today's Fight for Tomorrow's Freedom
www.antislavery.org
Anti-Slavery was set up in 1839 with the specific objective of ending slavery
throughout the world.
Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers
More than 300,000 children under 18 are fighting in armed conflicts in more
than thirty countries worldwide
www.child-soldiers.org
The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers was formed in June 1998 to
advocate for the adoption of, and adherence to, national, regional and
international legal standards (including an Optional Protocol to the Convention
on the Rights of the Child) prohibiting the military recruitment and use in
hostilities of any person younger than eighteen years of age; and the
recognition and enforcement of this standard by all armed forces and armed
groups, both governmental and non-governmental.
Global March Against Child Labour
Giving every child a chance to live and grow without the burden of
exploitative work
globalmarch.org
Millions of child labourers around the world live a life of servitude. Get
involved in its elimination!
Human Rights Watch
Defending Human Rights Worldwide
www.hrw.org
Children around the world suffer appalling abuses. Too often, street children
are killed or tortured by police. Children as young as seven or eight are
recruited or kidnapped to serve as soldiers in military forces. Sometimes as
young as six-years-old, they are forced to work under extremely difficult
conditions, often as bonded laborers or in forced prostitution. They are
imprisoned in inhumane conditions.
Amnesty International - Child Soldiers
The Campaign to Stop Child Soldiers
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/childrights/soldier.htm
Children are forcibly abducted to fight in adult wars. Thousands more are
enrolled into the armed forces and could be made to fight at any time. The
recruitment of children under the age of 18 is a world-wide problem. They are
often systematically brutalised and have their childhood stolen from them as
they are often forced to participate in, or witness atrocities
The international community has become increasingly concerned about the
devastating problem of child soldiers. Over 300,000 children and young people
around the world are soldiers. The 10th anniversary of the UN Convention on the
Rights of the Child in November provides an opportunity to put an end to this
practice of using children and young people as soldiers.
United Nation's Children's Fund
Changing the world with children
www.unicef.org
Created by the United Nations General Assembly in 1946 to help children after
World War II in Europe, UNICEF was first known as the United Nations
International Children's Emergency Fund. In 1953, UNICEF became a permanent part
of the United Nations system, its task being to help children living in poverty
in developing countries. Its name was shortened to the United Nations Children's
Fund, but it retained the acronym "UNICEF," by which it is known to
this day.