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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




JONATHAN TAYLOR FOR TIME

Across Asia, tens of thousands of children are being sold into prostitution or hard labor

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.