The Sangha and the Thai Sex Industry
Monique Beadle Tuesday, 26 August 2003
In the wake of years of research in Thailand and other countries such as India, Cambodia, and Eastern Europe, U.S. policy makers pushed the 2000 U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act through Congress. As a result, the State Department set up the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, a body that publishes the annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, ranking countries on a 3-tier scale indicating their efforts (or lack thereof) to stem the problem. The figures that emerged from Thailand's initial placement on the second tier of the TIP Report are alarming: Some 600,000 Thai women are known prostitutes (this in a nation whose total population is only 60 million). Approximately 40% of these women have been forced into the trade or are too young to provide informed consent. Conservative estimates on the prostitution industry's contribution to the Thai economy come in at the cool ring of $12 billion to $15 billion per year—between 2.9% and 3.6% of Thailand's total GDP of $410 billion.
Upon the first publication of the report, much of Thailand's governmental leadership (Parliament and the monarchy) belatedly snapped to attention in the face of clear, irrefutable evidence of a problem they could no longer neglect. Tragically, the same cannot be said of Thailand's religious leadership, the Sangha—Thailand's state-funded and highly influential order of Buddhist monks.
Parliament pointed fingers at the lack of appropriate legislation and law enforcement, as well as the enormity of their country's corruption problem. Though the majority of today's brothel-busts are criticized as symbolic, face-saving measures, honest enforcement officials have made headway with a number of arrests and convictions of brothel owners and customers. Efforts are now underway to beef up security at the porous Thai-Burmese border through which drug lords and corrupt police shuttle hundreds of thousands of girls each year. (It remains to be seen whether placing more cops on the border will diminish the trade or simply increase the bribes required to get girls over the border.) The monarchy, too, led by King Bhumibol Adulyadej, has evidenced concern for the growing problem of sex trafficking by financing and founding many foundations and educational initiatives aimed at prevention.
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But the response of the Sangha has been disappointing at best. And more's the pity, because Thai Buddhism's role in the justification and perpetuation of sex trafficking as a national industry is arguably the most dangerously underestimated factor in a complex web of social and political realities contributing to the growing problem. So far, no coordinated effort to address the victimization and exploitation of women in Thai society through the prostitution industry has emerged from Thai Buddhism's halls of wisdom.
Thai Buddhist monks, housed in temples at the center of each of Thailand's 32,000 villages, insure the presence of religious leadership in even the smallest villages. Contrary to conventional theories of development, Thailand has not welcomed modernity's alleged bedfellow, secularism. Thus, Buddhism as a religious and cultural institution still wields considerable influence in Thai society.
During a four-month stay in Chiang Mai and the hills of Northern Thailand [1], I was personally exposed to the myriad of social norms and cultural institutions in Thai society that continue relegating Thai women to their position as second-class citizens. At least once a week, in response to inquiries I made based on my observations, men and women alike repeated the mantra, "women are the hind legs of the elephant." As my Thai language skills improved and the acculturation process accelerated, I became further convinced that this statement is a mere embodiment of the many subtle messages absorbed by Thai women beginning in their early childhood, and shaping them through adolescence and adulthood—constant reminders that they are inferior to men. Thai culture has a woman washing dishes to support her brother's education when she is young, and wishing for rebirth as a man when she is old.
Watching their parents toil year after year in the rice fields inculcates most Thai children with a sense of indebtedness to their parents. To repay this debt, nearly every young Thai boy will be ordained as a Buddhist monk in his village temple. This is not an option open to Thai women, at any age. At present, the only religious role for a Thai woman is characterized by subservience: upon the death of her husband she will put on the white robes of a nun, spending the remainder of her life sweeping the temple grounds, maintaining the monks' living quarters, and preparing their meals. Because women cannot don the robes of a monk, a boy's ordination earns merit for his mother to apply toward her next life. If she is especially devout, she may have the privilege of rebirth as a man! While most boys remain in the temple for a period as short as three days, many choose to complete their theological and practical education as novice monks.
Once a boy has entered the Sangha as a novice monk, he is no longer allowed to touch a woman—not his mother, his sister, or his friends. Even the most innocent of handshakes is forbidden. Rooted in the Buddha's doctrine of 'detachment,' this practice has devolved into a reinforcement of the perception that women are somehow contaminating. This 'touching taboo' now serves to further alienate women from monks, turning them into suspicious Others.
The leap for a woman from the role of an inferior, contaminating, lust-inducing Other to that of a prostitute is not a large one. Because Buddhism as a national religion is so intricately wound up in Thai culture, social values such as the detachment of a monk from all material objects are easily perverted to serve the aims of those who seek to profit (or gain pleasure) from women's subordinate status.
If it were not enough that women growing up in Thailand are convinced that the only power they claim is that of their sexuality, Thai men, too, succumb to gross misperceptions about women and prostitution. Surveys of young men, military officers, and university students reveal that a gross majority (estimates range from 60% to 97%) of Thai men either lost their virginity to a prostitute or continue visiting prostitutes on a regular basis. For the majority of adolescent boys, their initiation into adulthood begins with a night of carousing and drinking with their buddies, and ends in the bed of a prostitute. As Kevin Bales, President of Free the Slaves, explains:
Businessmen in negotiations will provide or expect sex as part of the bargaining process ... Men who travel on business are also more likely to use prostitutes ... Even first-year university students will be taken en masse to brothels in their first week as part of initiation by upperclassmen. All of this behavior is made easier by the assumption that men are not responsible when they are drunk ... an opened whiskey bottle can never be resealed.[2]
Many Thai women have come to expect their husbands will visit prostitutes and even prefer such licentious behavior to an adulterous affair (or the risk that he will take on a mia noi, a minor wife). Since prostitution in Thailand acts as just another showpiece in the rapidly blooming free-market society, many men erroneously believe that visiting a prostitute is not considered adultery within Buddhist morality. Because Thai men consider the prostitute just another commodity to be bought and sold, their nighttime activities are never questioned and are usually ignored. The old adage, "Boys will be boys," seems to hold true even on the other side of the world.
As men continue providing ample demand to fuel the prostitution sector of the underground economy, Thai women continue to suffer from a lack of viable employment alternatives in other sectors. Jobs available to most rural Thai girls are limited to dishwashing in a noodle shop, hairdressing, and waitressing. While their brothers enter the economically 'non-productive' Sangha on their way through college, girls are effectively cut off from educational opportunities once they graduate from sixth or ninth grade—the end of their compulsory education. Due to the great symbolic debt owed to their parents, they are frequently tempted to abandon the dim prospects of their rural villages in search of the fortunes to be won in Thailand's cities (Chiang Mai or Bangkok). Despite Thailand's aggressive industrial development, prostitution is still more profitable than factory labor. To this day, Thai girls fresh out of the sixth grade constitute a great proportion of the mass exodus to the cities. Many leave for the cities to work in factories or restaurants, only to find themselves in the hands of brothel owners.
Once she has sold herself (or been sold) into the brothel, a woman may initially resist the perpetual assaults on her dignity perpetrated by her owners, pimps, and customers; eventually, however, her sense of karma will lead her to become emotionally resigned to her fate. Bales vividly summarizes this fatalistic mentality: "The terrible things that happen to a person are, after all, of an individual's own making, recompense for the sins of this life or previous lives."[3] She may find solace in the fact that she can now provide for her family, earning her merit toward her next life. If a woman—forced into prostitution by coercion or circumstance—falls prey to this line of reasoning, she will accept her circumstances quietly, hoping to one day attain tranquility. She may eventually take pride in the attention her beauty brings her and the high prices she can extract for her services. If she remains in the trade long enough without contracting HIV/AIDS, she will become adept at manipulating her customers to suit her whims. For a brief period, she will enjoy relative independence—but only until she contracts a fatal STD or ages beyond her perceived usefulness. Many a prostitute has been encouraged by her local Buddhist monk to simply live out her life as a prostitute with the greatest degree of moral fortitude possible and to contribute a portion of her earnings to the local temple—consequently, elaborate temples and stupas are being funded in part by the country's largest underground economy.
These social norms have an equally powerful impact on the women trafficked into Thai cities from the hilltribes, Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. As men, women, monks and laity alike all turn their faces away from their plight, trafficking victims succumb to hopelessness and lean on their conceptions of karma and destiny in order to make sense of their situation. Men and women in Thai society, conditioned from the cradle to accept the inferiority of women and the irresponsibility of men, accept police corruption with a shrug of the shoulders and the exploitation of women with a downcast gaze. In the Theravada tradition of Buddhism, one's primary objective is to make merit and attain enlightenment for oneself, rather than looking out for the needs of others. "To look too closely into someone else's affairs," Bales rightly notes, "is a serious affront to Thai culture: 'mind your own business' (yaa suek) is one of the strongest retorts in the Thai language."[4] Rather than proactively addressing the forces that rob their daughters and sisters of dignity, the vast majority of Thai society stands paralyzed by its twisted interpretation of Buddhist moral principles.
As long as the majority of Thai society—including its shepherds, the Sangha—sits on its hands, not only do the efforts of Thailand's parliament and royal family fall flat, the Buddha's rich teachings on compassion and loving kindness are soundly ignored. The involvement of the Sangha is necessary if efforts to cut off the supply of prostitutes and reduce the demand of customers are to be effective. Christian missionaries, too, whose message has been well-received only by the marginalized and culturally distinct hilltribe peoples, could coordinate their resources and expertise with the Sangha's cultural influence to address these pervasive social structures.
Christian missionaries, NGO's, and Thai monks could model their efforts on the UNICEF funded Sangha Metta Project, which has successfully educated and mobilized monks in HIV/AIDS prevention and care. In line with their traditional role as teachers, monks could inform parents of the dangers of sending their daughters to work in the cities, while deconstructing the deceptively glamorous image of the sex worker in the minds of young girls. Utilizing their status as the voice of wisdom in their communities, Thai monks could expound on the negative karma accumulated by visiting prostitutes. Acting in their own self-interest, then, Thai men would have one less incentive for visiting the nearest red-light district once the sun has set. Additionally, Thai women, now empowered to protest when their husbands use or sell prostitutes, would cause the sex industry's customers to lose face in their local communities. Shame, in Thai society, is a powerful mechanism for social control.
If the Sangha were to engage in a coordinated endeavor to address the problem of sex trafficking, the potential impact would be dramatic. A grassroots effort supported by Christians and led by saffron-robed holy men could forge the final link in the chain of social actors looking out for the welfare of Thailand's women and children.
1. January through April of 2003, the author studied Thai language and culture, completed an internship with the International Justice Mission, and conducted research on the economic history of the Karen, a tribal minority group in the hills of Northern Thailand.
2. Bales, Kevin. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. University of California Press. 1999. p. 47.
3. Ibid., p. 39.
4. Ibid., p. 50.