Sex Trade in Thailand Supported By Westerners

The red light district in South Pattaya, Thailand.

Photo: Getty Images
[From article]
Grimy, neon-splashed Walking Street, populated largely by young hookers and pie-eyed Western men, is the main attraction of a Thai beach town called Pattaya. Sex for hire there was most certainly what drew Ben Bartanyi, the 49-year-old American real estate broker recently arrested for allegedly performing a sex act on a 20-year-old dancer in one of Pattaya’s many strip clubs as other patrons cheered him on.
Some people may have been surprised by the outrageousness of it all. I wasn’t. Ten years ago I visited Thailand to do a story on the commercial sex trade there. By all accounts, nothing has changed.

[. . .]

Small stages inside teem with nude or bikini-clad women who are there for the taking — so much so that they have numbers pinned to their skimpy tops or G-string bottoms. These numerical designations make it easy for customers to call them and take them out for cheap sex.
[. . .]
It was a raunchy scene where women were readily available. Most of them came from the poor northern part of Thailand. They moved to Pattaya or Bangkok to earn money to send back home. As one girl wearing a skin-tight knock-off T-shirt that read J’Adore Dior, explained to me, “I need to make money for family. They grow rice and raise buffalo, but they are very poor. They need money for tools. You can get very hungry in Isan [the northern, rural region from which she comes].”
Of course, many of the naive family members thought their daughters and sisters were working in the big cities’ department stores. Surely, family members would be horrified to know what comes with making the money they receive.
[. . .]
These days the girls earn as little as $28 per hour. It’s a pittance for the work involved, but a lot more than the $10 per day that they could make with factory jobs at home. Still, they sacrifice a lot by being in Thailand’s sex trade, where diseases run rampant (according to one 2007 study in the International Journal of STD of AIDS up to 20 percent of Thai working girls are HIV positive) and drugs can be the only thing that gets the girls through shifts.
“I have few friends and no life outside of work,” a Bangkok bar-girl told me, standing on the fringe of Nana Entertainment Plaza, a three-story mall of sorts, where hundreds of prostitutes work out of strip clubs with names such as Play School and Bottoms Up. “It is bad what I do, and I cannot have a Thai man. Now I look for farang [Thai slang for Westerners] to support me. Someday I will be a good person.”
[. . .]
As the Thai government seems to turn a mostly blind eye to the trade, — it’s not technically legal but it is widely tolerated — the beat goes on. Westerners keep coming for the thrills they can’t afford at home, and Thai women who are caught up in the sex biz grimly endure.
“I miss my family, my baby girl,” a young mother, six months into the trade, told me and started to sob. “This is not the life for me. It’s a bad life.”

http://nypost.com/2016/04/24/inside-the-thai-sex-scene-where-women-are-sold-like-meat/

Inside the Thai sex scene — where women are sold like meat
By Michael Kaplan
New York Post
April 24, 2016 | 7:20am

Massachusetts Attorney General Wants To Stop Online Ads For Prostitution, and Exploitation of Women

The U.S. Court Judge protects advertisements on Backpage due to the law that Congress wrote. Why is that law being enforced according to the way it was written? The Supreme Court of The United States interprets laws, rewrites them, and adds to them as desired by the White House. The previous Attorney General enforced laws selectively and ignored inconvenient laws. Who decides which laws will be strictly enforced, which ones can be changed according to desires, and which laws should be ignored altogether like the immigration laws? Why are low level street dealers being hauled into court every day, provided taxpayer attorneys, translators, and accommodations, while corporations, and wealthy and influential celebrities can avoid accountability? The President regularly shows his disdain for law, for Congress and for the Courts. Why should anyone pay attention to what judges or prosecutors say? 

AG Healey says, "That federal law protects websites when a third party produces the offending content. That law — and other constitutional defenses — have kept Backpage out of trouble.
Healey acknowledged the problem, but said the law is outdated." There are several areas where the law is years behind. Technology is one. How many new devices are being used to abuse, to control, to steal from civilians by criminals, while the law has no knowledge or means to protect them? Even when some legislatures wrote laws protecting citizens, the state provides no training and/or no funding for technology to counter the new devices being used. Only when millions are stolen from banks do spineless politicians notice.   

[From article]
An escort was killed in a Burlington hotel, children have vanished, and yet men seeking prostitutes can still set up a rendezvous with minors with a 
couple of clicks.
It all could have been avoided if Backpage had simply removed its “adults section,” according to Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey. The site’s sexual advertisements have gone 
unchecked because federal 
law shields Backpage from 
prosecution.
So Healey is attacking in one of the few places Backpage is vulnerable — the court of public opinion.
“Behind every posting on that site is someone’s mother, sister or daughter. So many of them are dealing with serious addiction issues and they’re being kept there by pimps and traffickers,” Healey told me yesterday. “We need to get after the Johns and the pimps, but we also need companies like Backpage to stop being part of the problem.”
Healey is calling on the classified ad site to follow Craigslist and take down its sex trade ads. Her predecessor, Martha Coakley, played a key role in forcing Craigslist’s hand and also took aim at Backpage in 2011.
But unlike Craigslist, Backpage has continued to fight. The site had laws thrown out in Washington state, Tennessee and New Jersey that would have held it criminally liable for its ads. It also recently won a local federal case involving women who said “they were molested and repeatedly raped after being advertised as sexual wares” on Backpage.
U.S. District Court Judge Richard Sterns dismissed the case in May, citing the Communications Decency Act, and wrote, “Putting aside the moral judgment that one might pass on Backpage’s business practices, this court has no choice but to adhere to the law that Congress has seen fit to enact.”

http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2015/07/mcgovern_maura_healey_hopes_to_change_law_that_protects_backpage

McGovern: Maura Healey hopes to change law that protects Backpage site
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
By: Bob McGovern

Boston Herald

Sex Trafficking Victim Speaks Out About Super Bowl

[From article]
And every year, as if on cue, the city hosting the Super Bowl announces an awareness campaign to combat sex trafficking around what many in the media have referred to as “the biggest weekend for U.S. prostitution.” For example, Scottsdale announced a billboard campaign earlier this month, and the Phoenix police department recently revised its policy concerning prostitution.
[. . .]
I am a victim of the sex-trafficking industry. I was trafficked for more than a decade in Minneapolis, Hawaii and Las Vegas. Based on my experience I can tell you that the Super Bowl is just another weekend for the hundreds of thousands of sex-trafficking victims in the United States.
That’s what it was when I was a sex-trafficked call girl in Las Vegas. The escort agency I worked for expected me to go on as many calls as I could fit in a 12-hour period, from 8 in the evening to 8 the following morning.
I would see between 10-30 different men a night. It didn’t matter how tired I was or how much money I made, I had to be loyal my entire shift for the entire weekend, or face a fine of $1,500. When I finally got home, as soon as I walked in the door, my pimp took 100% of my earnings.
Never mind that the tricks (the men that paid for sex) thought I was enjoying myself. Never mind they thought I was making great money, paying my way through college.
When you live in fear of the next beat-down (I was physically beaten more times than I can count by my pimp and by tricks), this is what you must do to survive. Pretend you are someone else. When I began my time as a prostitute, I chose the name “Fallen” for my fake ID. I was no longer the Annie I knew and recognized; I was “Fallen”—a victim of high-class sex trafficking.
[. . .]
* Sex trafficking is a $32 billion a year industry in the U.S., victimizing between 300,000 and 400,000 American children every year according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
* Globally, the International Labor Organization estimates that there are 4.5 million people trapped in forced exploitation.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/01/30/sex-trafficking-survivor-truth-about-super-bowl-and-sex/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+foxnews%2Fmost-popular+%28Internal+-+Most+Popular+Content%29

Sex-trafficking survivor: The truth about Super Bowl and sex
By Annie Lobert

Published January 30, 2015

FoxNews.com

Woman Sold Into Porn By Parents Works To Heal, Educate

[From article]
One of Raven Kaliana’s earliest memories is being taken to a family portrait studio by her parents, at around the age of four. The studio was in the basement of a department store in a town 50 miles from their home. Once there, they waited for another couple to arrive with their child.
‘Would you like to have your picture taken with this cute little boy?’ her mother asked, before the parents left the kids with the photographer and retired to the café upstairs. But while they sat eating ice cream, the images being made in the studio down below were far from happy family portraits. Raven and her companion had just been sold into the child abuse industry.
It was to be the beginning of a 15-year ordeal, which saw Raven regularly trafficked by her parents and other members of an organised crime ring from her home in a middle-class suburb in the American northwest to locations all over the US and abroad. In her teens, the crimes were often perpetrated in Los Angeles, where many film studios provided ample opportunity for the underground child abuse industry in the 1970s and 80s.
[. . .]
Her adult life has been driven by the belief that it is important for survivors of child sexual exploitation to tell their stories, in order to make people realise that these aren’t crimes that happen ‘to someone else’.
[. . .]
A shocking aspect of Hooray for Hollywood is the banality of the adults’ talk, as they rationalise the choice they have made to sell their children from the cosy confines of a café. They appear to be ordinary people, struggling a little to make ends meet; not monsters, but people who might be your neighbours.
‘You hear about a perpetrator being processed in a certain way, you hear about the police getting hold of the images, but you don’t hear about the reality for the children in those images. How did they come to be in this situation? And how have they been damaged by what happened?’
[. . .]
Through her organisation Outspiral, Raven has launched a campaign to raise awareness of sex trafficking and familial abuse.
[. . .]
The biggest challenge, she says, is getting the bystanders in the child’s life – neighbours, relatives, teachers, care workers, counsellors – to consider the possibility that a child might be a victim of this form of abuse.
[. . .]
The most common way that offenders found their victims was through family and personal relationships.
[. . .]
From an early age she began to experience dissociative amnesia – a psychological phenomenon common in victims of inescapable trauma, in which painful experiences are blocked out, leading to gaps in memory. ‘I started putting things into little rooms in my mind, and it was like: “OK, we don’t look in that room,”’ she says. ‘When there’s no one stepping in to save you and it’s clear you’re going to have to endure something, your mind just does that. As a child, dissociation is a survival advantage, but in adulthood it can become a disability.’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2568706/My-parents-sold-sex-industry.html

'My parents sold me into the sex industry': One woman's campaign to raise awareness of this darkest of taboos
By NUALA CALVI
Daily Mail (UK)
PUBLISHED: 19:01 EST, 1 March 2014 | UPDATED: 17:25 EST, 2 March 2014

Sex Trade Boom at Climate Conference


http://politiken.dk/newsinenglish/article719339.ece

News in English
27 May 2009 kl. 09:33
Climate conference sex boom
Copenhagen’s sex trade did brisk business during the recent business climate conference.
Politiken Denmark