By Bruce Bower. September 19, at am. For people concerned with child welfare and human rights, the rural villages of northern Thailand loom as a heart of darkness. National policies on land ownership have led to the demise of many family farms in this agricultural area during the past 30 years, so northern Thais have increasingly trekked far from home in search of jobs.
A well-publicized and shocking aspect of this phenomenon has been the massive trafficking of Thai women and girls from the north in the sex industry of Bangkok and of cities in richer Asian nations. The U. The Protection Project, a human rights research institute in Washington, D.
Anti-prostitution programs in northern Thailand—a farming region without a major city—now focus on promoting better schooling for girls and teaching vocational skills to villagers. Enter Lisa Rende Taylor. An anthropologist at the Asia Foundation, a nonprofit policy-and-research organization headquartered in San Francisco, Rende Taylor directed a month study of child labor, prostitution, and sex trafficking in two northern Thai villages.
Daughters from both poor and relatively well-off families become prostitutes in roughly equal proportions, she finds. Moreover, some girls who complete primary or even secondary levels of education also enter the sex trade. That obligation stands even if the parents own farmland and make a decent living. In landowning families, middle-born daughters are the most likely to become prostitutes. First-born girls typically stay at home to assist their parents in daily tasks and thus rarely enter the sex trade.
Thanks to the labor of their older sisters, last-born girls typically receive more schooling than their sisters. They work to recoup education costs and strengthen family finances, Rende Taylor says.
