MTV Exit : Intersection!

This week for Elf Club, we watched the animation about the trafficking problem. And talking about how to protect themself and taking care of others.

MTV Exit Short Film

We partnered with MTV Exit a few months ago for an event. They have recently produced an anime-style short film that we will be using to show students the dangers of trafficking but in a relevant, engaging format. I encourage you to watch it here. There are both English and Thai versions.

call and response

check out the trailer here for a movie about artists coming together to fight the problem of human slavery.

Good news

UNIAP granted 130,000 Euros to tackle human trafficking in Thailand and Cambodia.

Trafficking in Iraq

Unfortunately, trafficking is a common occurrence in almost every country in the world. Due to instability and economic collapse, Iraq has seen a recent increase in sex trafficking as well. This Time magazine article reminds us at ELF that there are people like Hinda we can partner with all over the world:

"She goes by "Hinda," but that's not her real name. That's what she's called by the many Iraqi sex traffickers and pimps who contact her several times a week from across the country. They think she is one of them, a peddler of sexual slaves. Little do they know that the stocky, auburn-haired woman is an undercover human rights activist who has been quietly mapping out their murky underworld since 2006.

That underworld is a place where nefarious female pimps hold sway, where impoverished mothers sell their teenage daughters into a sex market that believes females who reach the age of 20 are too old to fetch a good price. The youngest victims, some just 11 and 12, are sold for as much as $30,000, others for as little as $2,000. "The buying and selling of girls in Iraq, it's like the trade in cattle," Hinda says. "I've seen mothers haggle with agents over the price of their daughters..."
Nobody knows exactly how many Iraqi women and children have been sold into sexual slavery since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, and there are no official numbers because of the shadowy nature of the business. Baghdad-based activists like Hinda and others put the number in the tens of thousands. Still, it remains a hidden crime; one that the 2008 US State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report says the Iraqi government is not combating. Baghdad, the report says, "offers no protection services to victims of trafficking, reported no efforts to prevent trafficking in persons and does not acknowledge trafficking to be a problem in the country.""

photo from time.com

The problem part III

ELF was founded as an anti-trafficking, pro-education foundation. But things have changed in the last decade. Few girls are actually trafficked from Phayao. This sounds like great news, but the problem is now that many girls are now going to work in dance clubs and brothels willingly as a way out of their lives of poverty and little opportunity. So now the problem is we have to present girls with the CHOICE to go to school, the choice to get a decent job and hope they take it.

Additionally, many of the girls in our programs are the daughters of prostitutes. Some of the women who went to work in brothels a decade ago have returned home (prostitutes cannot work for very long) and had children. The sad fact is many of these women have contracted HIV and already died from the disease, leaving their children, some of the HIV positive, to fend for themselves. We are now facing a second generation of children affected by the tragedy that of the sex trade. What seems like a good way to make an income is really a way to enslave generations to the cycles of disease and poverty. Prostitution is not a way out of poverty. It's a way to make sure that your children will be poor and suffer as well.

The problem, part II

Unfortunately, there are many stories to be told about the problems of sex trafficking and sex workers in Southeast Asia.

Nick Kristof wrote a couple of articles on the work of the Somaly Mam foundation in Cambodia trying to rehabilitate girls sold into prostitution. In this article, he explains how girls forced into prostitution are electrocuted and beaten to be coerced into entertaining customers. In another heartbreaking article, he explains the problem of sex trade as modern day slavery:

"Pross was 13 and hadn’t even had her first period when a young woman kidnapped her and sold her to a brothel in Phnom Penh. The brothel owner, a woman as is typical, beat Pross and tortured her with electric current until finally the girl acquiesced.

She was kept locked deep inside the brothel, her hands tied behind her back at all times except when with customers.

Brothel owners can charge large sums for sex with a virgin, and like many girls, Pross was painfully stitched up so she could be resold as a virgin. In all, the brothel owner sold her virginity four times."

In a seemingly unrelated article about prostitution during the Korean War, I was reminded that the sex trade in Asia/Southeast Asia exploded during the World War II/Vietnam/Korean War era due to the scores of American men on Asian soil. Before we are ever tempted to look as Westerners upon the Asian sex trade as an Asian problem, we must remember that it was the Western and American presence here that made the sex trade so profitable. Thailand's sex trade in particular is tied to the presence of troops here during the Vietnam War. There are echoes of that still today as you walk the streets of Bangkok and see old white men holding hands with young, impossibly small girls.

The problem of the sex trade here was created by people, encouraged by governments and the responsibility is on all of them, all of us to make it right.

The problem

ELF was founded 10 years ago to counteract the problem of girls being trafficked from Phayao Province in Northern Thailand to become sex workers in and around Bangkok. "Trafficked" is a convenient political buzzword that, in this instance, to the girls of Phayao, really means being forced or coerced into leaving home and being exploited for the purposes of commercial sex. The idea for ELF began when Michael, the founder, was visiting Phayao and saw a van of girls leave for Bangkok for "work." Suspicious of the intent, he frantically followed the van the whole way from Phayao to Bangkok (9 hours), calling policemen and politicians. When they arrived in Bangkok, to Michael's dismay, all of the girls stayed with the woman they called their auntie because they had been told to obey her and she would take care of them. Michael knew that these girls were headed for a life they could not imagine, one that would lead to violence, disease and possibly death.

Girls or parents may be tricked into thinking the work they're going to will be house or factory work. Other times the parents know full well the life they are selling their daughter into. Parents or guardians who sell their daughters receive money upfront and can also earn a monthly income, which has proven to be an enticing prospect for poor families with little education. Girls are seen as commodities. Whatever the situation is, we at ELF believe girls should never be sold. Michael founded ELF to keep girls in school and protect them from trafficking because he believes, he knows, that these girls can be so much more, and are worth so much more than the price traffickers are willing to pay.

The SOLD Project has put together a beautiful movie explaining the problem in Thailand best. Here's the trailer: