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Crisis-hit Laos wrestles with child-trafficking problem
Asian Political News, Jan 31, 2000
BANGKOK, Jan. 26 Kyodo
Trafficking of children from Laos to Thailand for commercial labor and sexual exploitation is increasing despite measures being taken to reverse the trend, according to a Lao government report presented Wednesday at a U.N.-sponsored conference on child rights in Southeast Asia.
An alarming number of children from rural areas are migrating to work in nightclubs, hotels and restaurants in Vientiane, the Lao capital, as well as other towns along the Mekong River dividing Laos from Thailand, said the report, released on the opening day of a three-day meeting in Bangkok.
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Thousands of Lao youths illegally migrate to Thailand every year, with traffickers and their agents luring young boys and girls living in villages along the river across it with promises of high-paying jobs, it said.
"The children are then forced to work without pay as factory workers, as servants in private homes, and as waitresses in restaurants and nightclubs in order to 'repay their debts or fees'," the report said.
"Some children have to do hard labor without rest and are frequently beaten by their 'owners'."
In some cases, traffickers pay parents as much as two years in advance for the right to take their daughters to work in factories in Thailand. Some girls are then raped and "lured into prostitution," it said.
Clients of prostitutes are known to be "particularly fond of young Lao girls due to the misguided belief that they are less likely to have AIDS," the report said.
Although living conditions have improved over the years, land-locked and sparsely populated Laos remains one of the world's least developed countries.
Almost half of its predominantly rural people live in sheer poverty, and are threatened by disease and malnutrition, suffering a high mortality rate.
Victims of prostitution "are sometimes victimized twice by the legal process" when arrested in Thailand as illegal immigrants, the report said, adding that many of those captured "can disappear without a trace."
It cited a 1997 case in which three young Lao female suspects were detained in Thailand's Rayong Province in the same cell with male criminals who gang-raped them for three consecutive days. "None of the offenders was prosecuted for rape," it said.
As to the root of the problem, the report said some Laos parents in rural areas do not adequately care for their children, requiring them to work in the fields or elsewhere to support the family rather than go to school.
"This leads the children to (have a) low educational level, lack of vocational skills, low self-esteem and eventually poverty, making them economically vulnerable to the traffickers and crime syndicates," it said.
The attractiveness of earning money while seeing and experiencing the modern 'wonders' of Thailand is undoubtedly a pull factor, the report said, noting that "most Laotian children said that they really wanted to see the city lights in Thailand and this drove them to look for a job in Bangkok."
The report said new programs are being developed with international assistance to help Laos curb commercial and sexual exploitation of children across its borders. It said education, both formal and informal, is seen as a major prevention strategy. Laos has signed bilateral cross-border treaties to combat trafficking in women and children with all of its five neighbors except Thailand, which the report said "happens to have a significant share of trafficking in women in the region."
"The Lao People's Democratic Republic is a poor developing country and does not have the resources to effectively suppress such international trafficking," it said, adding that keeping close surveillance of the 1,730-kilometer border with Thailand to prevent illegal border crossing is "challenging."
The daunting problems still confronting the Lao economy in the wake of the Asian economic crisis have also contributed to the trafficking problem, the report said.
It said encouraging villagers not to migrate to the cities and to Thailand will continue to be difficult as long as jobs are unavailable for them near their local villages.
"The creation of meaningful employment is very important and a major challenge in the current global investment climate," it said.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Kyodo News International, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
