How I Bought Two Slaves, To Free Them

By Alex Perry/Mae Sai

Mama San won't budge from $1,000. There's the food she's paid for, the clothes, the makeup and the condoms, not to mention the middlemen's fees. At $1,000, she says, she is making nothing. She taps out the figure in Thai baht on a calculator and holds it up: 43,650. You won't get a pair of 14-year-old Burmese girls for less in this town.

"Thirty thousand," I suggest.

"Forty-three," answers Mama San. She tells Tip and Lek to fetch their chips. The two tiny figures squatting at her feet jump up, run upstairs and return clutching gambling counters. "What the customers paid," explains Mama San. In the three months since Lek was brought to this back-street brothel in the northern Thai town of Mae Sai, she has collected eight white chips and four blues--equal to $59.50. Tip has done better: her chips add up to $163. "Not a bad little earner," says Mama San.

"Thirty-five thousand?"

Mama San sighs. Conveniently ignoring her silver Mercedes parked outside, she says she makes nothing from prostitution. She is in it because she cares. She takes the girls in, puts a roof over their heads. "What can I do? Somebody has to protect them." Her conscience will not let the two girls go for anything less than 41,500 baht.

"Forty-one thousand?"

Done. We shake hands. Tip and Lek have been sold. Again. This time to Jonathan, the photographer working on this story, and me. Mama San is not worried about finding replacements. "Their mothers or the middlemen bring them to me," she says. "There are always fresh ones."

According to the International Labor Organization, at least 1 million children are working as prostitutes in Asia. Sexual slavery feeds on destitution, and Asia, home to two-thirds of the world's extreme poor, offers plenty. The bust and stagnation of the past few years only made the problem worse. The ILO estimates that the flesh trade has mushroomed into a major regional industry, accounting for 2% to 14% of GDP in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand.

Whole villages are sometimes complicit in the sale of their children. The procurers, says Sompop Jantraka, a Thai activist who has saved thousands of girls from being sold into brothels, might be the wives of village heads. Teachers know which children are vulnerable, and some alert procurers for a fee. Sompop has seen pickup trucks leaving schools full of girls sold to brothels in what is called the "green harvest." A police officer is often at the wheel. "This is a war," Sompop says, "a war for our children."

As Jonathan and I talked with Lek and Tip over a few days, our sense of being impartial observers gave way to concern that just by watching the children's degradation, we were implicated. Then it occurred to us that we could buy their freedom. That's how we found ourselves driving to an ATM, and withdrawing 41,000 baht.

Once free, Lek and Tip appear unable even to consider that their mothers may have sold them into sexual slavery. They insist they want to go to Kentung, in Burma's eastern Shan state, to live with Tip's family. With trepidation, we agree to try to get them there. With traffic heavy on the bridge into Burma, the four of us cross unnoticed into the border town of Tachileik, which is a good thing, since the girls lack the requisite ID papers to enter their homeland. Fearing problems at checkpoints if we go to Kentung by road, we buy the two girls airplane tickets. It is with relief that we watch the plane take off.

Only later do we learn that minutes before the aircraft departed, airport authorities threw Lek and Tip out, presumably for having no ID cards. Days afterward, we make an even more wrenching discovery: the mothers of both girls were in on the deal from the start and had received regular payments from the brothel, which might make an unexpected return home an unhappy occasion.

Lek and Tip are still in Tachileik, where they have taken shelter with an older friend. It is not a happy ending. And many could argue that we did the wrong thing, that by paying money for the girls, we were only perpetuating the trade, that helping them take only one step toward freedom was not enough. But at least Lek and Tip have some choices this time.