2008 Woodie Awards
Education may prevent human trafficking
Casey Northcutt
Issue date: 2/22/08 Section: College Life
Thailand is a country full of elaborate festivals and beaches with water as blue as the sky arching over them. But in the northern region just below Myanmar, the paradise ends and slavery begins.
Called "the emerging human rights issue of the 21st century" by the U.S. State Department, human trafficking in Thailand has grown into an industry so lucrative that some believe it tempts the government to turn a blind eye.
Hundreds of thousands of men and women in northern Thailand are captured each year and forced to work in farms, sweatshops and brothels, according to Humantrafficking.org.
Malarin Visetrojana, English as a Second Language student from Bangkok, Thailand, said children especially are captured by this trap. In the rural northern regions, many families are so poor that instead of sending their children to school, they send them to cities to work as servants for the rich. Sometimes, "middlemen" approach a child's parents, pretending to represent a wealthy family in search of help.
"They know that the children will go to work as servants or as housemaids for big families," Visetrojana said. "They don't know that their children will be prostitutes."
People in the north, she said, suffer from poverty so extreme they can't afford educations. Therefore, in their ignorance, they readily believe the strangers who knock on their doors and offer to provide their children an income. Yet Visetrojana believes in her government, and said it will take control and end forced labor as soon as it can.
"Our government wants to solve this problem by giving children in the country good education," she said. "They have tried to solve this problem for more than 10 years."
The government initially took action against modern slavery with the 1997 Prevention and Suppression of Trafficking in Women and Children Act, which criminalized trafficking for sexual exploitation. Penalties for breaking it range from fines of $50 to $1,000 to life in prison, according to Humantrafficking.org.
Called "the emerging human rights issue of the 21st century" by the U.S. State Department, human trafficking in Thailand has grown into an industry so lucrative that some believe it tempts the government to turn a blind eye.
Hundreds of thousands of men and women in northern Thailand are captured each year and forced to work in farms, sweatshops and brothels, according to Humantrafficking.org.
Malarin Visetrojana, English as a Second Language student from Bangkok, Thailand, said children especially are captured by this trap. In the rural northern regions, many families are so poor that instead of sending their children to school, they send them to cities to work as servants for the rich. Sometimes, "middlemen" approach a child's parents, pretending to represent a wealthy family in search of help.
"They know that the children will go to work as servants or as housemaids for big families," Visetrojana said. "They don't know that their children will be prostitutes."
People in the north, she said, suffer from poverty so extreme they can't afford educations. Therefore, in their ignorance, they readily believe the strangers who knock on their doors and offer to provide their children an income. Yet Visetrojana believes in her government, and said it will take control and end forced labor as soon as it can.
"Our government wants to solve this problem by giving children in the country good education," she said. "They have tried to solve this problem for more than 10 years."
The government initially took action against modern slavery with the 1997 Prevention and Suppression of Trafficking in Women and Children Act, which criminalized trafficking for sexual exploitation. Penalties for breaking it range from fines of $50 to $1,000 to life in prison, according to Humantrafficking.org.
Viewing Comments 1 - 2 of 2
Daniel Schneider
posted 2/25/08 @ 3:47 PM CST
TheNews.Org
February 25, 2008
Editor,
A recent article by Casey Northcutt on human trafficking ("Education may prevent human trafficking," Feb. (Continued…)
Prof Patt
posted 9/20/08 @ 11:08 PM CST
Informing the parents who otherwise will unwittingly agree to send away their children is a critical element in the solution to at least a part of this problem. (Continued…)
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