Well I myself think this is not trough. prostitution we will find all over the world and I think there is not more prostitution in Pattaya as any were else.



Here is what other people think about it.

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  Children caught in Thai sex trade dragnet

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Thailand has long had a reputation of being the prostitution capital of the world. Church groups and the government are tackling the crisis, but are hampered in their efforts by a disastrous recession. ANTO AKKARA, Asia correspondent for The Southern Cross, invesigates.



Unlike most of the world’s urban centres, Pattaya, Thailand, sleeps in the day and comes to life as the sun sets.



Sex tourism is about the only business conducted in the beach resort. Littered with hundreds of hotels on its coastline, Pattaya wakes up as the neon lights start shining in the dusk.



The exact figure of those involved in the sex tourism trade in Pattaya, 130 km south of Bangkok, are unavailable for obvious reasons. However, a travel agent operating near south Pattaya beach, who asked not to be named, estimated that nearly half of the town’s population of 200000 are "outsiders" involved in sex tourism.



Three decades back, Pattaya was an obscure fishing village. With the Vietnam war, it became a popular "recreation" resort for US marines based at nearby Sattaship, sowing the seeds of sex tourism. From these beginnings, prostitution spread like wildfire.



The population of the "sex tourism" centre virtually doubles during winter when European and American tourists (many of them well past middle age) flee the biting cold in their countries to the mild climates and "recreational" pleasures of Pattaya.



As a result, thousands of young women and girls barely into their teens from impoverished villages of northern Thailand find "easy jobs" in the sex tourists’ haven. Even women and pubescent girls from neighbouring Myanmar, Cambodia and Vietnam are brought to work in the sex shops which masquerade as beer pubs, massage parlours and bars. Hundreds more roam Pattaya’s neon-lit streets soliciting customers.



Although more than a quarter of the annual 8 million foreign tourists to Thailand visit Pattaya, the number of women tourists to Pattaya is "very nominal" according to the travel agent.



At the age of 30-something, the travel agent remains unmarried for the simple reason that "Pattaya is not a city for children to grow up. I will go for marriage when I can settle down with a good job outside" the city.



Families in the town, if they can afford to, send their children to boarding schools.



"Even if parents give good moral education, children’s thinking will be influenced by what they see around them," said the travel agent. There is "great demand" for young girls and boys in Pattaya where tourists, some of them well past retirement age, can be seen strolling the street with their arms around girls hardly into teens.



"The challenge before us is enormous," said Good Shepherd Sister Joan Gormley of the Fountain of Life centre. "Though we are a minority, we are trying our best to protect the vulnerable children from the vicious atmosphere."



Christians number only 200000 of Thailand’s 63 million people. Half of the Christian population is Catholic.



The Good Shepherd nuns joined the fight against the flesh trade, with a special emphasis on child prostitution, in 1988 at the invitation of Redemptorist priests. Their brief was "to run a drop-in centre for the women and girls involved in the sex industry."



With sex tourism becoming deeply entrenched in Pattaya during the past decade, the Church workers have opened several centres in their bid to combat the prostitution menace. The Good Shepherd nuns run two centres: one for the children from the families of bartenders, municipal cleaners, and even prostitutes, the other for young prostitutes. Both operate under the name Fountain of Life Centre.



At the first centre, more than 150 children below the age of seven–many of them living in slums–are picked up in vans belonging to the Fountain of Life of Centre every morning, and remain in the care of the teachers and the volunteers supervised by the nuns until the afternoon when their parents return from work.



Because the atmosphere in the slums is "very bad with drugs and prostitution," Sr Joan, an Irish nun, said, "we help them get out of the poverty and prepare the children for school by inculcating in them love for knowledge and love for life." The centre aims at preventing the children "from falling into the vicious racket " of child prostitution.



The second centre, opened in 1993, is intended exclusively for young prostitutes "to wean them away from their profession."



The number of young girls and women working in the sex trade and bars who visit the centre "of their own free will and at their convenience" has gone up from 150 to 250 in the last two years.



"Many of them want to quit the profession," Sr Joan said. So, in three shifts of two hours each, these women learn dressmaking, hair-dressing and computer skills in their bid to equip themselves for alternate trades. Some even learn foreign languages like English, French and German to fulfil their dream to marry foreigners and settle abroad.



Apart from that, the centre also conducts adult education classes–sponsored by the government–on Sundays to enable school and college drop-outs to complete their education and "return" to mainstream education.



With a dozen staff, the centre also imparts psychological counselling to the women living in "difficult circumstances."



Sr Joan turned down my request to visit the centre, saying that "they (prostitutes) lack self confidence. Still, they come to the centre without fear. If they find you [a journalist] there, they will be upset."



The Redemptorists themselves run a couple of centres for street boys and orphans in Thailand’s city of vices. The Redemptorist Street Kid Home has more than 55 boys between the ages of five and 15. As the boys grew up, explained Supagon Noja, director of the Street Kid Home project, they were sent for vocational training in Redemptorist and other centres outside Pattaya to enable them to pick up decent jobs.



The centre allows its elder charges to work in department stores in the evenings. But Mr Noja was clear: We never allow them to work in brothels, beer pubs and hotels. That will only get them tangled in the (prostitution) racket."



Despite such determined efforts, the "grim situation" has not changed much. Pattaya is not the only place where prostitution thrives in Thailand. Bangkok, Chiang Mai and other major tourism destinations in Thailand are also in the grip of the flesh trade.



The annual income from the "sex trade black market" in Thailand, conservatively estimated at 200000 sex workers (25% of them children), is worth nearly 54 billion baht (about R14 billion), according to the Bangkok-based End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism (ECPAT).



Agencies such as the Children’s Foundation estimate over 800000 child prostitutes alone are active in the kingdom’s rampant sex tourism market.



Thailand’s government enacted a tougher Prostitution Prevention and Suppression Act in 1996 due to domestic and international pressure to shake off the country’s notoriety, which has inspired some western travel agents to openly advertise "pleasure tours" to Thailand.



Yet, the number of prostitutes has increased, mainly due to a fallout from South-East Asia’s economic crisis that gripped the region in 1996.



This was reinforced at an international seminar last year in which representatives from 14 Asian countries met to discuss the Asian economic crisis and its impact on children.



The economic crisis, the seminar said, had produced a common effect in all Asian countries, such as increased unemployment, inflation, and increased migration.



A 10% decrease in school enrolments in Thailand since 1996 has made children vulnerable to sexual exploitation as rural children migrate to tourist areas and to big cities hoping to find work. Many get caught in the dragnet of flesh traffickers.



Fr Vichai Phokthavi, president of Thailand’s Justice and Peace Commission endorses this theory.



"Parents have been thrown out of jobs and families are struggling. School enrolment has decreased and children are out in the street. There is enough reason to believe that the number of prostitutes have gone up as a result of this [economic] crisis," he said

 

 

<Well I myself think this is not trough. prostitution we will find all over the world and I think there is not more prostitution in Pattaya as any were else.>



The report you copy and pasted is from February 2000 so is well out of date with many of its figures.



If you really beleive that child prostitution is no worse in Pattaya then anywhere else in the world then you really do need to either travel with your eyes and ears open or stop fooling yourself.

 

Well I think its not that bad . prostitution is every were in the world not only in Pattaya or in Thailand.

Big Banners are posted at Pattaya land which says No to sex tourism and No to child sex.  Same for Sunee Plaza all bars who provided underage boys have been closed for long long times. No the thai' s have everything under control. Believe me Sawatdee forum or Gay Pattaya would never allow promotions on sawatdee forum board or at the weekly report about for example sunee plaza or boys town as they would think that there are under age boys  beiing exploited in that area or in the bars. So who is blind you or me ?

Edited by: thai me up at: 13/11/05 1:32 pm

The Southern Cross, from which the article is taken, is the publication / website of "Southern Africa's National Catholic weekly", hence its concentration on the work of the Catholic / evangelical foundations in Pattaya, and the unwritten implication that the level of prostitution may be in reverse proportion to the level of Christianity in Thailand.



The figures it produces simply do not add up, even to the most cursory check. It also misrepresents and does a gross disservice to the work done by, for example, the Fountain of Life (a well established and very worthy charity which largely concentrates on making education available for children from all poor families in the area).



Anyone who says that prostitution is not rife in Pattaya and elsewhere in Thailand would indeed have to be blind; anyone who says that it is the sex capital of the world, as well as the centre of child prostitution, has clearly overlooked the age of consent in other countries, overlooked Amsterdam or Hamburg (as well as parts of Eastern Europe and Central/South America) and is working to their own agenda.



 

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Anyone who says that prostitution is not rife in Pattaya and elsewhere in Thailand

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Farang style prostitution is very visible in Pattaya, that is all. Pattaya is also a destination for both the desperately poor and adventurers - this is due to the stark contrast in attitude between the Thai patron and the Jai Dee Farang.



I recall in the early 80's visiting a Thai business - my host whisked me 'orf to a massive theatre which was chock a block with ladies bearing numbers. This was as normal as offering a glass of something strong after a meal.



What you see on the surface is not what goes on beneath. It is true to say that some Thai despise the gaudy neon style dens of iniquity, but have no problem with their own more discreet version.



Pattaya is a farang disneyland version of Thailand, and always has been. When the Chinese and Russian families take over this will have little or no effect on the prevalence of prostitution in the Kingdom.

Edited by: Dr Anne Thrope at: 13/11/05 3:04 pm

""We never allow them to work in brothels, beer pubs and hotels. That will only get them tangled in the (prostitution) racket."""..



I love it when they state the obvious..only in Thailand.

 

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So who is blind you or me ?

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Read the EPCAT website.

Although well meaning, its a shame that Thai Me Up has to write such gibberish. Apart from the fact that the article he quotes from is about 5 years out of date, his assertion that Sunee is squeeky clean, and that forums such as this would not write about such places if it were not so are just a joke. Is he a spin doctor??

What is that a spin doctor  ?



I think that the thai people are doing a very good job trying to get rid of child sex. The age of content is 18 in this country compair that with most countries were the age of content is 16. and I think prostitution like you find in pattaya you find all over the world. Sand Sun and Sex hollidays isn't that something for what the average  single male/female tourist is looking for ?



 I think sex in pattaya is not much more different as in New York,Amsterdam or Kota kina balu or was it Timbukthoe ?!





Spin doctor ??







 

Edited by: thai me up at: 14/11/05 8:25 am

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The age of content is 18

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  Sawatdee's own Mrs Malaprop.

Yes and Pattaya has also be nominated to be an Inheritage side !

If that were true there would be more happy posters on this board.

Yes not all of us have rich parents !

I have not seen that thaipeople take more care of childprostitution than others. Many many stories go about children being raped from father, familymebers.

I dont know if Thailand is a special sexparadise. many seem to forget, that aout of the customers by prostitutes, 83 % are thais, only 17% are foreingers.  

Really who was counting the sex encounters between familly members.  i wonder how they get those numbers >



Do you ?