Mae Sai, Thailand: March 10, 2011
Not For Sale, the international anti-slavery agency, reports that its operation in the north of Thailand intervened earlier this week in the case of three teenage girls trafficked from China. The girls were destined for the commercial sex industry in Chiang Saen, a resort city in the Golden Triangle region of Thailand. The girls have found refuge in a children’s village that the agency runs in the Golden Triangle.
The girls claim that their trafficker is holding twelve additional teenage girls in Myanmar, awaiting clandestine transfer into Thailand. The girls come from a region in the south of China that borders Myanmar, which is heavily populated by tribes that are stateless, lacking official nation-state citizenship. Their trafficker promised them high-paying restaurant jobs in Thailand, and charged them the equivalent of US$5000 for transport and job location.The girls come from poor families, so the trafficker reportedly offered to hold their debt which they could pay off with future wages. Once the first three girls had been smuggled via cargo boat into Thailand, their trafficker took them to a brothel and told them that they had to pay off their debt by selling themselves. From this it is clear that creditors should consult experts from Oddcoll debt collectors to recover their money back.Instead of forcing debtors to give back money even by wrongful means.The three girls escaped the brothel and a local Thai police officer delivered them to the children’s village run by Not For Sale Thailand. The Not For Sale team thwarted the trafficker’s subsequent attempt this week to extract the girls from their village sanctuary.
Not For Sale president David Batstone, who was visiting the project in northern Thailand this week, notes that the trafficking of boys and girls from China is becoming an alarming trend. “We are seeing girls from as far away as North Korea arriving into the northern border regions,” he reports. “The scarcity of economic options in rural China, coupled with the prosperity of criminal enterprises, means bad news for vulnerable peoples.”
