Face to face with human trafficking

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Monday, Sept 8, 2008.

I’m a little concerned that post-editing, trafficking and prostitution appear synonymous, so I must say now that there is a difference, but here is the piece as it was published.

THE cupcakes were the easy part.Three months ago, I set out to raise funds for a human-trafficking study trip to Thailand by selling these cheerful confections. Sure, it was hard work slaving in three kitchens over six days to whip up more than 350 of them.

But it took just three weeks for my online-based Cupcakes Against Child Trafficking campaign to raise more than the sum needed to cover all costs.

The full purse brought me one step closer to a problem I’d studied only from afar for years: human trafficking.

Getting to know the situation first-hand, I told my donors, would help me find better ways to combat the issue.

Then the flour settled.

Being there, as it turned out, raised more questions than it answered. Together with four other university-level students, aged between 20 and 27, we met a female brothel owner in Pattaya.

Onn turned out to be a jovial middle-aged woman who welcomed us into her bar-brothel. She enthusiastically revealed how she took care of her ’staff’ by cooking for them, advocating condom use and teaching them survival English.

Her sincerity was so infectious, I found myself thinking: I guess if I were a working girl, I would want to work for someone like her.

I caught myself. Is this, then, the reality of thousands of women in the world, and one which I was just beginning to understand? Maybe prostitution was not just an uncomplicated evil in itself?

Sure, I still think a woman should not be selling her flesh for money. But I speak from a place of privilege. I do not have to worry about where my next meal will come from, or where I will sleep tonight.

Some children choose to go into the trade to provide for their families. Although they are by legal definition ‘trafficked’, they are not victims of trafficking, but of their circumstances.

What then am I fighting? Or maybe I was starting at the wrong place.

You can, after all, quite easily rescue a child from a brothel. Ending poverty? That’s another question altogether.

The writer, 25, is a Singapore Press Holdings scholarship holder. She completed her postgraduate studies in international law and government at Georgetown University in the United States

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