Thailand has gone to great effort in recent years to convince the world it’s cracking down on child prostitution. But despite occasional and much-publicized arrests of western pedophiles, government and law enforcement repeatedly show they’d rather suppress discussion of the country’s child sex problem than wholeheartedly try to eradicate it.
The latest evidence of that came yesterday when the critically acclaimed Japanese film “Yami no Kodomotachi,” or “Children of Darkness,” was pulled at the last minute from the Bangkok Film Festival which opened Tuesday. (Trailer at right.)
The raw and brutal film from director Junji Sakamoto follows a journalist who investigates the black market sale of children for sex as well as for their organs in Thailand. In its review, the Japan Times said “Salkamoto shows, with a documentary-like directness, how children caught in the web of a Thai prostitution ring are exploited, abused and, in some cases, murdered when they are no longer sexually salable. Despite its thriller plot structure, the film is a serious indictment, based on actual cases.”
“As a filmmaker myself, I found the film was interesting and very, very well made,” the festival’s artistic director, Yongyoot Thongkongtoon, told the AFP news agency. “(However), I’m not really sure the audience will get the information from the film correctly and it could cause problems.”
Tuesday’s Japan Today quoted film production company sources saying that film festival organizers and the Tourist Authority of Thailand ordered the film dropped from the lineup. The movie ‘‘handles too touchy issues and cannot be screened in view of the country’s public sentiment.” In its place, the festival will screen “Where the Miracle Happens,” a melodrama written by and starring Thai Princess Ubolratana.
Exactly what “sentiment” is that? Sounds a like “hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil.”
To try to further legitimize yanking the film, TAT also accused production firm Sedic International of shooting the film in Thailand for a month in April 2007 without authorization, a claim the company rejected.
Too Hot a Potato
Yami no Kodomotachi, which was shown in only seven theaters in Japan - no stranger to child prostitution problems of its own - has been passed over by a number of film festivals, Japan Times reviewer Mark Schilling noted.
I can’t vouch for the reasoning of the festival programmers or theater owners who rejected the film, but in being so visually graphic - particularly in the sex scenes in the Thai brothel - Sakamoto treads a dangerous line between hard-hitting social drama and stomach-turning exploitation. He takes care never to show his young actors (whose average age looks to be about 10) and their adult “clients” in the same explicit shot, but he films them engaged in sexual acts or their aftermath. Sakamoto may defend these scenes in the name of realism, but could he have filmed similar ones in Japan, using Japanese children? The short answer is “no.”
Jason Gray, a Japan-based correspondent for Screen International magazine who assisted with some English-language dialogue for the film, called Yani “a rough and unblinking depiction of the sexual and medical exploitation of Thai children. It shows as much as can be shown within legal limits.
“What I admired about it is that it painfully captures the guilt on all sides in social problems such as this. The fact that Yang Seok-il’s book, on which the film is partially based, contains even more disturbing truths is hard to stomach,” he wrote on his Jasongray blog.
“A couple of major festivals unfortunately decided to pass on Children of the Dark — weren’t brave enough to program it? — but I think, aside from its domestic run, it’ll eventually garner the overseas attention it deserves. Whatever critics and audiences think of Children of the Dark, it’ll get people talking and hopefully help give a voice to some of these kids.
No Change in Mae Sai
Somehow, that seems unlikely until Thailand’s own institutions start taking child trafficking and prostitution truly seriously. That’s something Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Joel Brinkley sees no evidence of. In a column for the San Francisco Chronicle last week, Brinkley - also featured in my “From the Headlines” column last week - said that, at least in the northern Thai city of Mae Sai, the trafficking problem is actually worse than it was than when he visited there in 2001.
Back then, brothel agents visited the schools to look over the fourth-graders. They offered cash to parents of 8-year-olds for the right to buy their daughters when they finished the sixth grade. …
Today, agents still troll the schools. Thousands of girls from here have been forced into the trade. Many have died - of AIDS or abuse. Some others, however, have paid off their bondage. They are allowed to return home for the Buddhist New Year - wearing spaghetti-strap blouses, garish bangles, sparkly makeup. The younger girls look at them, wide eyed.
“These 11- and 12-year-olds, they go with the traffickers now because they want fancy clothes and mobile phones,” said Ladda Benjatachah, who runs a government shelter for victims.
It’s not hte first time the Chronicle had been to Mae Sai. The paper’s Andrew Perin reported much of the same problems in a story in 2002.
In the latest article, Brinkley questions how Thailand’s government lets this continue, with at least one answer coming from Royal Thai Police Maj. General Visut Vanichbut: “The trafficking problem ‘has gotten worse - much worse’ because ‘our people are more interested in the financial gains they can get from these activities.’”
Gift Basket Folly
Brinkley damages his argument, though, by sensationalizing a bit — quoting 12-year-olds who tell him their mothers keep trying sell them into sex slavery — and by making tenuous and questionable connections between traffickers and the gift baskets police commanders in Bangkok collect.
Gift bags, dozens upon dozens of them, sit on the floor. Spilling out of them are bottles of whiskey, sweets, perfume or lingerie for the wife or mistress. Any cash that might have been tucked in next to the Chivas Regal will have been plucked out, but the bags remain as a display of the officer’s power - and corruption.
“I am not saying none of this goes on but what I do not get is where? Getting some quotes from people, talking about the police gift baskets and then declaring it is all hooked together is so silly. Police get these baskets for everything - I don’t know how many we have handed over through the years,” “Sideshow Bob,” co-owner of The Big Mango bar in Bangkok, wrote on the bar’s The Farang Speaks 2 Much blog Tuesday.
“What I never understand is why they don’t work harder as reporters or NGOs to connect the dots. Where are the girls going? Who is managing them? Who is using them?,” he continued. “Seems an article exposing some of that would go so much farther to help eradicate it than a puff piece about Johnny Walker gift baskets.”
Flaws or not, the story points out that Thailand isn’t making as much progress as it would like the world to believe. And by so publicly stifling debate on the issue by banning the Japanese film, the country ends up putting even more of a spotlight on a very dark aspect of Thai culture.
Subsequent to publication of this post, I’ve come across three good additional sources of info:
From Absolutely Bangkok:
http://absolutelybangkok.com/children-people-in-dark-pg12-film-too-hot-thai-govt/
From the Daily Xpress:
http://www.dailyxpress.net/2008/09/24/coverstory/coverstory_4430.php
Ms, Kwai’s Film Journal
http://thaifilmjournal.blogspot.com/
View all comments by The Ghost
Have any of you guys ever seen child prostitution in Thailand firsthand? I have been all over Thailand since the late 1960s and I have never either seen evidence of child prostitution nor have I been offered a child by anyone. I have to believe that if it isnt fiction, the title of this film, “Children of the Dark” is absolutely true. This stuff has to be buried so deep that the average guy who isn’t looking for children will never see it. I have always been of the opinion that most customers of this sort of thing are gay, since young boys and girls are pretty much devoid of female shape. Of course, the gays have their own networks that we would have no idea of. The bit that is most disturbing is that they harvest the kids organs for transplant after they are used up. Unless the film is fabricated from rumors, this whole thing is really sick. Anybody caught participating in or facilitating this trade should be strung up in the jungle with shackles so the tigers find them.
View all comments by Cruizn
Once in 16 years I “think” I saw a guy touting a girl outside Royal Garden in Pattaya. He was scruffy as hell she was dressed like a little Princess, it just didn’t look right.
But like Cruizn says, I have read so many stories about child prostitution in Thailand but have always thought it was blown all out of proportion, after reading this article I am not so sure now.
View all comments by John
I think it is sickening. I remember going to a beer bar last year in Pattaya. A lady asked me if I wanted the bar keep who was supposed to be 16. I said NOOO. Then then lady changed her tune. She was only joking since the girl was not 16. Who knows?
I always have so much fun in Pattaya even without the sex, but I do not want to touch teenagers. It’s so hard to tell with asian women. They may be 16 or they may be 30? The Thai Government is too blame. It is a class society. If an Issan girl is 16 then I guess it is ok to the Thai elite, but not a 16 year from a rich Thai. That would be wrong.
View all comments by Geno
An interesting fact is: child abuse is a much bigger problem in other countries like the U.S.A. ,
and the UK than it is in Thailand.
What it comes down to is the mass media is trying to make higher $$$rating$$$ .
The media have covered child abuse in the western countries so many times and for
so many years that they now have to go to other countries for the ” BREAKING NEWS ” .
sad,sad,sad.
View all comments by mike
Years ago, I saw a Danish documentary about pedophiles in Pattaya. The pedophiles found their victims at the back of the barcomplex just before Walking Street, where they show Thai boxing.
Everything was filmed with a hidden camera and afterwards arrest were made.
Those perverts know exactly where to go and I guess that the pick up places change very quickly.
View all comments by hanuman
Mike, actually the problem only SEEMS bigger in those countries because the media loves to write stories about it in those countries. Most of the stories have no basis in fact. NGOs both at home and abroad get donations (both from private and government sources) by making the problem look much bigger than it is. In every government building in the US, there are now big posters that decry the practice of sex trafficking…but there’s a catch. Although the posters have pictures of young girls, they don’t mention anything about age. The media buys into their stories about child abuse because they knew that lurid stories sell, so they both win when a story like this is published.
Do I believe that sex with children exists? Yes, but not in anywhere near the proportions the NGOs and so called reporters would have you believe. I mean, think about it…do you really believe that the management of a brothel dealing in children would allow a film crew to come in? Not likely. This was staged, pure and simple. It’s one of those pseudo-documentaries that gets a lot of people believing that what they saw is true. It’s very similar to “An Inconvenient Truth” and how it persuaded millions of people to climb on the global-warming bandwagon, when it is just as likely that we are heading into another ice age.
Make no mistake. The aim of the NGOs is to wipe out any opportunities worldwide for pay-for-play. Child abuse is just a tool they use to get there. And anytime that we agree with anything they say, they are laughing at us because we are their targets.
View all comments by Cruizn
If there’s no global warming, then why are the glaciers and ice caps melting? Just a fairy tale?
View all comments by hanuman
Hanuman,
Everything on Earth is cyclical, especially the climate. The geologists can show that the glaciers have moved forward and retreated many times in the last 100,000 years. It was only fifteen years ago that the glaciers in Glacier bay were growing so fast that they were worried it would close off nearby shipping lanes. People tend to see trends in climate based on a few years of data when the climate has been fluctuating for thousands of years. A study that was done several years ago on the Greenland ice cap (using ice cores) showed that each of the last three periods of massive ice growth were proceeded by extra warm periods.
It is better that we just get used to the fact that our planet is NOT static and will change whether we like it or not. Nobody really knows how it will change. We just need to figure out how to adapt to the changes as they happen, because changes will come. Of course, if we get smacked by a big chunk of space debris (as happens a lot more often than people think), it won’t matter anyway, since it’s kind of tough to adapt to changes that happen that fast. The last decent-sized collision hit the Indian Ocean about 15,000 years ago and it almost wiped out all humans (if it had been just a bit bigger, it would have). Maybe a couple of hundred people were left. There is more space debris out there than we can find. It is very likely that the one with our name on it won’t be discovered until it is on its final approach to Earth. Face it. We don’t control the place we live in.
Here’s one for you. Over 40% of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by man is from the production of lime for concrete. I’ll bet you didn’t know that. They cook limestone to make lime which releases huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the air. It is a much larger source than petroleum-based fuels. If it is really that important to reduce carbon in the atmosphere, why hasn’t anybody said anything about halting all concrete construction? You know that isn’t going to happen. We might as well stop being human. Learn to adapt and quit worrying about somebody else’s nightmare.
Ghost, sorry for going so far off topic.
View all comments by Cruizn