You know, right now the statistics say there's between
10 to 20 million slaves in the world and it's higher
than it's ever been in the history of time
and so I think people have and owe themselves that
responsibility to pay attention to what's happening
and to realize that, unfortunately, it is happening in your own back yard.
It's so difficult how...should we catch the mouth of the snake or
the middle part or the tail, you know? So where to begin and how to begin.
When you go to these villages it's completely absent of two generations; it's absent of the teenage
population and then the young adult population.
And the reason being is because most of those individuals
are in the big city working in the sex trade.
It hurts me badly, in my heart, to know it's happening
in the centre of the city and no one looks at it.
We just pass by. We're used to passing by.
Ok? And that's the cult that I see the world going, we just pass by.
Everyone has a time and place to when they're going
to be ready to hear these types of issues happening.
But I feel like the more empowered you are, the more you aware are,
the more likely you are to make a lasting solution happen.
Kamathipura is the red light area of Mumbai.
In this area there are many prostitutes who work with diseases
so to create the diseases the red light preferred to brothels
where are the diseases that put red light
so they still exist. We do consider sex as work.
We think, because of poverty, all women can be pushed
to these kind of activities. A lot of women from Nepal or West Bengal or from the south of India
they come and they are forced by the mafias and the _ by the demand
Because they come from village, they don't have food where they live
so they have no choice to work where they are
after they abandon their village, their family will not accept them.
The proper people, the pimps, the traffickers control the women, you see,
in such a way that...and everyone is party to that crime, you see,
the police is party to the crime; they're supported by the politicians, the criminals, the mafia and the
and this is all hand in glove, you see, and what to do?
So we thought of hitting the police first, you see.
Because, in spite of all of the pollution within that crime, you know,
they work within the...some framework they were working, you know,
of so-called "rule of law". We involved an active Human Rights Commission
and then we somehow tried to pursue the whole thing and tried
to say whatever was happening was going against the women only.
The women are not criminals, they're not accused; they're victims themselves, you know?
You know? And the whole treatment is like treating them as criminals, you know?
They're almost ridiculed. So it was all happening and we hit the police
after the police...obviously we hit one point where the whole nexus
shakes, you see? Despite all this effort, you know,
at the end of the day we realized the women were still weak, you know?
They could not break that cycle of slavery, you know, within the red light area.
So it's more psychological also, the slavery works more psychologically, you know?
So they would not speak against the brothel people, or those things or anything, you know?
Because there would be no structural changes there, you know?
We were not very judgemental about that whole point that women should not be in prostitution
this or that, we have no...not at all that mentality about that
but the only idea we always had was that the minors should not be forced into prostitution
and even the major women should not be forced into it, you know?
At the voluntary level they can continue with the trade.
So we realized, you know, some maybe have to hit the bottle (bottom?), people send things on, you see.
At times it's very admissible also, you know, it looks as if they are in agreement, you know?
But it is not that way. The whole paradigm shift in the world came with
the involvement of civil society in that. So in 2005, October or November,
we involved like 4 or 5000 people in the rescue. It was a major rescue operation.
The civil society went in. We informed the police, we informed everybody
but we knew they would not come. We did all the legal exercises, see, that is required
then we went in their as a civil net, as the citizens of this country, you see
We cannot let it...and that is what I say: something horrible happening
and then we just walk past. How is that possible, you know?
And we rescued almost 50 girls from that rescue operation:
girls from Nepal, from Bengal, Behad(?), you see? And, we rescued them
and then we're also fighting a criminal case against the brothel people
so we are fighting, as you see, we are almost fighting over 150 cases now
against almost something like 450 human traffickers.
We're also working on the source area, you know, to prevent human traffic.
It's something that really shocked me; I became really impassioned with
learning about human trafficking and joining the movement
to raise awareness about human trafficking about 3 years ago.
So I came to Thailand with the intention of just learning more about
what was happening to women and children so it happened that
I was reading books and articles and all of these different publications and
it only mentioned women and children. So when I finally got to Chiang Mai and
I passed the bars where all of our boys worked, I was completely shocked.
And it just was this incomprehensible kind of site because I just hadn't read about it.
And I got really angry and I said "Well, how come we aren't learning anything
about the fact that boys are being victimized just as much as the girls are?"
And the candid response that I kept getting from the community, from NGO workers
was "These boys are all gonna get HIV and die so why should we care?"
"Why waste our resources on these boys?"
And I just thought that was so unfair that they would be so easily overlooked and so easily ignored.
And the more I talked to the boys, the more they realized that society really didn't care at all about them.
And that was, you know, the push behind behind starting Urban Light,
was, to 1: provide services to these boys, but to also get the message out
that boys should be involved in the language as part of the victims of this horrible, insidious crime
that's happening all over the world, but what I'm seeing specifically in Chiang Mai and in Thailand.
One thing that we've really noticed is that the definition and kind of the vision that
people have when we talk about trafficking is a little bit distorted.
It can come in so many different forms and in so many different ways.
And the way in which our boys are victims of trafficking is that they are
essentially pushed into the city life by their families so they're not essentially shackled;
they're not behind bars; they're not, you know, kept inside a room.
And I think that's the common misconception that a lot of people carry.
Essentially they're free to come and go, so are they really in fact victims of trafficking?
And we go back to the definition that if you are under 18 and you're working in the sex trade
with these types of vulnerabilities and these types of, you know, push factors
then, yes, you are considered a victim so the shackle then becomes
the family that have that really high expectation; the shackle becomes
the lack of education, the discrimination for a lot of these hill tribe people,
in particular, our boys, who are mostly Agka(?) which is a hill tribe
an ethnic minority, which there is a ton of villages in the northwest part of Thailand.
One thing which I do not know whether you have been caught with that, I think,
is the aspect of gratitude. Because we have our culture of Buddhism also
gives admiration to those who are grateful children to their parents,
this is the very highest merit the children can do to their parents
but there are many forms of paid gratitude, you know
We are taught that parents are the first god, you know.
You do not go to the table at your parents' place if you do not pay
respect to your own parents at home, because they are the first monk,
In the old days, when the children worked very hard to help,
do any kind of hard work at home, taking care of them when they get sick
and, you know, things like that, this is a kind of paying the gratitude
is a grateful children already. But it was, it is taught them, you know
if you talk about the first monk, who's .
So that is the first. You have to do something for them, to make them happy in that time.
to be like money, when the world of materialism coming in.
And so it's a very hush hush topic; everyone knows what`s going on,
but no one will really say where the money's coming from
and that becomes just a big, huge weight on a lot of these boys
that I'm talking to, because they don't want anyone to know what they're doing
but they just know that they're doing good because they're providing for their families.
You know, in a twisted way, the boys also see them as people that want
to help them; they don't see them as, the boys don't see these sex tourists
as people that wanna take advantage of them.
And that's a really frustrating part, is that, you know, the boys are
so respectful of the men that come here. It's very much a Thai way.
And they'll never talk badly about them. And, you know, I think the Johns,
to this realization where they say, "You know what, I don't want
In a restaurant? In a hotel? At a tour agency?"
to do this anymore. I don't care if I'm not sending any money home
to my mom; I just don't wanna do this." And that's when we react.
That's when we really go hard and we say, "You know what,
then let's go on job interviews. Where do you wanna work?
It's a huge challenge for us, but we know that at some point, it clicks
So it really started off with just providing English. Once we started
doing that, we realized that there were a ton of other services that
were in need as well. We're now providing intensive case management.
So that can include health services, going to the doctor, getting a physical exam,
getting tested for HIV, getting STI treatment and testing, getting housing services
and just different, like, different components in life that
many people take for granted, but for these boys they've never had access to.