Prostitutes wait for customers in Mae Sai

Thailand's prostitution problem is growing as Thailand's economy evolves. Marketing creates a demand for consumer goods that poor villagers can ill afford. Some girls become prostitutes because they are eager to make a financial contribution to their families, despite the risks of abuse and AIDS.

Sompop Jantraka Photo by Naveen Kishore

Networks of middlemen target the most hard-pressed families, offering financial rewards to enroll their daughters in the sex trade. Girls are more likely to be forced into prostitution in families where there is drug abuse, violence, or the mother or an older sister is already involved in prostitution. Families are broken and children left to fend for themselves when their parents succumb to the temptation of cheap and easily accessible heroin and amphetamines.

"The country has changed very fast to become an economic society. Most of the people of the rural area didn't have to spend money before. They had their field, their chickens, vegetables, but as the government moves to develop a modern industrial country their way of living has changed. They can't go from the field and the forest to work with computers. But now the villagers have to buy everything. They get in debt and become poorer and poorer. That kind of pressure breaks families. The daughters become something to sell." - Sompop Jantraka