Painful Profiles in Prostitution

Child prostitutes can be found in cities across the globe, some bewildered by what has happened to them, others hardened by life in the streets. They are the victims of broken families, social injustice and criminal exploitation. The stories of three:

Bangkok, Thailand

Noi Wattana slept with eight men during her first week of work in a roach-infested brothel in a middle-class section of Bangkok. Three of them beat her.

Noi insists she is 17, one year younger than the legal age to work as a prostitute in Thailand. But with her close-cropped hair, red T-shirt, torn jeans and dirty white flip-flops, she doesn’t look that old. And she is sitting on the torn leather sofa that the brothel manager says he reserves for dek-dek, the Thai word for children.

Noi’s farming family comes from a poor village in the arid northeast. Her father died several years ago, and her mother has no income. A 20-year-old family friend, who is also a prostitute in the same brothel, brought Noi here.

“My mother knows what I am doing,” Noi said. “I’ve called her three times already. She always cries. I cry too.”

Counselors who work with child prostitutes say that in all likelihood, Noi will be trapped in an underworld of prostitution and crime for many years, shuttled from brothel to brothel until she is too old, too diseased or too emotionally unstable to be of use to her exploiters.