Abuse Without End: Burmese Refugee Women and Children at Risk of Trafficking [January 2006]

 

 

 

 

 

Executive Summary

 

 

Kaung[1], who was born in Thailand of Burmese parents, was ten years old when a trafficker paid his estranged father 1,000 baht (US$25) for him while his mother was temporarily away from home. The trafficker then resold him to a gang that operated begging rings in Bangkok.

 

Kaung lived with two other boys and one girl while working in a begging gang. They were locked in the home of the traffickers, where they slept on the floor with no blankets or mosquito netting. Each day, the traffickers gave Kaung approximately one cup of ramen noodles, which he had to share with another boy. This was his only food, leaving him constantly hungry.

 

According to Kaung, the traffickers beat him with a metal rod, stuck him with needles and burnt him with cigarettes. He also witnessed severe abuses against the other children. The traffickers took one of the boys away one day. When he came back, he no longer had hands or feet. Kaung believes that the traffickers had severed his limbs to keep him from running away.

 

Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Burma, many of them women and children, have fled into neighboring Thailand in the course of the past two decades. Escaping armed conflict and rampant human rights violations in their homeland, these refugees often find that safety eludes them during and after crossing the Thai border. The failure of Thailand to offer them meaningful protection puts them at risk of continued human rights abuses, including trafficking. Women and children are particularly at risk of trafficking, and the sexual and physical exploitation and forced labor associated with it, as they desperately seek a way to support themselves and their families.

 

The international community has paid tremendous attention to the growing phenomenon of trafficking in recent years. In 2000, this focus resulted in the issuance of the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children to the UN Convention on Transnational Organized Crime. The purpose of the protocol is to prevent and combat trafficking in persons, with special attention to women and children; to protect and assist victims of trafficking, with respect for their human rights; and to promote cooperation among countries that have ratified the protocol in order to achieve those objectives. The protocol also explicitly acknowledges that the agreement does not supersede states’ obligations under international humanitarian, human rights and refugee law, including the principle of non-return that is the core of the international refugee protection framework laid out in the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.

 

Thailand is not, however, a party to the 1951 Convention. The Thai government characterizes refugees as “displaced people fleeing fighting,” a definition that does not comply with international law and excludes large numbers of refugees from Burma. It is also narrowly applied to people “fleeing active fighting,”[2] Refugee camps are referred to as “temporary shelters” although many refugees, such as the ethnic Karens and Karennis, have been warehoused in border camps for decades.[3]

 

The majority of Burmese[4] who have not been designated as refugees under that narrow interpretation are deemed “illegal” by the Thai government, regardless of the person’s reason for entering Thailand. This includes hundreds of thousands of migrant workers.

 

However, when questioned about their motivation to come to Thailand, almost without fail migrant workers cite the political repression, armed conflict and economic devastation in Burma that has directly resulted from years of despotic rule. The Shan people, for example, despite fleeing from well-documented persecution by the Burmese military, are regarded as “illegal migrants” under Thai law and thus denied any protection. Clearly, labeling such individuals “illegal” and characterizing them as “migrant workers” is inaccurate, when in fact many—if not most—are people in refugee-like circumstances.

 

Regardless of their status, moreover, the vast majority of Burmese residing in Thailand have extremely limited means to support themselves and their families. They eke out a subsistence living, are marginalized in the Thai economy and exploited as a cheap source of labor. They often support not only themselves, but also family members who live with them in Thailand or who remain behind in Burma. They live in fear of detection by the Thai authorities, not only because they are vulnerable to deportation back to Burma but also because the authorities will often exploit their lack of status to extort bribes from them.

 

Refugees who live in refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border also face specific risks. While some NGOs put tremendous effort into creating income generation activities for women inside the camps, it is insufficient. As a result, despite Thai policy which requires prior written approval to enter or leave the camps, people leave surreptitiously to work on nearby farms for less than the wages paid to Thais; many simply abandon the camps permanently to seek relatively better wage labor in urban or semi-urban areas. Refugees who leave the camps are vulnerable to arrest, harassment, extortion and trafficking.

 

Forced into an underground existence by their lack of status and precarious living conditions, Burmese in Thailand are at strong risk of being trafficked. Such trafficking can occur at various points during the migration experience, including before the individual has crossed the border, during the border crossing or once present in Thailand itself. It may result from force, coercion or deception. After being trafficked, women and children may end up in a range of abusive situations, including forced prostitution, children forced to beg on the streets of Bangkok or other urban areas, young women working as domestic servants or entire families working in substandard and dangerous labor conditions in textile factories, fishing or other industrial settings.

 

Sometimes, the trafficked person is not paid at all or is paid a wage far below that promised or allowed under Thai law. Consistently, labor conditions for trafficked persons are appalling, characterized by long hours and physical and sexual abuse. Some women working as domestic servants reported that their inability to speak Thai left them isolated, and the nature of their work, which often involves living in their employers’ homes, left them profoundly vulnerable to abuse.

 

Moreover, the fear of deportation haunts people living without status. Even workers who were registered for employment with the Thai government stated that some employers held on to their registration cards despite Thai law stating the workers must keep the card with them at all times.[5] They also spoke of instances in which police officers, despite being shown the worker registration card, still demanded a bribe. Women and children may be especially susceptible to maltreatment, and are reluctant to complain. As such, the capacity to report abuses they experience is an inseparable issue from their insecure status in Thailand. Such apprehensions are grounded both in the fear of persecution by the Burmese military if returned as well as the fear of stranding their families without economic support if they lose their source of income, as abusive as their employment situation might be.

 

Despite the fact that the vast majority of Burmese living in Thailand cannot safely return home, the solution for trafficked persons apprehended in Thailand is typically deportation. Burmese who are apprehended by the Thai authorities may be detained before being deported. Some are deported with prior notification to the Burmese government. Others who have been designated as refugees or “persons of concern” by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Regional Office for Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam are rounded up, detained and informally deported to border areas without prior notification to the Burmese government.

 

This emphasis on repatriation is rarely challenged and sometimes supported by international agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working with trafficked persons. Return is often viewed as necessary to deter and prevent future trafficking. It is also often characterized as harmless, because it is widely acknowledged that most deported Burmese return to Thailand at the earliest possible opportunity. This rationale for repatriation, however, is troublesome; by having to return to Thailand a second or sometimes multiple times, the refugee is at risk of either being identified and targeted by the Burmese military upon return to the homeland, or when migrating back to Thailand, of being swept up in the same cycle of violence and exploitation they experienced when trafficked the first time. Often the person returns to Thailand burdened with greater debt, either from having to bribe officials en route or as part of the costs of resettling in Thailand. The cycle of repatriation and return leaves people even more vulnerable to traffickers, and bolsters corrupt practices at the local level.

 

What is clearly missing in the dialogue on trafficking in Thailand is a holistic, rights-based approach that addresses the root causes of migration from Burma to Thailand. This new approach casts an analytical net wide enough to consider the unique vulnerabilities to trafficking as experienced by both recognized and unrecognized refugees in Thailand. New solutions must be sought that take into consideration the reality that for many Burmese nationals repatriation is neither a safe nor viable option. Trafficking of persons who are in refugee-like circumstances must be considered within the international refugee framework, which traditionally has promoted the durable solutions of local integration, third country resettlement or safe, dignified and voluntary return. Even in the absence of ratification of the Refugee Convention, Thailand—with the support of the international community—must abide by these principles.