13/08/2015
YANGON (Myanmar Now) –
Sixteen-year-old Wut Yee, left to fend for herself and her younger brother, was
relieved when her exhausted mother finally came home after a week’s
disappearance, but the feeling was short-lived.
Her mother had two devastating
pieces of news for her: Since her husband remarried she had been working as a
sex worker to make ends meet and she had just agreed to sell her daughter’s
virginity to a businessman for $3,000.
Wut Yee, who requested to
change her name for this story, had quit school to handle household chores and
look after her brother and she had no other source of income. Money was in
short supply. The monsoon was coming and their thatch-roofed house in Yangon’s
Hlaing Thar Yar Township required urgent repairs; her brother’s school fees and
old debts also needed to be paid.
“My mother said: ‘I’ve already
accepted the money. I worry you would be in pain since you’ve never done it
before, so I’ve paid an advance fee to the clinic at the top of our street to
give you anaesthetics.’ I cried the whole night,” Wut Yee said, recalling the
events from two years ago.
“The next morning, I had to
follow this man after the doctor injected me with anaesthetics. He took me in
his car to a house on the outskirts of town. I spent the whole day with him. I
wasn’t in pain when he sent me back home in the evening because of the
medication, but I couldn’t walk properly,” the petite girl told Myanmar Now.
Soon afterwards, Wut Yee found
herself working at a massage parlour that doubles as a brothel near Ba Yint
Naung wholesale market, one of Yangon’s busiest places. After two months, she
quit over disagreements with colleagues and exploitation by the owner, and she
decided to ply the trade alone on the streets, often following men more than
twice her age into dingy hotel rooms.
Due to the clandestine nature
of sex work in Myanmar, it is almost impossible to know how many underage girls
like Wut Yee are engaged in the work in Yangon, the country’s biggest city with
more than 5 million inhabitants. Myanmar Now found one underage sex worker after
interviewing more than a dozen workers, but was told that it was not uncommon
for teenage girls to end up in the trade.
Aid workers warn the problem
could worsen if authorities ignore it, especially as Myanmar society opens up
after half a century of isolation under military rule. They also say
rehabilitation and support is more important than punitive measures.
“This issue is directly linked
to poverty,” said Dr. Sid Naing, country director for Marie Stopes
International Myanmar, which runs health education and support programmes.
“Underage sex workers have
existed for a while so it is important the authorities do not deny their
existence. Otherwise, their numbers could increase. It is also equally
important for society to not just criticise them, but to understand why it
happened and help them get on the right path,” he added.
“At a time when it is
universally acknowledged that child labour is unacceptable, using children for
sex should be completely out of bounds.”
VIRGIN MARKET
The practice of buying underage
girls for sex is fuelled in part by superstitious beliefs that sleeping with
virgins has health benefits, such as long life and curing the human
immunodeficiency virus (HIV), said Dr. Sid Naing.
Most underage girls arrive in
big, commercial cities due to a combination of family difficulties and a lack
of opportunities for well-paid jobs in the countryside, said Thu Zar Win from
the Sex Worker in MyanmarNetwork.
“Most child sex workers enter
this profession because their parents or guardians sold their virginity,” she
said. “In most cases, they themselves see very little money because pimps and
brokers usually take a large cut.”
Some 0.45 percent of Myanmar
women between 15 to 49 years of age - an estimated 40,000 to 80,000 - are
engaged in paid sex work, according to government and United Nations figures released
in 2013.
Poh Poh, a 21-year-old sex
worker who requested not to use her real name, says most girls who became sex
workers via the virgin market face difficulties leaving the industry. Many tend
to work in brothels disguised as beauty salons or massage parlours, as they
provide better protection than roaming the streets, she said.
“I’m
also scared to ply the trade on the street,” said Poh Poh, a single mother who
became a sex worker a year ago after separating from her husband.
SEX WORK AND THE LAW
Arresting and punishing sex
workers would not eliminate prostitution, said Dr. Sid Naing from Marie Stopes.
“I don’t want to say anything about whether sex work should be legal or not.
What we can do is to accept the reality that they exist and help them so that
they don’t face more suffering.”
Observers also say the current
law governing sex work, the 1949 Suppression of Prostitution Act, limits
workers’ access to healthcare and makes them vulnerable to threats and
harassment from security officials.
Under the law it is illegal to
solicit prostitution, force or entice a woman into sex work, and operate or
work in a brothel. It was amended
in 1998 to increase sentences to between
one and three years in prison, and to provide an expanded definition of what
constitutes a brothel to “any house, building, room, any kind of vehicle/
vessel/ aircraft or place habitually used for the purpose of prostitution or
used with reference to any kind of business for the purpose of prostitution.”
Since Myanmar’s political
reforms began, opposition lawmakers and activists have called for amendments to
the law. Sandar Min, a National League for Democracy lawmaker, submitted a
proposal in parliament calling for decriminalisation of sex work in 2013, but
it was rejected. Taw Win Khayay, a network of sex workers, is calling for an
analysis and rewriting of the law.
Local media reported in July that a parliamentary committee proposed amendments to the law
that would make procurement of sex punishable with a prison term of up to one
year with hard labour, and a fine. It also proposed adding a section on
“rehabilitating” sex workers through education.
The current 1949 law does not
allow the arrest and detention of clients of female sex workers and police
could only educate them, said Major Thi Thi Myint, deputy head of Yangon
Police's crime statistics department.
Of the 1,772
prostitution-related crimes in 2014, very few relate to cases of sex workers
under the age of 18, she said. “If we apprehend underage sex workers, we don’t
send them to prison. We send them to youth rehabilitation schools and teach
them vocational skills and general knowledge that would help them to leave this
job,” she added.
SEX EDUCATION
Aid workers say underage sex
work is not only morally reprehensible but also physically harmful.
Underdeveloped sexual organs
are easier to bruise and injure and are vulnerable to sexually-transmitted
diseases, said Dr. Sid Naing. Underage sex workers also tend to have poor
knowledge of sex and how to protect themselves, he added, putting them at
considerable risk in a country with a high HIV prevalence rate.
A 2014 UNAIDS report estimated
that some 189,000 people in Myanmar live with HIV. Government figures cited in
the study state that 23 percent of recorded HIV-infections in Yangon and
Mandalay occurred among sex workers.
According to Sex Worker in
Myanmar Network’s Thu Zar Win, sex education is almost non-existent for youths.
“It’s not just underage sex
workers that lack knowledge of sexual issues. Young men are also unaware of
such issues. They need to be conscious of other sexually-transmitted diseases
that could spread, not only HIV.”
“Parents and business owners
need to protect children who became sex workers for various reasons. They
entered this industry because they were exploited,” she added.
Wut Yee had never encountered
sex education. She was making an average of $30 a day in a country where,
according to a UN report released last year, 43 percent of adults live on less
than $2 per day.
“I was happy with how much I
was making, but what terrified me was that my mother’s health deteriorated. We
found out at the end of last year that she has HIV,” she said. “She was aware
of the possibility of getting infected with the virus in her line of work, but
I got really scared when it happened.”
STRUGGLE
Without a high school degree,
job opportunities for Wut Yee were scarce. But she decided to quit prostitution
for a less-paid but safer job of a salesgirl at one of the hundreds of mobile
phone shops in Yangon.
She is still struggling to
explain to buyers the different phone models, brands and prices. She is two
months into the new job and finding it difficult to grasp the technical terms
and specifications. Yet she says she is determined to make it work.
“I
am only earning $80 a month now but I feel there is more security,” she said.
She regularly wonders whether
she should return to prostitution, even if temporarily, to allay her family’s
financial troubles. Her mother, now a street vendor and receiving healthcare
through an aid agency, is against the idea, Wut Yee said. They now try and make
do with their meagre income while her younger brother continues his school.
Wut Yee hopes one day to find a
husband who she could be honest with about her past. For now, aware of the deep
discrimination towards sex workers in a deeply conservative society, she is not
taking any chances. None of her co-workers know of her past.
“I don’t
want to blame my mother for what happened to me. I will get married one day and
I’m only thinking of ensuring my daughters do not have to suffer the same
fate,” she said.
Written By Htet Khaung Lin
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