Thai Sex Workers Petition To Decriminalise Prostitution

[Pdoggg]

BANGKOK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Sex workers in Thailand have launched a petition calling for prostitution to be decriminalised and urging authorities to remove all penalties for selling and buying sex.

Empower Foundation, a Chiang Mai-based group that supports sex workers, said it hoped to collect 10,000 signatures and present the petition to parliament to help persuade lawmakers to consider changing the country’s prostitution law.

“The law punishes sex workers - 80% of whom are mothers and the main breadwinner for the whole family,” said Mai Junta, a representative from Empower.

“It turns us into criminals,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Tuesday.

More than 1,000 people had signed the petition since it was launched on Saturday.

Thailand is predominantly Buddhist and deeply conservative, but is home to an extensive sex industry, largely catering to Thai men.

Hordes of tourists also flock to the bright lights of go-go bars and massage parlours in the Thai capital Bangkok, and the country’s main tourist towns.

Women and LGBT+ rights activists say the current law, which made prostitution illegal in 1960, does little to protect sex workers, while repeated arrests and fines for doing sex work has driven them further into poverty.

A 2014 report by the U.N. agency fighting AIDS estimated that there were 123,530 sex workers in Thailand but advocacy groups put the figure at more than twice that number and say it includes tens of thousands of migrants from neighbouring Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Prostitution is currently punishable by a fine of up to 40,000 baht ($1,274) or two years in prison, or both, while people who pay for sex with underage workers can be jailed for up to six years.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-thailand-law-sexworkers-idUSKCN26D0Y5

[cobber32]

Talk about having two bob each way - on one hand conservative and religious; but on the other hand a thriving sex industry (as we know, so badly hit by the pandemic, with virtually no government assistance to so many). I think it will be a hard slog to change the laws in Thailand.