This is a story about children who sell flower garlands on the street corners of the Klong Toey slums, their moms and a new law that is child-friendly. But it’s still hard for the law, policemen, courts, lawyers, or social workers to save a kid when the moms and their cohorts won’t play by the rules.
The new law is a good one, designed to give all kids a fair shake. It states there must be four parties present whenever a minor is being interrogated in a police station. These four people must include a representative of the public prosecutor’s office, a lawyer, a social worker and someone of the child’s choosing. (Plus, of course, the police officer assigned to the case.) The questioning must be videotaped and the attendees must all sign a statement before the case can proceed to a court of law.
It all sounds good, but it doesn’t always work. Let me explain how the game is often played. Here are the players in one particular case:
1. Two moms from Klong Toey. 2. Their daughters who sell garlands. 3. The Bad Guy who drives a blue jeep and buys garlands from the girls. He lives in a province just outside of Bangkok with his wife and children. 4. Two streetwise fourteen-year-old Klong Toey girls. (They appear just twice—once in the jeep and once in a hotel.) 5. The local police officers who control the street corner garland sellers. 6. The Bad Guy’s lawyer, always smartly dressed in a suit and tie. 7. Our legal aid team.
It’s what they call an open-and-shut case—open because the Bad Guy opens his wallet and pays off authorities, and shut because the case is closed. The Bad Guy walks.
That’s how this one turned out. Two moms pandered their own children, pushing and goading them into trouble, demanding that they make street corner money selling garlands, sometimes demanding that they make extra money. This is not acceptable Klong Toey conduct. It breaks the code, it really does.
Imagine, these moms actually encouraged their own daughters to get into the jeep! Two fourteen-year-old girls were already inside. The driver had promised them each an exorbitant amount of money for their garlands, and free candy and toys if they’ll just get in. The moms encouraged their daughters to take street corner money. One hundred, 200, even an occasional 500 baht for a twenty-baht garland, the amount depending on the booze level of the Bad Guy.
The Bad Guy abused the four girls: two of them kind of willing, two of them definitely not, and all underage. In the end, their moms and the lawyers ensure that the Bad Guy walks. The kids keep losing, keep doing it again and again as their moms find other pedophiles they can shake down. In these types of situations, the kids almost always stick up for their moms. This time too. Right or wrong, it’s their mom—and the kids think they have to protect her.
These moms who break the code think it’s all about control. They won’t let their daughter be better than them, won’t give them a chance, just use them any way possible to feed their own drug habits or to pay back gambling debts. They tell their children, “You owe me.” It’s like a debt and now it’s payback time for the money and effort spent in raising them, an investment. They want a financial return—a profit.
Borrow money at two baht on 100 baht per day. That means if I borrow 1,000 baht from you, I have to pay you twenty baht every day. 140 baht a week, 560 baht a month. You can calculate how much per year. And on top of that, you still have to pay the original 1,000 baht. The moms feel they can control the relationships with their daughters, so they use them. The kids won’t rebel anyway.
The two twelve-year-old girls in this story call the Bad Guy the Mall Man, because he promised to take them to a mall to buy candy and toys (though he never did). Instead, they went to a short-time hotel. The Bad Guy flashed 20,000 baht in the hotel room—5,000 baht apiece that they could split four ways, but that didn’t happen. The younger girls got only 300 baht each and the two older girls pocketed the rest.
The twelve-year-olds felt too brutalized to complain. They just wanted to run home to their moms and cry. But once back home, their moms cursed them for bringing back only 300 baht.
They sent their girls back to Klong Toey street corners to sell more garlands. Days passed and the Bad Guy in the blue jeep didn’t come by the street corner where they worked, nor did anyone else. Business was slow. The moms needed cash so they decided to make a police report on the Bad Guy, whose license number they had written down earlier. They didn’t care if the Bad Guy went to jail or not; they only cared about getting more money from him.
One of the moms came to us and said she needed a secure place for her daughter (meaning, until the payoffs were made). We followed all the legal avenues, signed papers and then placed the young girl in our safe house outside of Klong Toey. She stopped selling flowers, went to school, and best of all, her mom didn’t know where she was.
Three weeks later, her mom contacted us. She wanted her daughter almost anywhere except with us. The Bad Guy and his lawyer arranged a kind of contract—offered money in compensation—under the condition that the girl denies everything. We were asked to bring the daughter to the police station, and when she saw her mom, she said she wanted to go home.
Both moms are spending their newfound riches fast. Meanwhile, the girls are still selling garlands on the street corner. They’re attending school but doing poorly, I’m told, often falling asleep in class. The case is still pending but it’s already over. The Bad Guy, according to our most reliable sources, is now behaving like a model citizen.
There’s a lot of sadness and frustration in this unfinished story. I still have hope for the two young garland sellers, though I also fear it will end in misery.
Nobody in control of these girls’ lives, especially their own mothers, seems to care.