Children’s Rights and Child Prostitution: Critical Reflections on Thailand in the 1990s and Beyond

In the 1990s saving children from prostitution became one of the most high profile causes for many NGOs and child rights movements, especially if it involved Western men travelling to poorer overseas countries and abusing children. The abuse that was uncovered was seen as self evident and Article 34 of the UNCRC used as a justification and as a moral imperative to end the problem and rescue the children caught in this form of ‘modern slavery’. However ethnographic work with children selling sex to foreign men suggested a more nuanced situation and children’s reactions were not always consistent or easy to predict and many were very clear that they did not want to be rescued. Based on fieldwork carried out in Thailand in the mid-1990s this chapter will analyse the gap between the rhetoric of universal children’s rights and the realities of children who sold sex and their explanations and justifications for what they did