Thai attitudes around sexual conduct, including sex work, have shifted over the last twenty years. The Thai Prevention and Suppression of Prostitution Act (1996) is fast becoming an orphan law running counter to the moral code of modern Thai society. No one reports the crime of prostitution. Reports may be made about noise, underage drinking, and child abuse, but not about the buying and selling of sex. It has reached the point where police must instigate the transactions themselves in order to make any prostitution arrests at all. The application of the law and the impacts on sex workers are well documented in Empower reports such as “Hit & Run” and “Moving toward Decent Sex Work in Thailand”, which are based on more than three decades of sex worker-led organising, advocacy and community research.
We're not asking Thai society to approve of sex work, but rather to approve of the state giving equal protection to those who do sex work.
Despite significant expenditure and 60 years of criminalisation, the Thai law has spectacularly failed to end ‘prostitution’ in Thailand. Instead it has filled the pockets of corrupt authorities, who use it as a tool to extort money from the country’s sex workers. It has become an insurmountable wall standing between sex workers and access to justice and human rights. In 2017 Thailand was reviewed by the UN Committee for the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The legally binding recommendations included reviewing the prostitution law to decriminalise sex work, ceasing entrapment operations and violent raids, and extending the Labor Protection Act to all workers in the entertainment industry without exception. The committee’s recommendations reflect the growing acceptance that the criminalisation of sex work fuels discrimination, violence and other social problems. This acknowledgement of the need for decriminalisation began with UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon’s recommendation for decriminalisation in 2006 and has been endorsed by a growing list of UN agencies and leading global human rights organisations.
How Empower argues for decriminalisation
Generally we do not expect that everyone will, or even needs to, condone sex work. We're not asking Thai society to approve of sex work, but rather to approve of the state giving equal protection to those who do sex work. Supporting decriminalisation means to agree that human rights are inherent and inalienable, and that no one should be persecuted for what they do with their own bodies. It is to take a stand against male violence, especially violence institutionalised by the police and state. It is to want to remove one layer of the stigma which sex workers live and work on top of.
