Development and Education Programme for Daughters and Communities, Thailand
www.depdc.org
DEPDC is a non-profit community-based NGO working in Thailand on the prevention side of the trafficking of women and children into the sex industry or other exploitative child labour situations. It offers free education, vocational training and full-time accommodation for young girls and boys in an effort to achieve these goals. DEPDC operates a school and shelter in Northern Thailand for young girls (primarily Burmese and hill-tribe ethnic minorities) at extremely high risk for being sold by their parents into sex slavery. Survivors of sex trafficking also live at the DEPDC shelter.
DEPDC’s founder Sompop Jantakra launched the program because he began to notice that all the young girls in his village were disappearing at the age of 10 or 11. He discovered that the children were being sold into prostitution. First their virginity was sold (for about $300) at a hotel in town. This heinous practice involves selling a child to a client for 3-7 days, during which he can do whatever he wants to her, again and again. After this torturous initiation, the girls were then sold to brothels in larger cities, from which many never return.
Without citizenship or land tenure the majority of the hill tribe people residing in Northern Thailand live in poverty without access to education, health care or legitimate work opportunities. At the same time, their way of life, traditions and values are being rapidly eroded due to foreign influence, national development strategies and the influx of consumer goods. In hill-tribe villages across the region drug addiction and sales as well as the prevalence of HIV/AIDS are insidious problems breaking down families and communities.
Brothel owners have networks of agents combing the villages seeking out troubled families caught in the cycle of debt with few options. These traffickers can appear to be the answer to the family's financial struggles and fears with their simple solution of exchanging their young daughters for money. This system is a complicated web involving relatives, village elders, city authorities, police, government officials and business people who all benefit from the girl's labor.
Since its inception DEPDC has helped prevent thousands of children from the Mekong sub-region (Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, southern Yunnan province of China and Vietnam) succumb to the sex industry or other exploitative child labour situations. These young children have received further schooling or vocational training as a good start to a healthy life.
Teenagers at the DEPDC shelter make hand-woven cotton scarves and table linens. There is also a program for the mothers and other women in the Mae Sai area to work, providing the girls’ families with an alternative to selling their daughters and a further incentive to keep their children in school.
DEPDC has been replicating their prevention and aftercare program in other villages throughout Thailand, and they operate a national child emergency help-line, as well as a radio station educating people in native languages.
