There was recently a TIME magazine article about how hotels train their staff to spot sex trafficking victims at a hotel. I am Asian and I have lived in Asia my whole life. I have traveled throughout the continent extensively, especially throughout Southeast Asia. Reading through the TIME article made me realize that when looking at a situation, what Westerners see and interpret and what we see as Asians may be something entirely different. Paying with cash is obviously a cause for concern, especially if the reservation was originally made with a credit card.
This might be applicable in Western countries, but in Asia and especially in Southeast Asia, those signs are not necessarily a sign of sex trafficking. In Southeast Asia, you may see a male guest invite a special friend back to his hotel for a nightcap even in the middle of the day. In an effort to dig deeper into the topic and get a more Asian perspective on this, I set out to onto the streets and interviewed both hotel staff and working girls in Asia to listen to their experiences and opinions on the topic.
In Thailand and Hong Kong at least, when asking front-office staff and management from several hotels, they mentioned that such a scene is extremely normal. It might come as a surprise to foreigners that prostitution in all forms is actually illegal in Thailand.
Even if this lady walks in five times a day with different guests, we will just ask her each time for her ID and make a copy of it. No exceptions. Meanwhile in some more religious countries in Southeast Asia just south of Thailand, if you, a male hotel guest, walk into or out of a hotel with a local woman, you might just find yourself in a spot of trouble. The hotel staff may well report the case to the local religious authorities and you mister could well find yourself very shortly walking down the aisle with a brand spanking new local bride with a change of religion to boot.
I traveled into some of the most popular red-light districts in Bangkok to see that if I could find out about any evidence of human-trafficking and forced sex working in those areas from the very people who work in the industry. The girls I spoke with candidly were very open about what goes on in their bars and on the streets. There were stories of sex, drugs, violence, police extortion and money laundering. All the girls that I spoke with however made a point of reinforcing the point that all the girls that work in that area are there of their own volition.
