Introduction: Personal Reflections and Disciplinary Perspectives

Child abuse is an emotive topic. There are no easy or straightforward ways of understanding or framing it, and it is difficult, and arguably undesirable, to think about it dispassionately or without judgement. It defies easy definitions, changes according to context and depends on intention – something hard to judge now and almost impossible to have done in the past. Ideas about what is right and beneficial for a child and what is wrong and abusive are highly unstable and have shifted dramatically over both time and place. Few children in twenty-first-century England are sent to bed hungry as a punishment, made to stand in a corner at school, or rapped on the knuckles with a ruler by their teachers. None are caned at school and increasingly few are smacked at home. Yet as a child in the 1970s none of these were uncommon or especially remarkable in my experience. I remember one friend’s very loving parents keeping a small paddle over the oven in the kitchen. On it was written ‘Heat for the Seat’, and every Sunday it would be taken down and applied liberally to her or any of her siblings’ bottoms. While considered somewhat over the top at the time by my friends and I, we also saw it as eccentric rather than abusive (although I recognize, of course, that my friend may well have seen it differently).

My more academic interest in children’s experiences of abuse was prompted in the early 1990s when I began a PhD in social anthropology. Focusing on South East Asia, I had become interested in how children were thought about cross-culturally, how their roles and responsibilities were perceived, and how ideas about nurturance and child rearing differed in places and contexts vastly unlike my own. I was heavily influenced by the idea of ‘child-centred research’, a new way of theorizing and working with children that had come to prominence throughout the social sciences in the 1980s. This emphasized the need for research to be focused on children’s own experiences and explanations and to be conducted ‘with’ rather than ‘on’ children. Inspired by this new way of thinking, I started to research child labour in Thailand. I quickly discovered that while there was a problem of children working in sweatshops, a more pressing concern, and source of national and international scrutiny, seemed to be the numbers of foreign men who were buying sex from children.

In the mid-1990s, the international and English-language media in Asia were full of stories of western men travelling to South East Asia, particularly Thailand and the Philippines, if they wanted young girls, or Sri Lanka if they desired young boys, and buying sex. These articles would usually go on to tell the heart-rending story of a child who was either cruelly duped, or sold by her impoverished and greedy parents, into a life of prostitution. She would be taken to a brothel, forced to have sex with up to twenty foreign clients a night and then be rescued by a kind-hearted charity worker, or journalist, only to discover she was HIV-positive and had a limited time left to live. There seemed to be no repercussions for the perpetrators and, on the rare occasions they were caught, they were often able to leave the country without penalties. Such stories left little room for nuance – and indeed how much nuance was needed? These were western men travelling the world, violating children and abusing the financial, social, gender and ethnic privileges that being relatively well-off white men conferred on them. The only matter for debate was around terminology. Terms like ‘child prostitution’ or ‘child sex work’ were suggested but quickly discarded in favour of ‘the commercial sexual exploitation of children’ or even simply ‘the commercial sexual abuse of children’ to make the exploitation and violence explicit.

Fired up with ideas of child-centred research, I felt that long-term anthropological fieldwork could provide a deeper and richer account of these children’s lives. Between 1993 and 1994, therefore, I spent fifteen months working in a small informal settlement in Thailand where western tourists bought sex from both boys and girls aged between six and fourteen. I lived alongside the children, talked to them daily and tried as best as I could to understand their worlds, their ideas and their everyday experiences. I had not been in the community for long, however, before I discovered my theories, ideas and personal morality simply did not ‘fit’ the context I was describing. I found listening to children’s accounts of their lives deeply problematic because they did not say what I expected and – indeed – wanted them to say.

I had assumed that the children sold sex because they had no choice, that it was the worst possible option and that they would rather do anything else. They told me something different. They said that there were other jobs available, such as scavenging on rubbish tips for scrap metal, begging or selling food in the street, but they did not want to do these. The rats in the rubbish dump frightened them, as did the thought of being mugged by older street children who would take any money they earned from begging. In contrast, selling sex, despite its drawbacks, was lucrative and seen to have other benefits, such as the chance to eat well and stay in good hotels or apartments. I was expecting rage and anger against the men who abused them. Yet the children expressed no such feelings. Instead, they resisted my assertions that their involvement with foreign clients was a form of abuse which violated their rights. They claimed that they were not abused. Rather, they told me that they were ‘being supported by a foreigner’ or that they ‘had guests’. Sometimes they claimed that these men were ‘friends’ because they came back regularly to visit them. Occasionally they would ask me to help them write letters saying how much they loved them. A child once snapped at me while I was carefully, and no doubt patronizingly, explaining her abuse to her: ‘He is so good to me; he gives me and my family money whenever we need it. How can he be bad?’ She later stopped talking to me altogether because I would not stop referring to ‘such ugly things’.

Significantly, the children were still living with their parents who knew what they were doing. They implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, encouraged it, claiming to see no harm. Again, I had taken it for granted that parents would protect, nurture and make sacrifices for their children. That parents had duties and responsibilities to their children but not necessarily the other way round. Neither parents nor children agreed, and within the community I found that the sense of duty I anticipated was reversed. Children were thought to owe a debt of gratitude to their parents for giving them life. They were expected to look after their parents, to go to work so that their parents did not have to, and to support their parents in whatever way they could. These obligations were lifelong. Drawing on culturally valued traditions of filial piety and family obligations allowed these children to present themselves as dutiful sons and daughters. I was constantly told that being ‘supported by foreigners’ was a means to an end and a way of fulfilling their perceived obligations and duties. When I asked one 13-year-old about selling sex, she replied, ‘It’s only my body, but this is my family.’ Both parents and children were working within a vastly different framework of what was acceptable or unacceptable. Within that context, I was the odd one out, identifying and condemning abuse where they claimed to see none.

It seemed self-evident that what was occurring was a form of violence. The western clients, despite occasional acts of self-serving generosity, were abusing their power to take advantage of poor children who had none of their privileges. To label their behaviour as anything other than horrific abuse would provide a justification for things which should never be condoned. But I also found it deeply frustrating that the children and their parents could not see this, would argue with me about it and get angry with me when I kept, as they were fond of pointing out, ‘going on about it’. Even after her eight-year-old son returned to her injured after spending time with a western client, another mother told me, ‘It’s just for one hour. What harm can happen to him in one hour?’

It would have been easy enough to dismiss the children’s accounts as straightforwardly wrong. I could rightly have pointed out that they lacked the wider economic, social or political understanding which would have allowed them to see that they were being exploited by both their parents and their clients. Or I could have argued that they were victims of a form of false consciousness, unable to see their own oppression or, knowing it, refusing to acknowledge it. The alternative would be to take on a position of extreme relativism and claim it was accepted and acceptable within that community and, therefore, if these children did not see abuse, then it was not my place to identify or condemn it.

In the end, I tried to make sense of what I saw through the well-worn but possibly clichéd defence that understanding is different from condoning and that to intervene successfully we need to know how the problem is viewed from the inside. I am aware, however, that this argument might fall short, and there is a very thin line between...