Both religious and secular bodies in the modern world are tuned in to human exploitation. Wherever exploitation of peoples is occurring in the world, in whatever form, there is to be found religious and secular ‘missionaries’. They show up like ants to honey and commence to run interference. Wherever human dignity, human rights, are being usurped reporters and missionaries gather in flocks mostly from European and American NGO type organizations and religious denominations. This is especially true in Southeast Asia. The modern world is ostensibly singing in harmony on this front. Human beings must not be used and exploited and stepped on. Their dignity must be protected, especially children, young women but also young boys. Included in this list are the poor as well as refugees. These and other categories of people are very vulnerable to exploitation. All mission endeavors attempting to head off exploitation are well and good to the extent their peoples, methods and motives are insightful and righteous.

Isan Girl Being Consumed by the Bangkok Night By Chris Coles

In a former teaching trek I was invited to a new seminary in Cambodia. I arrived in Phnom Penh a few days before my teaching assignment commenced in order to have a look about the city and also to work through my notes. Finding a Western breakfast spot I began to frequent it each morning and with coffee and food I went through my lessons spending several hours. One morning illustrates my ‘ants to honey’ point well. Twice during my breakfast study Western men showed up harem in tow for their coffee and toast. The first guy had two Cambodian girls about 16 and 18 then a second arrived with three gals following him like a mother duck with her ducklings in tow, the youngest no doubt could not have been older than 14. I am not a religious or secular policeman. No NGO blood courses through my veins. But he spied me off in the corner with my white shirt and black pants and brief case and became unnerved. Abruptly he corralled his teen harem and made a quick exit. Western do gooders have arrived in the bad boys playground and are spoiling the party. There are many playing fields where these skirmishes to protect the vulnerable occur. I have seen these at close range but as a spectator. My job is to think about what’s going on and seed my thoughts into my lessons. Insight and understanding are needed for reform.

In the following I point to one of the forces that I believe is driving a part of the exploitation occurring in the sex for money trade in Thailand. My language and conceptual grid is of course Western, those of whom I write are non-Western and their conceptual cultural grid would not name and explain the same realities I describe in the same way or with the same meaning. The window through which I look at and understand the problem discussed here is Christian and Western. If the reader has no tolerance for a little theology (actually theological anthropology) then there is no need to read further. Theology, as I am using it, allows for a different way of understanding the problem of exploitation of young women involved in a significant segment of the sex for money trade.

At the heart of religion and culture in Southeast Asia (especially Cambodia, Laos, Burma/Myanmar, and Thailand (Vietnam) is an ethic of reverence. Reverence to all authority is linked not merely to the cultural inertia of old traditions but merit. Merit is a, if not thee, engine propelling this ethic. Reverence as I am using it goes beyond respect and here is where my Judeo-Christian meaning grid comes into play.

Reverence in my tradition intersects the problem that the First Commandment in the Ten Commandments addresses. When the invisible but revealed Yahweh/God is not the primary loyalty humans always give their highest loyalty to a visible secondary power and/or person. This visible secondary power or person may be collective or individual, human or natural (nature). Here follows a praxis setting where this problem is discussed. It opens with a true story of a 25-year-old woman named Nittaya. I have taken care to be precise and not bend the details to my thesis.

With purpose in mind, with a friend accompanying me, I went in search of a chat that might clarify some things. Success was easier than I thought. I met a young lady named Nittaya on a street in Bangkok and talked to her at length and then met with her several times again and corresponded with her. She is/was one of a few hundred thousand women working in the lucrative sex for money trade. Like many she did not chose this work it was chosen for her. She was not trafficked but merely obedient.

She is a college graduate. Her parents are middle class. Her father is a senior (i.e. tenured) teacher at the high school level, her brother holds a PhD and teaches in the university. All of her four siblings married and prospered within their middle class socio-economic standing. No economic deprivation existed but her parents picked her and arranged her future in the lucrative sex for money trade and of course they received a weekly dividend. She could leave this work if a suitor/husband rewarded the family accordingly. By her own confession she insisted that she disdained the work and wanted true love and romance and listened to western music which of course elevates romantic love.

Culturally and religiously Southeast Asia elevates the ethic of deference to the highest level, far beyond the western idea of respect to the level of reverence. The roots of this ethic come from the dominant religion, (Buddhism) which continues to inform and shape culture. Children at any age, young or older, will do anything their parents require and because it is for the parent that the deed or action is done, no matter what it is, save outright violence or robbery, the deed or action is not merely justified but becomes an act of righteousness and a maker of merit. Merit promises metaphysical benefits.

I have no mind to pick on Buddhism and ignore the problems inherent in culture and religion in the West. I would rather aim my critique at an opposite problem. If Buddhism in the East seeds an ethic of reverence and deference that can be abused, ‘human’ in the West conceived as an inviolable individual with near absolute rights and freedoms can also be abused. Lions hunt in pairs. No doubt devotees on each side of this divide view the other as the greater social menace. But here my focus is on trying to penetrate the roots of a particular problem in Southeast Asia.

Here in this ethic, benignly called deference or reverence, is a hidden player that I now believe combines with others and drives the exploitation of young women in the region. For good reason the West has elevated the idea of the innate rights of the individual and while this is catching on in Asia it founders when it comes up against traditions rooted deep in religion and culture that form in children an ethic of absolute loyalty to parents (and authority) and require children to advance the welfare of parents no matter how able and prosperous they are. This, I am convinced, is one of the invisible roots that often is a participant in the sex for money industry in Southeast Asian culture. Most often this factor, more precisely this force, behind a young woman’s involvement in this work is subtle and ‘benign’ i.e. not viewed as abusive or exploitative. Nor is it necessarily or predominately physically abusive.Mostly it occurs under a religiously engendered ethic of parental obedience and care and it does not rupture filial bonds. And it is viewed as generating merit.

Understanding this (or grasping this) I believe shines light on the weakness of secular NGO type antidotes to this problem. This is so both because their measurement of exploitation is limited to harsher more obvious transgressions of human dignity and because they often do not grasp the religio-cultural root that is in the mix. If my insight has merit, and I believe it does (not simply because of one encounter but many years living and working here in S E Asia thinking and reflecting about the culture) then simply importing a more robust aggressive human rights ethic with its premise of the inviolability of the individual has limited effectiveness. The Western dogma insists that every person is enfranchised by God and nature with life, liberty, self-determination and dignity that cannot be rightfully violated or trespassed. It is conceived as inviolable. I am suggesting that this doctrine and ethic does not and cannot travel with ease too far into many cultures in the East without coming up against another deeply rooted ethic and doctrine that weakens. if not. derails it within certain contexts. The ethic requiring children to exist in deference, reverence and obedience to their parents and to exist for their parents, because these are rooted deep in tradition, culture and religious metaphysics, easily resists the career of modern Western “values” into Southeast Asian cultures (i.e. inside the family /parent contexts discussed here).

This is why some of the roots of the problem under discussion here are deeper than economic deprivation or greed. To reduce the antidote of this problem simply to improving the economy for the poor,  better education and enlightenment about human rights and better law enforcement is not enough. The roots of the problem are deeper. Can we grasp that this problem does not vividly appear unrighteous within the cultures where it is found ? We see this movement of young women into the sex for money trade by parents as blatantly exploitative and unrighteous but many, if not most, people within these cultures see it differently. It is considered to be sort of like  ‘taking one for the team’. Or, as one looker observed, the prostituting of a daughter is like an obedient son required to lay down his freedom and become a soldier. But because necessity and deprivation may not be involved these illustrations fall short and we must look deeper into the religio-cultural dimension.

The First Commandment, while explicitly addressing God’s claim on our highest loyalty, implicitly points to the problem inherent in human nature. Where this higher invisible loyalty is missing, visible loyalties gain the highest place. Something in nature abhors a vacuum and this vacuum lies near the nub and root of the problem. The Church knows this and cannot simply merge its mission with the secular NGO type mission work, although the church no doubt should embrace common goals where they exist. The Christian Gospel is the evangelical friend of the First Commandment rooting in humans a higher invisible loyalty, which in doing so subtly makes relative (while not destroying) visible loyalties. In this relativism the real antidote, I believe, is to be found. It supports, empowers and transforms the individual ethic and it saves  mission work that is truly Christian from falling into ethical nomism and legalism that is rife in secular endeavors.

I lost contact with this young woman but she told me her story concluding with this phrase “my name is Nittaya and we are many…”

*Here follows a couple rhetorical and theological questions that I think are related to this discussion. Are we Western secular and religious missionaries simply assuming humans exist in Southeast Asia as ‘individuals’ by our definition, or a ‘universal’ definition, of what ‘humans’ are and what humanness is? And / or are we calling them to become ‘human’ by our definition. And if so can that be accomplished or fulfilled merely by an ethical campaign? Both the church and the secular world in the West and those enlightened in the East know that ‘individual’ is an imperfect conceptual construction of the human person. Even when ‘individual’ is balanced by concepts of community it fails to reach the Judeo-Christian Christian understanding of humanness. Secular definitions of human and of human rights and human freedom are not perfect, not without a serious downside. And they are not wholly synonymous with Christian understandings and solutions. I believe it is closer to the truth to state that ‘human’ is not something innate but something that is a project. And this project Christians believe involves us in a dialectic with an invisible higher loyalty. This distinction is not a novel one. Self viewed as complete in itself underpins the Enlightenment birth of this designation – individual. But many Jewish and Christian philosophers and theologians argue that human = human in relation to other/Other. I believe missions for justice, especially those that emerge from the Church must be chastened by this truth if they are not to lose their salt and become overly pedagogical, strident, judgmental and legalistic.

*Another distinction I think that is helpful in looking deeper into this problem and how it is met is to think about the difference between a rebellion and a revolution. All rebellions remain tied to that which they are rebelling against. Revolutions on the other hand discover a new truth that enables them to view the controlling party differently in their imagination. Looking at a controlling party through the lens that new truth provides serves to downsize the oppressor and open up freedom to reconceive the relationship on new terms. To rebel against parental ‘overreach’ (an overreach which I argue is one force behind this problem in Southeast Asia that we in the West call forced prostitution) is one possibility, one that I think is very rare and without a future. Another response would be for society to scold the parents and tell them they must shorten their reach and enfranchise children with more control over their own future. I am not saying this does not have merit. I think it does have some merit but it also possesses limitations and distortions because it would require a sea change in culture. What the church that is true to its Gospel brings to the table is a spiritual revolution that ‘accidentally’ undercuts the absoluteness of the position parents enjoy over their children especially as they mature into young adults.

*Another layer in this problem is the split between body and spirit inherent in prostitution, a split that is relatively compatible with much of Eastern thought but foreign to Judeo-Christian understanding. Even so this bifurcation has also infected the West coming into culture through the back door of an individualism and assertion of freedom and right that has lost its religious root. But this waits for a later discussion.