"Lin-Lin" was 13 when her mother died. Her father took her to a job placement agency, which promised to get her a good job, and took $480 as an advance on her earnings. Instead she was taken to a brothel, where she sits in a windowed room with a number. Clients pay the owner $4 an hour for her. She cannot leave until she pays off her debt, which is her cost to the brothel owner, plus interest and expenses.

If "Lin-Lin" refuses to take care of her clients, she might be beaten, burned with cigarettes, or have her head immersed in water until she relents. If she tries to escape, she might be killed.

"He's the one": A former sex slave identifies her Australian abuser after a brothel raid.
Of the $4, she theoretically gets about $1.60, plus tips. The owner keeps her money... and the records. "Lin-Lin" will be there a long time.

Hundreds of thousands of Asia's children, mostly girls but also boys, have been taken from their homes and delivered to bordellos, where they fuel a sex industry that thrives in great part by servicing Western and Japanese men.

Although child prostitutes are used by Asian locals, some countries in Southeast Asia have become centers of sex tourism and targets of organized pedophile rings. Centered in Thailand but spread throughout Asia, this international flesh trade consumes girls as young as eight years of age, according to Christine Vertucci, information officer with ECPAT.

The sexual enslavement of children is part of the general exploitation of children in impoverished parts of the world. Indeed, sex slaves are captured in much the same way as Haitian cane cutters, India's carpet weavers, and Persian Gulf camel jockeys. They are lured with false promises of decent employment, caught in debt bondage, kidnapped, or simply sold outright by parents, friends, or people they know.

Debt bondage in particular continues to enslave millions today in Asia. They are trapped by an obligation that may be passed from generation to generation; indeed, because of incredibly low wages, high interest charges, and cheating, it may never be repaid. Armies of debt-bonded slaves -- including little children -- work in rock quarries, as housemaids, building roads, weaving carpets, or as forced prostitutes. With no social safety net, a bad harvest or serious illness might mean starvation; bondage is better than death.

It is also true, according to Chis McMahon of the Centre for the Protection of Children's Rights (CPCR) in Bangkok, that some girls are simply sold by parents who have fallen on hard times -- not so much from a bad harvest but due to a drinking or drug problem. Some have been filled by TV's corrupting materialism and simply must have a car, television, or VCR.

According to Vertucci of ECPAT, many of the little girls who are used by their families to pay off a debt do not know what the original principal or interest rate is, and so they will never buy back their freedom. Brothels can range from the seedy to the hideous. Often, they are closed compounds from which the girls may not leave without escorts. The local police are corrupt: A raid is an opportunity to collect a payoff, or even to sell back the girls to the brothel owner, who then adds that cost to the girls' debt. The police themselves are frequently bordello patrons.

Sex slavery is now so ingrained in Thailand that many girls accept their fate as just another way of life. "More and more from their village have done it, and the Thai girls may pay the debt and stay in a life of prostitution, getting some economic return," reports McMahon.
Indeed, the worst cases of brutally forced prostitution now involve non-Thai groups. The fear of AIDS has spawned an intense demand for girls who are supposedly disease-free.

Thai-based sex slavers now seek out the very young and girls from other countries. Tens of thousands of girls from Burma, China, and Cambodia are being lured and kidnapped.  ECPAT is waging an international campaign for Western countries to criminalize the sexual abuse of children by their own citizens in foreign countries. (The U.S. Congress enacted such a provision under President Clinton's crime bill.) In June 1995, Swedish courts chalked up the first such extraterritorial conviction, jailing a man caught in bed in Thailand with a 14- year-old boy.  Outside pressure has brought some changes in Thailand as well.

A new Crime Suppression Division has been formed to battle forced prostitution. The CSD is a national police force whose men are moved constantly so they can less easily form relationships with brothel owners. But there are only 30 or so of them in the entire country, and their effectiveness is marginal.  For example, on March 1, 1995, the CPCR organized a raid on a brothel in Chiang Mai, Thailand's second-largest city, to free foreign girls who were held against their will. The girls were from the Akha hill tribe and were trafficked from China to Burma and then Thailand. The CPCR called in the CSD. The raid worked, the girls were rescued, and the pimps and mama-san were arrested. But they were immediately released on bail, and, when they disappeared, local Thai police were "too busy" to rearrest them. The brothel is now functioning as before.

The anti-slavery activists rescued 13 girls in this raid -- 11 from Burma, 2 from China. The girls are now undergoing rehabilitation. But as Amihan Abueva of the child welfare group Salinlahi Foundation in Manila says, "It's more difficult to rehabilitate children who have been sexually exploited than even those who have been traumatized by war."

The Cadena smuggling ring trafficked women, some as young as 14, from Mexico to Florida. The victims were forced to prostitute themselves with as many as 130 men per week in a trailer park. Of the $25 charged the "Johns" the women received only $3. The Cadena members kept the women hostage through threats and physical abuse. One woman was kept in a closet for 15 days for trying to escape. Some were beaten and forced to have abortions (the cost of which was added to their debt). The women worked until they paid off their debts of $2,000 to $3,000.

Domestic servants in some countries of the Middle East are forced to work 12 to 16 hours a day with little or no pay, and subject to sexual abuse such as rape, forced abortions, and physical abuse that has resulted in death.

Traffickers in many countries in West Africa take girls through voodoo rituals in which girls take oaths of silence and are often raped and beaten, prior to their leaving the country. They are also forced to sign agreements stating that, once they arrive in another country, they owe the traffickers a set amount of money. They are sworn to secrecy and given detailed accounts of how they will be tortured if they break their promise. Traffickers have taken women and young girls to shrines and places of cultural or religious significance; they remove pubic and other hair and then perform a ceremony of intimidation.
In August 2001, soldiers with the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Eritrea were purchasing ten-year-old girls for sex in local hotels.

Before the arrival of 15,000 UN troops in Cambodia in 1991, there were an estimated 1,000 prostitutes in the capital. Currently, Cambodia's illegal sex trade generates $500 million a year. No less than 55,000 women and children are sex slaves in Cambodia, 35 percent of which are younger than 18 years of age.

Over 5,000 women and children have been trafficked from the Philippines, Russia and Eastern Europe and are forced into prostitution in bars servicing the U.S. Military in South Korea.