Scared but desperate, Thai sex personnel forced to the road
05 April, 2020
A shutdown to contain the coronavirus has killed Thailand's party scene and forced sex staff like Pim out of bars and onto desolate streets. She's scared but desperately needs customers to pay her rent.
Red-light districts from Bangkok to Pattaya have gone quiet with night clubs and massage parlours closed and tourists blocked from entering the united states.
That has left around 300,000 sex personnel out of employment, pressing some onto the streets where the risks are sharpened by the pandemic.
"I'm afraid of the virus but I have to find customers therefore i can pay for my room and food," Pim, a 32-year-old transgender sex worker, told AFP within an area of Bangkok where previously bawdy neon-lit bars and brothels have gone dark.
Since Friday, Thais have been under a 10pm to 4am curfew. Bars and eat-in restaurants closed several days earlier.
A lot of Bangkok's sex employees had jobs in the relative safety of bars, doing work for tips and ready to go back home with customers.
When their workplaces suddenly closed, most returned home to hold back out the crisis.
Others like Pim went to work the streets.
The government says it really is ready to enforce a 24-hour curfew if essential to control a virus which has infected a lot more than 2,000 persons and killed 20, according to official figures.
Pim is paying much price for the movement restrictions - she's not had a person for 10 days and the bills are stacking up.
Her friend Alice, another transgender sex worker, in addition has been forced to go from a go-go bar to the roadside.
"I used to make decent money sometimes $300-600 a week," Alice says.
"But when businesses turn off my income stopped too. We are doing this because we're poor. If we can not pay our hotel they'll kick us out."
HIGH RISK
The casual tourist loiters near clusters of sex workers, before a furtive negotiation and an instant march to a local hotel, mostly of the still open on Bangkok's main tourist drag.
The already-high risks of sex work have rocketed as the virus spreads.
Sex personnel have flocked back again to homes in the united states in anticipation of weeks of virtual lockdown before Thailand's night economy comes home to life.
There are fears the malaise could last for months, yanking billions of tourist dollars from the economy and leaving those employed in the informal sector destitute.
They include sex employees - an against the law but widely accepted part of Thailand's nightlife.
There are concerns a Thai government emergency scheme to give 5,000 baht (US$150) to millions of newly jobless over the next three months will exclude sex workers because they cannot prove formal employment.
The Empower Foundation, an advocacy group for the kingdom's sex workers, says entertainment venues make around US$6.4 billion a year, most of them selling sex in a few form.
Women are suffering the most from the virus measures, it says. Many are mothers and their family's main income earner, forced into sex work by insufficient opportunities or low graduate salaries.
The group has written an open letter to the federal government urging it to "discover a way to provide assist with all workers who have lost their earnings".
As the 10pm curfew looms, Pim and Alice prepare for your final forlorn patrol for customers.
"I think the federal government has been really slow. They don't really care about persons like us who work in the sex industry," Alice said.
"We're more afraid of experiencing nothing to eat than the virus."
Source: www.channelnewsasia.com
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