(IPS) feature

Coloured pictures published recently on the front pages of a best-selling Thai newspaper showed police wrestling with a naked woman in a hotel room as they tried to arrest her on charges of prostitution.

Other newspapers, meantime, ran pictures of another woman in the room who was running to get a blanket to cover her body.

These pictures were about the results of an entrapment operation undertaken by Thai policemen on four Chinese sex workers in Thailand. The policemen had posed as customers in November last year, paying 5,000 baht (113.54 US dollars) to have sex with one woman.

When the law enforcers deemed that the timing was right, they busted the operation and allowed a number of Thai journalists and media groups in to take pictures and footage. Some footage was also shown on television.

While those pictures grabbed many a reader's attention, rights activists and sex workers say they point to the common thinking that the sex workers are criminals, without looking at the ones running prostitution rings.

This attitude is also behind media's portrayal of the women as offenders, showing them being rounded up and in various stages of undress, critics say.

''This gives the attitude towards prostitution that it is the women's guilt,'' said Chantawipa Apisuk, director of Empower Foundation, an organisation that works with sex workers. ''We hardly hear about other people involved.''

Undercover arrest

Soon after the November raids, 14 rights and women's groups activists handed an open letter to the Thai police, asking that they change the way undercover arrests are carried out and the practice of allowing open media coverage of prostitution-related raids.

''The policy and practice need to be reviewed,'' said the letter, signed by groups that included Empower, the Lawyers' Assembly of Thailand, the human rights lobby Forum-Asia, and the Global Alliance Against the Trafficking of Women.

''Those women were victims. They should be treated better and considered human beings who have the same rights we do, as what is said in the Thai constitution,'' they wrote. ''We, as Thai people, would not like this to happen to Thai women so we ask to give justice to these foreign workers.''

They also criticised media for exposing the sex workers in such a way as to make violence against women an ordinary matter.

Soon after receiving the petition, the police commissioner-general issued instructions to keep undercover operations secret among officers. But the debate was far from over - because similar raids on foreign sex workers and similar coverage by media occurred even after that.

That prompted Empower to organise a seminar this week, at which different views in the debate - from the sex workers, the police and media - were heard.

''Just because they are sex workers and they are not Thai, it does not mean they should be treated in a bad way,'' said 30-year-old Porn, a sex worker from northern Thailand. ''We actually do not want to be called prostitutes. We want to be thought of as human beings.''

''Yes, it is a (commercial sex) deal, but it is only with our customer that we have to undress,'' she added. ''But I do not think any sex worker would be happy with the idea of having everybody seeing her in that condition.''

But Police Leftenan General Surachai Jetpinongruamjai, investigation inspector, said the police were only doing their job and viewed the media as a partner in this task to ensure that they have evidence of wrongdoing in order to clamp down on the sex trade.

''They (raids) are not only because of the police's duty to collect as much evidence as they could to prove their guilt. It is also because of the changes in illegal methods these days, so police need to work harder and most of the time try to catch them red-handed, '' he added.

Prostitution-related busts

As for having media cover prostitution-related busts, he explained: ''It is also difficult to avoid newspapers from getting those pictures, or to separate police's and media's works from each other.''

Some editors say that for many newspapers, publishing photographs of police operations was just the nature of news, which includes presenting stories and pictures they believed would sell.

''It is all about the media having pictures they should not have gotten,'' said Niwat Kongpian, a columnist from Thai-language newspaper Matichon . ''But of course, those pictures could never be taken without police's permission, so the police have to do something with it.''

However, he admitted that media do have the room to choose which ones they want to publish - and therefore, what they want to say to the public.

''The messages (by the publication of photos taken during raids) are to show people what is right and wrong,'' said General Surachai. ''By making them see that these are illegal acts, we hope they will not be repeated.''

The National Commission for Women's Affairs estimates there are between 150,000 to 200,000 sex workers of various nationalities in Thailand, including those from the former Soviet Union, southern China, the Philippines and Burma.

Activists say they are increasingly being trafficked or drawn to Thailand to 'replace' locals who have moved on to other roles in the sex industry. Many have increasingly been seen in Bangkok and other big Thai cities since the mid-90s.

Empower's Chantawipa says the situation is made worse by how some policemen take advantage of the sex workers in the guise of undercover operations.

''There is no sex buyer to be arrested in these cases because the police themselves are customers,'' she said. She cited previous cases where before arresting the women, police, after paying them - would actually ask to have sex with them.

''This is against the law as both sex buyer and trading corrupter,'' Chantawipa said. ''Some police are taking advantage of these women. Some threaten the women to have sex or they would arrest them.''

Obscene commodity

Thailand, which once looked at prostitution as a crime and at sex workers as criminals, now has a revised law from 1996 that provides harsher punishment for traffickers as well as sex buyers.

While this is welcome, ''such policy has its weak points - it allows bad police to take advantage of it,'' said Chantawipa, the Empower director. She said that in some cases where sex workers are girls under 18 years old, the policemen involved could be charged with sexual abuse of children.

''It shows here a double-standard in the police practice in these operations,'' added Wasant Panich, member of the board of the National Commission Human Rights of Thailand. ''They can only be done by male police, and we surely would not ask women police to do such undercover with men sex workers.''

He said that if the police really want to arrest the big agents behind prostitution networks, they actually could have plenty of evidence without abusing the women or parading them before media. Law enforcers would even have evidence from the fact that sex workers accepted their money, and these women could be used witnesses later on, he added.

Meantime, Wasant said that media should ask themselves tough questions: ''Since we cannot deny that journalists can also make a lot of money out of these news and pictures, why can't these acts be considered against the law, as an obscene commodity?''