Sex Crimes

I followed a link to a blog today. The blog was nothing special, and not particularly well-written, but it triggered a connection in my brain to something I heard recently elsewhere.

In the blog, the writer — Ms. Sanitsuda Ekachai — makes a number of statements that I want to offer to you here.

As a mother, the news that grabbed my attention over the weekend … was about a boy gang rape. A nightmare for any parent, the incident involved three boys, aged 8, 11 and 12, raping a 7-year-old girl neighbour. The boys said they just wanted to copy the porn they saw in the Internet shop.

This horrifying news came on the heels of a Thammasat University sex scandal involving a male lecturer who offered a girl student better grades in exchange for oral sex.

How can poor parents keep close watch on their children when they have to struggle to make ends meet?

How can the boys know rape is a heinous crime when the hottest soap opera on TV now says rape is okay, when the law allows rapists to get away with murder by marrying the victims, and when men in authority rarely get punished for their sexual crimes?

I might have thought this was mindless blather or sensationalizing, but I didn’t. First of all, I was familiar with the two news stories, and her brief summaries are accurate based on the news reports that I read.

But what I might normally have dismissed was the final paragraph in the quote above, about TV soap operas, rapists and men in authority if I hadn’t recently heard an intelligent Thai commenter talking about this very thing recently.

I don’t watch Thai soap operas often, but when my ex-girlfriend lived with me they were frequently droning in the background. I would occasionally watch them with her as an exercise in trying to improve the quality of my dismally bad Thai.

American soap operas are useless drivel, and unbelievable story lines that seem to have little to do with real life in America. Marriage, divorce, re-marriage, murder, amnesia… all of these exist in America, but they’re not exactly standard fare in Allentown Pennsilvania on Saturday afternoon. Soap operas don’t reflect real life, and they are a strange perversion of some social realities.

Similarly, Thai soap operas (incidentally, Thais don’t use or understand the term ’soap opera’, typically they just call them ‘dramas’ in English) don’t reflect life in Thailand. For one thing, there’s a lot of conflict, including shouting, screaming, slapping, fighting and guns. These things are rarely seen in Thailand, where harmony is valued above all things and open conflict is seen as a complete loss of self control — an embarrassing loss of face.

I had a well educated Thai man — with a doctorate in literature who spoke very good English — recently comment on this. He expressed the view that these unreal scenes in soap operas act as a form of ‘release’ for Thais who watch the TV shows. He said that Thais have to keep such a tight control over their emotions that watching people let go of all control, with the resulting cat fights and brawls in the storyline, was a way for Thais vicariously to release some of the tension that builds up in their own lives.

Yeah. Pop psychology. I’m not here to debate whether he was right or wrong. What I’m interested in is what he said next.

He started talking about the fact that recently there have been shows in which the main characters have been shown to rape female characters, and that the audience will view this as a romantic thing. He said that this was not new; that even dramas set hundreds of years in the past have similar themes.

He spent some time explaining. He gave examples from Thai traditions — theatre and literature — where a powerful man or god would rape a woman. A common theme was that the woman would come to admire his power and virility, and typically would fall in love with him and often marry him.

Wow! What a different concept! Rape as a prelude to love and marriage.

Now, I want to stress that this guy had a PhD in literature; he should know what he is talking about.

It’s a far cry from the idea that it doesn’t matter what she’s wearing, what she’s done or how far you’ve gone, when a woman says ‘no’ she means ‘no’ and you need to respect that.

He linked these traditional stories to the dramas (soap operas) on TV today, saying that the representations of rape in these shows flows from this long history of male dominance that these stories would suggest is admired by women. He made it clear that, while he disagreed with this idea himself, it was an entrenched part of Thai sociology, and that a Westerner probably couldn’t understand how to many Thais (at least the writers, producers, directors, actors and TV executives) that makes it a theme that is acceptable to put on prime time TV.

I’m not trying to explain or defend anything here. I don’t think I even give a very cogent explanation, because I didn’t retain enough detailed information (he told me the names of specific characters from specific stories to illustrate, but I can’t recall them) to explain to you the way he explained to me.

My only point is to say that I recently heard a highly educated man saying much the same thing as this potentially shrill blogger quoted above. To me, it means that she isn’t shrill… she’s talking about real things.

Consider this information orginally posted by the Nation newspaper:

Children enjoy sexual assault scenes on TVs: survey

A recent survey has revealed shocking findings: many children enjoy watching scenes of rapes on TV and they come to see sexual assaults as something common. “Some children even say they want to be like leading male characters in TV series so that they can rape a woman,” Dr Noppadon Kannika said Tuesday as the head of the Assumption University’s research centre, “This is worrying”.

Conducted from April 24 to April 27, the survey covered 2,159 respondents in Bangkok and major cities. The respondent age starts from two years old up. According to the survey, raping scenes are the favorite among 21.1 per cent of children aged between 13 and 19 years old, 10.3 per cent of childrent between two and six years old and 6.4 per cent of those aged from seven to 12 years old.

On one forum here in Thailand a commenter wrote:

They see nothing wrong with [rape] as the lead male ends up marrying the woman he earlier raped and beat. We see this kind of acton so often that it becomes the norm for children. They learn that Thai males are superior and that they can get away with beating their wife or girlfriend.

How amazing! I feel overwhelmed by these ideas because I was so unaware of them. Yet it feels like I’ve been assaulted by this idea in the last 7 days.

If it weren’t so sad, it would almost be funny, since Thai TV is so heavily censored for other things. Pixilation is rampant, blocking out people holding lit cigarettes, pointing guns at other people and even many Buddha images. Another recent drama call something like “Airline Hostess Wars” was pulled off the air because of pressure from flight attendants who objected to the portrayal of flight attendants arguing and getting physically violent with one another in-flight.

But a story line built around rape doesn’t seem to tweak the censors’ antennae. Strange.

Thailand is a country where the rich and powerful are not held accountable to the same rules as the poor and weak. To use a hackneyed phrase, “money talks”.

The most recent high-profile example I know of involves the son of the Deputy Prime Minister. Several years ago when he was in the Army he was accused of shooting and killing a police officer in a bar-room brawl. He ran away to Malaysia to avoid being arrested, deserting his duties as an Army officer.

About a year later he returned to Thailand and had his day in court, and was found ‘not guilty’ of the killing. Thai laws on slander are very harsh; you can’t just say what you think here. A man who is found not guilty in court has the law on his side. I asked some Thai friends about the case and they were not shy about expressing their opinions about why he was not convicted.

What is undeniable, though, is that he was AWOL. He deserted his duties with the army.

Last week it was announced that this… person… had been re-instated to the Army, and will now hold an officer’s rank. In effect, he has been given the rank that he might have earned had he not deserted.

Is it because his father is the Deputy Prime Minister? What do you think?

In the light of high profile stories like these, I understand K. Santisuda’s lament about “men in authority [who] rarely get punished for their sexual crimes.” Here we have an army deserter and previously accused murderer being rewarded with a commission in the army; what kind of punishment would be meted out to the rich and powerful for rape in this society? Somehow, I think the answer is ‘not much’.

It seems that Ms. Sanitsuda Ekachai, the blog writer that I quoted a the top, is not simply an excitable mother over-reacting to one or two isolated news stories. In fact, her statements seem quite accurate and reasoned. Her concerns seem to be real.

This is an aspect of Thailand that I didn’t understand before, and I’m not sure I really understand it now. But it is disturbing.