There are some stories that appear, at first, to be isolated horrors. A dead girl. A foreign man. A suitcase. A beach city. A police investigation. A family left to grieve in front of cameras while the rest of the world scrolls past, briefly appalled, before moving on to the next spectacle.
But sometimes a single case opens a door into something much larger than itself.
That was my immediate reaction when I saw the reports about Tunchanok Donhomla, the 17-year-old Thai girl whose body was found inside a suitcase in Pattaya. Australian national Simon Peter Carman has been arrested and charged with intentional murder, concealing a corpse, moving or destroying a corpse, and abduction of a minor for indecent purposes. According to Reuters, Thai police said CCTV showed Carman entering a condominium with the girl and later leaving alone with a large suitcase; Reuters also reported that police said he had admitted strangling her but claimed he did not intend to kill her. He has not been convicted, and any discussion of the case has to remain careful about that, but the facts being reported are horrifying enough to demand more than passive shock.
I am currently writing about femicide, and this case caught my eye not because I want to turn the death of a teenage girl into true crime content, but because it sits inside a much wider pattern of vulnerability. It sits inside the reality of a sex tourism industry that has been treated, for decades, as though it is somehow inevitable, somehow cultural, somehow just one of those things that happens in Thailand, rather than the result of war, poverty, tourism, male demand, racial fantasy and global inequality.
And the first thing that has to be said is this: a 17-year-old is a child. Whatever else emerges in this particular criminal case, wherever the legal process goes, and however the facts are finally established, any commercial sexual context involving someone under the age of 18 is not “sex work” in the adult labour-rights sense. It is child sexual exploitation.
That distinction matters because the conversation around Thailand is so often deliberately blurred. Adult sex workers exist. Adult sex workers have agency. Adult sex workers organise, survive, resist and make decisions inside constrained circumstances. But children are children, and the existence of an adult sex industry must never be allowed to become the soft-focus background against which the exploitation of minors is excused, normalised or euphemised as “nightlife.”
The scandal is not Thai women
The scandal of Thailand’s sex tourism industry is not Thai women.
The scandal is not that poor women make decisions inside poverty. It is not that women migrate. It is not that women support their families. It is not even, in the simplest sense, that sex work exists, because sex work has existed in many forms across many societies and many periods of history.
The scandal is the structure.
The scandal is the way Thailand has been marketed, consumed and whispered about as a place where foreign men can access women and girls more cheaply, more easily, and with less social consequence than they could at home.
The scandal is the way Western men — and not only Western men, but Western men very visibly and very historically — have treated parts of Southeast Asia as a sexual exception zone.
The scandal is the way poverty turns consent into something more complicated than the smug liberal imagination wants to admit, because it is very easy to talk about “choice” when you are not choosing between low-paid agricultural work, factory labour, debt, family obligation, limited education, migration, violence, stigma and hunger.
The scandal is the tourist economy that looks away because money is being made.
The scandal is the male demand.
How many Thai women are involved in sex work?
This is the first question most people ask, and it is also one of the hardest to answer honestly.
There is no reliable statistic for the percentage of Thai women who have ever been involved in sex work at some point in their lives. That lifetime figure does not exist in any robust way because sex work is mobile, informal, stigmatised, partially criminalised, and often hidden inside other economies: bars, massage parlours, karaoke venues, escorting, online arrangements, “girlfriend” relationships, entertainment work and tourism-adjacent labour.
What we do have are point-in-time estimates, and even those vary widely depending on who is counting, what they are counting, and whether they are only counting registered establishments or the wider hidden economy.
A 2024 UNAIDS factsheet reported that among Thailand’s estimated population of sex workers in 2023, 62% were female, 13% were male and 25% were transgender. That alone is important because even the phrase “Thai sex workers” often conjures a narrow image of young cisgender women, when the reality is more varied and includes male and transgender sex workers who are often even more invisible in public discussion.
Older International Labour Organization research shows why the numbers are so difficult to pin down. The ILO noted that the exact number of people in prostitution is impossible to calculate because of the illegal and clandestine nature of the work. It reported that Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health recorded around 65,000 prostitutes in 1997, while unofficial sources placed the figure between 200,000 and 300,000. Across the four Southeast Asian countries studied by the ILO — Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand — between 0.25% and 1.5% of the total female population were estimated to be engaged in prostitution at a given time, not across a lifetime.
That distinction matters. A point-in-time figure tells us who is working now. It does not tell us how many women have passed through the industry, left it, returned to it, entered it temporarily, moved between formal and informal arrangements, or hidden their past involvement because the stigma is so severe.
And the stigma is part of the trap. The woman is blamed for doing the work, but the men who buy her are excused as tourists. The woman is treated as dirty, but the economy around her is treated as entertainment. The woman is criminalised, shamed, pitied or eroticised, while the man becomes merely a customer.
Family pressure, poverty and the burden of sending money home
One of the most uncomfortable parts of this subject is the role of family economics.
There are stories, again and again, of girls and women entering the sex industry not simply because an individual man coerced them, but because an entire household became dependent on the money they could send home. The ILO reported that in Thailand, close to US$300 million was transferred annually to rural families by women working in the urban sex sector, a sum it noted could exceed the budgets of government-funded development programmes.
That is an extraordinary figure because it exposes the real architecture of the industry. This is not just individual women selling sex to individual men. It is an informal welfare system. It is rural development paid for with women’s bodies. It is daughters financing parents, siblings, children, land, houses, debts and survival.
And once a family becomes dependent on that money, leaving becomes harder.
This is where the simplistic language of “choice” collapses. A woman may technically “choose” to go to Pattaya. She may technically “choose” to work in a bar, a massage parlour, an escort arrangement, or a transactional relationship with a foreign man. But when the alternative is poverty, when her family expects remittances, when local work pays a fraction of what she can earn in the city, when education is limited, when domestic violence has already shaped her life, and when the entire tourism economy is built around making her labour available, the moral clarity of that word “choice” begins to disintegrate.
The ILO’s research was very clear that sex work in the countries it studied usually paid more than other forms of unskilled labour available to young, often poorly educated women, while also carrying stigma, danger and health risks. It also found that many women wanted to leave the occupation if they could, but were afraid of losing the income they and their families relied upon.
That is the trap.
The woman is stigmatised for doing the work. The family may be ashamed of the work. Society disapproves of the work. The law criminalises parts of the work. But the money is accepted.
The Vietnam War did not end; it became infrastructure
What really struck me in looking more deeply into Thailand’s sex tourism industry is how modern it is.
There is a lazy, racist, orientalist story that treats Thailand as though it has always simply been “like this,” as if Thai women were naturally available to foreign men, as if Pattaya emerged from some timeless cultural tendency rather than from very specific twentieth-century political and military conditions.
But the modern mass sex tourism industry in Thailand has a history, and one of the most important parts of that history is the Vietnam War.
A major LSE Centre for Economic Performance paper, War, Migration and the Origins of the Thai Sex Industry, argues that the geography of Thailand’s sex industry was shaped by US military presence during the Vietnam War. The authors compared Thai military bases used by the US army with unused Thai bases and found that districts near former US bases had five times more commercial sex workers. They also linked the later expansion of the industry to female migration from regions affected by agricultural crisis.
At the peak of the Vietnam War, the paper reports, around 50,000 US servicemen were stationed in Thailand, and around 700,000 US servicemen visited Thai bases between 1962 and 1976. US authorities organised Rest and Recreation leave for servicemen, while bars, nightclubs, massage parlours and brothel districts grew around military bases and red-light districts.
This is the part we have to sit with.
The war ended, but the infrastructure remained.
The soldiers left, but the routes, venues, economies, reputations and expectations stayed.
A temporary military demand shock became a durable tourism economy. What began around soldiers became organised around tourists. What was built for men on leave became marketed to men on holiday.
That is not culture. That is political economy.
Western men and the demand side of the equation
The supply side of the sex tourism industry is studied constantly: the women, the girls, the poverty, the migration, the families, the bars, the brothels, the trafficking, the health risks, the stigma.
But the demand side is the moral centre of the issue.
Because this industry exists because men buy it.
And when we talk about Thailand specifically, we have to talk about the foreign male imagination. Pattaya is not simply a Thai city. It is an international fantasy destination produced by decades of male tourism, military history, racialised desire and economic inequality. Recent ethnographic research in Pattaya, based on interviews with 76 participants, found that women often working in sex and massage industries perceived relationships with farang men — white Western foreigners — as one of their best, and sometimes only, routes to security, while also navigating scams, abuse and online risks.
That is what makes the dynamic so disturbing.
The foreign man arrives with money, mobility, legal distance and a passport. The local woman or girl is often navigating poverty, family obligation, low-paid work, migration, stigma and danger. The encounter is then dressed up as romance, adventure, “nightlife,” “girlfriend experience,” or the pathetic delusion of the lonely Western man who tells himself he is being loved, when what he is often purchasing is not love but inequality.
And again, this is not to deny that real relationships can exist between Thai women and foreign men. Human life is complicated. People form attachments across all kinds of circumstances. But sex tourism as an industry is not a love story. It is a market built around unequal bargaining power.
The question is not whether every foreign man in Thailand is abusive. Obviously not.
The question is why so many foreign men understand Thailand as a place where they can buy forms of access, youth, submission, dependency or sexual availability that would be harder, more expensive, more stigmatised or more legally risky at home.
What percentage of tourists are sex tourists?
This is another place where the honest answer is frustrating: there is no reliable percentage.
There is no official, credible, comprehensive data set that tells us what proportion of visitors to Thailand are sex tourists, because “sex tourist” is not a category most people self-report honestly, and because the boundaries are deliberately blurred. A man may travel for beaches and nightlife and buy sex while he is there. Another may travel specifically for sex but describe it as retirement, romance or companionship. Another may form a long-term transactional relationship and insist that he is not a sex tourist at all.
This does not mean the phenomenon is imaginary. It means it is hard to count precisely because it is hidden in plain sight.
A Guardian investigation published after Tunchanok Donhomla’s death described Pattaya as a sex tourism hub where underage girls remain vulnerable to exploitation, despite prostitution being illegal. The report cited an estimate of approximately 60,000 sex workers in Pattaya, mostly from impoverished regions, and described a context of weak protection, inconsistent enforcement and normalised exploitation.
So we should be precise. We cannot say “X percent of tourists are sex tourists” with confidence. But we can say that Thailand, and Pattaya in particular, has a deeply entrenched international reputation for commercial sex; that this reputation has been sustained by decades of foreign male demand; and that women and girls from poorer regions are disproportionately exposed to the danger created by that demand.
The law says one thing; the economy says another
Thailand’s legal position is not straightforward, but it is clear enough to expose the contradiction.
The Prevention and Suppression of Prostitution Act, adopted in 1996, prohibits prostitution in public places and brothels, prohibits advertisement and procurement, and criminalises brothel ownership and management. It also penalises sexual relations with a prostitute under 18, and procurement of a person under 18 can be punished with up to 20 years in prison. The law also states that forcing someone into prostitution through violence or intimidation can carry up to 20 years’ imprisonment, and if injury or death results, punishment can be life imprisonment or execution.
So the law is not simply absent.
The problem is that criminalisation and tolerance coexist.
Sex work is illegal enough to make workers vulnerable, but tolerated enough to keep the money moving. It is criminalised enough to push women into danger, but normalised enough to sustain tourism, hotels, bars, taxis, restaurants, landlords, police corruption, informal economies and international male demand.
That is why “just criminalise it” is not an adequate answer. Criminalisation can make women more vulnerable if it forces them into hidden arrangements, makes them afraid to report violence, or gives police, pimps, clients and venue owners more power over them.
But “just tolerate it” is not an answer either, because tolerance without protection simply preserves the industry for the men who profit from it.
And in the middle are the women and girls who absorb the risk.
Why the Global South is expected to absorb Western male depravity
This is the hypocrisy that makes me furious.
Imagine if men from around the world were travelling to Germany, or Australia, or Britain, or France because they believed they could easily buy access to vulnerable 17-year-old girls.
The moral panic would be immediate.
There would be documentaries. Emergency debates. International pressure. Border controls. Taskforces. Panels. Think pieces. Politicians performing outrage. Entire countries would be smeared as unsafe, immoral, diseased, depraved.
But when the destination is Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Kenya, Brazil, Colombia, or anywhere else in the Global South, the language softens.
It becomes “adult entertainment.”
It becomes “nightlife.”
It becomes “tourism.”
It becomes “boys being boys.”
It becomes “everyone knows what Pattaya is like.”
And that phrase — everyone knows — is exactly the problem.
Everyone knows, and everyone looks away.
The global economy has a remarkable ability to rename exploitation when the victims are poor, brown, foreign, female or already stigmatised. A girl in a suitcase becomes a shocking crime story. But the system around her remains scenery. The hotel. The beach road. The foreign men. The bars. The money. The mythology. The idea that poor girls in poor countries are somehow more available, less protected, less innocent, less grievable.
This is where sex tourism meets femicide.
Femicide is not only the act of a man killing a woman or girl. It is the world that made her killable. It is the hierarchy of whose bodies matter. It is the social permission structure around male entitlement. It is the economic system that made her vulnerable before the man ever entered the room.
This is not about saving Thai women from themselves
There is a danger, in writing about this, of reproducing another kind of violence: the colonial rescue narrative.
So let me be clear. This is not about presenting Thai women as passive victims with no agency, no intelligence, no strategy and no resistance. Women in the sex industry are not symbols. They are workers, mothers, daughters, migrants, survivors, organisers, decision-makers and human beings operating inside conditions they did not create.
The point is not to shame them.
The point is to shame the market.
The point is to shame the men who eroticise poverty.
The point is to shame the governments that criminalise women while benefiting from tourism.
The point is to shame the global order that creates conditions in which a woman’s body becomes a remittance strategy.
The point is to shame the hypocrisy that treats Western male sexual violence abroad as somehow less politically significant than sexual violence at home.
Because if we are serious about violence against women, we cannot only talk about the intimate partner in the kitchen, the stranger in the alley, the husband with the weapon, the ex-boyfriend who would not let go. We also have to talk about the man with a passport, the man on holiday, the man who travels to poorer countries because he believes his money will protect him from consequences.
The women are not the scandal. The men are.
Tunchanok Donhomla was 17 years old.
She should be alive.
Her death is now part of a criminal case, and the court process will determine the legal facts. But whatever happens in that courtroom, her story has already exposed something much larger than one man.
It has exposed the brutal convergence of sex tourism, poverty, foreign male entitlement and the disposability of girls in the Global South.
Thailand’s sex tourism industry did not come from nowhere. It was shaped by war. It was expanded by tourism. It was sustained by poverty. It was normalised by men. It was tolerated by institutions. It was hidden behind euphemisms. And it continues because too many people benefit from pretending not to understand what it is.
The women are not the scandal.
The girls are not the scandal.
The scandal is the man who travels across the world believing that a poor girl’s life is cheaper than his pleasure.
The scandal is the market that waits for him when he arrives.
The scandal is the world that only notices when one of those girls ends up dead.
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