This Burmese Nunnery Saved 200 Girls From Sex Slavery

Paula Froelich December 11, 2014

Buddhist nuns are everywhere among the streets of Myanmar — of all different ages, some as young as 5. Dressed in pink loose-fitting shirts and pants with orange scarves, they have shaved heads and rely on alms to pay for their schooling, food, housing, and other basic needs.

The nunnery is a safe place in a country where poor girls have very little hope for a safe future. (Andrew Rothschild for Yahoo) 

Monks don’t have the same economic handicaps. The large temples pay for their needs, but that’s not surprising. In Myanmar, being a woman is hard, more so if you are poor and live in the north of the country, where tribes are still battling the government.

Girls in these areas are in a precarious position, constantly in danger of being trafficked across foreign borders. According to the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking:

“Myanmar is a source country for women, children, and men trafficked for the purposes of forced labour and commercial sexual exploitation. Myanmar people are trafficked to Thailand, China, Malaysia, South Korea, and Macau for sexual exploitation, domestic servitude, and forced labour.”

There are no reliable estimates on the number of people trafficked annually in Myanmar, although a total of 134 trafficking cases were investigated in 2008, involving 303 victims (153 female and 50 male), and 342 traffickers were prosecuted. UNICEF for example, estimated in 2003 that 10,000 girls were being trafficked every year from Myanmar into Thai brothels alone.

The number has not declined.

There are girls as young as five in the convent. (Photo: Andrew Rothschild)

Concern over trafficking has led many parents in the north, who earn an average of $1,200 a year, to send their daughters south to the capital of Yangon and the only outlet for escape and education — the nunneries.

One of these institutions is located in Than Lynn, a 30-minute drive from the center of Yangon. At the Thadama Myintzu Nunnery, run by the nun Daw Aye Theingi, more than 200 girls, who range in age from 4 to 18, live in two small buildings with a rudimentary outdoor kitchen and bathing area. In many cases, the girls do not see their parents for years, if ever again.