The Grey Man (25 page)

In hindsight, it would have been better for me to form relationships early on with national police and prosecuting authorities, rather than rely on other people's contacts in Chiang Mai. But that would have been nigh on impossible. It was hard enough for me to get an in with IJM when I first arrived in Thailand, and as an individual I doubt I could have made the necessary contacts at a national level. The Grey Man now works at a much higher level and has set up a Thai Foundation as well.

You would think that Australian and British expats would be a helpful resource to us in the countries that we work in, as volunteers and sources of intel, but apart from a few exceptions we found that not to be the case. Unless they were already involved with other charities, many expats preferred bagging the country they were living in as opposed to trying to do something to improve things there.

It was amazing to see some of the internet forums for the expat community. So many of the people on there were unbelievably jaded and cynical. After our first rescue in Cambodia in 2010, which I'll describe in a later chapter, many of the posts on the forums were along the lines of, ‘Okay, but what good will that do?' One post that sticks in my mind read:
Big-whoop . . . now they
[the girls we rescued]
can find work de-feathering birds at a chicken processing plant or gutting fish at a tuna cannery for starvation wages.

We took a different view: that we were giving these girls back something that had been taken from them – their freedom to choose their own path in life. Since they were going to shelters that concentrated on education and vocational training, maybe they wouldn't end up de-feathering birds and gutting fish.

One British expat had been a good contact over the years and I considered him to be a friend. He had heard a rumour about underage girls being offered for sex at a guest house near one of the temples in Chiang Mai. He passed it on to me on the day I was leaving Thailand on my second visit. I forwarded it on to Panom to investigate and he didn't follow up the lead. Undeterred, I asked another one of our volunteers to go and meet with the expat later. Unfortunately, our new man was sidetracked by other investigations that were already in progress. I told our source that a new guy would be arriving in Thailand soon, and that I would get him to follow up on the lead, but it might take up to six weeks for him to be in touch.

Our source spat his dummy out and refused to contact our new man. He said he had expected we would act on his information within forty-eight hours and he didn't think it was acceptable that it was taking so long to investigate the guest house. He said that if it had been him in my shoes, he would have acted more quickly.

My question to him, then, was, ‘Why didn't you? You live in Thailand.' Ideally, we would have acted sooner, but we had limited resources. If this guy had wanted to join us he could have taken part in the investigation.

However, I did learn one thing from the Buddhist monk I trained with many years before. He said ‘Anger is the frustration of not having your needs met' and I think this was the case with so many of these people. Trouble was, I didn't even know what need of theirs I wasn't meeting and I doubt they were introspective enough to know themselves.

At another time we were investigating kiddie porn in Pattaya; we had presented the intelligence briefs to the police and were waiting on a decision for a raid. In the meantime some local journalists had seen the kiddie porn and done an article about it. We received a letter from yet another waste-of-space expat, asking, ‘What are you doing about this?'

What was The Grey Man? All things to all people? The man who wrote the letter didn't know that we were already carrying out an investigation and that the article, while well meaning, had interfered with our plans against the pornographers. I wondered what the next line of questions would be: what is The Grey Man doing about global warming? Or: my socks are missing, does The Grey Man know where they are? All this criticism from people on the sidelines was becoming ridiculous.

As I've said, some expats fall in love with the culture of Thailand or other south-east Asian countries, but many are there because they like the cheap lifestyle or cheap sex. The problem, however, is that many of these people are like captives – too afraid to rock the boat in their adopted homeland, like the teacher who wouldn't report on his Thai colleagues who were abusing children.

One expat woman told one of our people in Chiang Mai about a Thai pastor who had sold his daughter into prostitution. We asked her to provide details, promising to follow up while maintaining her anonymity. Her response was that she didn't want to jeopardise her and her husband's own evangelical Christian mission there and, besides, she didn't agree with child rescue anyway. She claimed there were better ways to fight child trafficking. I felt like saying to her, ‘Tell that to the pastor's daughter, you idiot.'

I'm the first to admit that after working in Thailand on and off for six years I still don't really have a clue how the place works. You've got NGOs fighting each other for donor money and jealously hoarding and gatekeeping information that could be saving lives if it was shared. You've got middle-aged cops acting like teenagers and money changing hands to buy protection and favours, and you have local Thai and expat communities that don't want to get involved, for the most part because they have no balls or they are part of the problem.

As I've mentioned, there are many NGOs in Thailand who claim they rescue kids from slavery and the sex trade, but ‘rescue' is a word very much open to interpretation. When I first arrived in Thailand I found that many of the so-called rescue organisations were actually orphanages or shelters – more often than not Christian organisations – that either picked homeless kids up off the street or looked after children netted in police operations. Very few were in the business of going out and finding kids and bringing them out of the underworld to safety. The view that I formed was that the majority of charities claiming to conduct rescues were either not doing so, or they were ineffective at it. That's one of the reasons why, after rescuing the first five girls on my own, I decided to set up The Grey Man.

As well as questioning the work that some organisations did, I also had cause to question the honesty of some of the people running them and working for them. We'd been involved in the investigation of Harris, who was accused of molesting the kids in his care but whose charges had since been dropped, and Frank Weicks had told me of another rescue organisation whose staff were leaking information about upcoming operations aimed at illegal brothels.

‘Seriously?' I asked Frank.

He nodded. ‘Every time IJM did a joint operation with these guys we'd arrive at a brothel and find the girls and kids had been moved. We figured the leak was coming from the other NGO we were working with.'

Some organisations that used to be actively involved in child rescues have now moved away from those sorts of operations. During our time in Thailand we've seen the problem of child prostitution move deeper underground, so the job can now require days or weeks of surveillance and undercover work to rescue a single child; for organisations that are also trying to feed and clothe kids, the resources needed for rescues may be better used elsewhere. IJM had started off doing rescues – albeit in a rather heavy-handed manner by raiding and shutting down brothels – but once they left Thailand they left behind a couple of legal people to concentrate more on getting citizenship for hill tribe people.

The Grey Man, by contrast, has been a rescue organisation since Russell and I started it and well before, when I was working solo. Despite the aid work and education programs we support in the hill tribe villages, rescue is still our main focus. I believe our village support work is important, and I wouldn't like to drop it, but I'd personally be happier just working on the operational side of things, going back out into the brothels and getting the kids out. There are other people in The Grey Man who have more of an interest in the developmental work, and others too who are better suited to the administrative side of the charity. It's very rare to find good all-rounders with the skills and interests to be good at everything that The Grey Man does, and that's fine. Just as people should focus on their strengths, I believe that NGOs should not lose sight of their mission, or, worse, try to con potential donors into thinking they are doing work they're not.

In the early days, we sent our director of operations, Frank, to meet with the in-country representatives of a major Australian charity. He had a cordial meeting with two women and briefed them on the work The Grey Man had been doing. This NGO, too, stated in its brochures and on its website that it was rescuing children, but from what I could see they were simply providing food and shelter for homeless kids. True, some of these kids were at risk, and had been forced into the sex trade in some instances, but there was no one proactively going out and finding children who were still being abused. Frank suggested that we could work with them as their rescue arm.

The women seemed interested and we discussed the idea in more detail. Frank mentioned some of the other work we'd been doing with the local police, conducting surveillance on paedophiles and helping to secure their arrests. As I've mentioned, it wasn't strictly the sort of work I'd set out to do, but it was a positive byproduct of getting to know the seedy side of life in Thailand, and frequenting the same bars and brothels as the peds.

‘Yes,' one of the well-meaning aid workers said, ‘we have some information of our own about western paedophiles operating in Thailand.'

‘Great,' Frank said. ‘If we shared information it might help us find more kids, and the cops to bust more paedophiles.'

‘I'm not sure about that,' the woman replied, her smile morphing into a frown.

‘Why not? What's the problem?'

‘Well, we couldn't give you the names of the alleged paedophiles as that might be an invasion of privacy.'

Frank left the meeting as soon as he could and we never bothered with them after that.

No matter what you try to do to improve things on this planet you will always come across people who want to cut you down and criticise you, or tell you you're doing things the wrong way. However, all of the people and organisations that have criticised me and The Grey Man over the years have only helped to make me stronger personally, and The Grey Man stronger as an organisation. Russell and I used to throw our hands in the air at the latest rumour or criticism of us, but these days we usually laugh and consider it business as usual.

I've got a favourite story from my martial arts studies. It concerns a young Korean boy whose father is attacked by some thugs. The boy goes to a martial arts master and tells him he wants to learn to fight so he can get revenge against the men who have hurt his family. The master draws a line in the sand. ‘How do you make this line shorter?' the old man says to the boy. At first the boy scores a deep slash across the line, breaking it in two. He looks at the master, but the old man just shakes his head. Next, the boy uses his foot to rub out half of the line but again the master tells him this is not the way. ‘What do I do?' the boy asks in desperation. The master smiles at the boy and uses his stick to draw another line in the sand longer than the first line. The original line is now the shorter of the two.