The Sex Slave Trade – LWT for Channel 4 Dispatches
(Secret filming)
April 29 1999
Credit: Investigation in Thailand by Andrew Drummond
Early in 1999 Andrew Drummond was contacted by London Weekend Television. Their Factual Programming Department had put in a proposal to make a programme for Channel 4 Dispatches on the trafficking of women into Britain to work as service girls in brothels/ massage parlours.
In recent weeks Thai girls had fled brothels in London, claiming that on arrival in Britain their passports had been confiscated and they were forced to work for nothing for six months just to pay off the costs of getting there.
Some claimed, including one pregnant women, that they were told they were going to work in restaurants and they had identified a Chinese man known as Boon Tam, who was the man sending them from Bangkok. They said they were beaten if the did not service clients sexually.
The information given to Andrew Drummond was of no news to him. This was how these traders normally worked.
Some of the girls went willingly and knew what they were doing. Others did not. But all were cheated nonetheless.
Andrew Drummond had already investigated a similar operation run by a Briton called Ronnie Miller from Northampton (jailed in the U.K. in 2000) which put him at an advantage. The name Boon Tam was however new.
Within a couple of days he as able to track down Boon Tam (left) to an inner city travel agency and he also found two of his foreign agents, New Zealanders Bruce Langslow and Glenn McKenzie.
Langslow was running his own bar in the city’s Sukhumvit 23. McKenzie (right) ran an English language school. But they had both supplemented their income by ‘riding shotgun’ - running Thai girls abroad posing as their boyfriends.
Bruce was desperate to sell his bar so Andrew Drummond sent in one of his team to pose as a potential buyer. LWT on their part sent in a reporter posing as a London massage parlour owner, for which they had already established a business, which could be found on the internet.
In his bar Langslow (left) was famously caught on camera deriding his charges: “They’re all straight out of the f……..g paddy fields!” he said.
Andrew Drummond also knew one of the couriers who worked for Boon Tam and Langslow, who was able to provide information on forthcoming meetings. In addition to that he sent in a Thai female member of his team to pose as a girl seeking work in England.
The trap was set. Unwitting Langslow led the team secretly filming first to Boon Tam and then to another New Zealander called Christina, known to the girls as ‘Honey’ who was another recruiter.
Using a combination of information from all three ‘embedded’ sources, the crew were able to fully document the activities of the traffickers in Bangkok for the LWT cameras.
Through Sudarat Sereewat of FACE (Fight Against Child Exploitation) Andrew Drummond also set up interviews with young Thai girls who had been rescued from such brothels both in the U.K. and Thailand on condition the girls were not identified. The victims in Thailand were juveniles.
Back in Britain the crew also did showdowns with the receivers there. Police rescued some 8 girls from massage parlours like the Solitaire in North East London. (below)
Sadly the producers sent Andrew Drummond the script only after the programme was cut. They were unable or unwilling to make some very obvious corrections.
On the day of broadcast C4’s promotions department leafleted thousands of homes in Britain with the flyer ‘Is Thai Sex Slavery coming to Britain?’ Moreover when the programme was aired it was clear the producers had broken their promises not to identify the the girls.
Andrew Drummond supported a complaint by Sudarat Sereewat to the Broadcasting Standards Commission, which preceded Ofcom. The complaint was upheld.
Andrew Drummond also wrote the article ‘How Channel 4 Dispatches Betrayed My Trust’ for Times 2
.
(It is virtually unheard of for a programme maker to complain to the BSC about his own programme and then condemn it in his own paper)
In the meantime Sudarat had to arrange for the victims to be moved out of their homes to ‘safe houses’ because in almost all cases the traffickers take the house documents of the girls, so if anything goes wrong, they know they can seek retribution - and that can get violent.
*New Zealand Press Association report