5.7.1. Lifestyles of Contravention
This trajectory encompassed n = 16 research participants (n = 9 women, n = 7 men), making this, alongside the harmed and harming pathway, one of the most common criminalisation routes for women. These narratives were generally characterised by persistent illicit drug use over the life course (starting in adolescence or early adulthood), and what participants described as addictions to drugs, alcohol, gambling, and/or ‘partying’. Furthermore, everyone made a living through the underground economy. They worked in casinos or the sex and/or drug industry. Some had official criminal histories for offences committed supporting their lifestyles, including property and drug crimes. No one had previous convictions for violence. Thus, all the women and men on this pathway led lives outside the norm, characterised by persistent criminalised actions and behaviours. Furthermore, there were two distinct subgroups within this pathway.
The first subgroup included those who were pushed into lifestyles of contravention because of multiple childhood adversities, including, but not limited to, poverty, abuse, separation from parents (through death, divorce, or abandonment), caregiver substance abuse (alcohol and drugs) and involvement in other criminalised activities (e.g., drug dealing), and exposure to illicit drugs and other “crime” in their immediate community. Most of these research participants’ life stories reflected these experiences (n = 6 women, n = 5 men).
For example, Adranuch grew up in a poor farming family, and her parents separated when she was 12 years old, with resultant financial hardship. Adranuch’s mother became increasingly stressed and started to take this out on Adranuch. She explained, “when my dad left, we had financial problems. That lead to me stopping going to school. I had to work. Mum was very stressed. She hit me. I felt lonely and fed up with life, so I left, I decided to live by myself”. At 15 years of age, Adranuch moved from her rural village to Bangkok, where she lived in a “slum area” with “drug problems”. She was initially employed as a waitress in a tourist targeted restaurant. By the time she was 18 years old, Adranuch realised that foreign men were prepared to pay significant amounts of money to have sex with her, and her sex work career began. Adranuch was introduced to methamphetamine by her work colleagues, and explained, “this is normal for people who work there [in the sex industry]. I used drugs almost every day”.
In another illustration, Chet grew up in a “slum area”, where there was “crime and drug use”. He described his parents as “very strict, they would hit me, I was scared of them, and I didn’t want to stay at home”. Chet “ran away” when he was “13–14 years old”. He stayed with his “senior friends”, who “gambled, raced motorbikes, dealt, used and [introduced Chet to] drugs”. Chet explained, “I was addicted to yaba, and I also tried cannabis. I used drugs often, almost every day. I would sell drugs to support my drug habit”.
The second sub-group (n = 3 women, n = 2 men) was relatively void of childhood adversity. Here, people had been pulled away from loving families by friendship groups into lifestyles of contravention. Ittiporn, for example, was born into a caring “middle-class family”. Her father was a “police officer”, and her mother a “teacher”. There was no “crime or drugs” in her childhood neighbourhood. However, when Ittiporn was 18 years old, she started “hanging out with a group of friends, they were clubbing and partying a lot”. By the time she was in her twenties, Ittiporn was using “yaba every day”, and she started “selling drugs to afford drugs”. She explained, “I was using drugs, partying, selling drugs and also sending girls to clients for sex work” because this provided the income needed to maintain her lifestyle. Like Ittiporn, Niran grew up in a middle-class family. He started “hanging out with the wrong people”, used “yaba” at the age of “15–16” years, got “addicted”, and started to “rob”, “thieve”, and “receive stolen goods”, because “I needed the money for partying and drugs”.
Despite the above subgroup variance, everyone on this pathway was incarcerated as a direct result of their non-normative lifestyles. Nevertheless, how this led to imprisonment was gendered. All the women were sex workers, and eventually imprisoned for human (sex) trafficking offences that occurred against the backdrop of their criminalised vocation and lifestyle. More specifically, in all but one case (which was an organised sex-trafficking operation involving immigrant women being held in debt bondage), the women on this trajectory connected clients with sex worker colleagues. This was, on the face of it, a win-win arrangement for our research participants and their associates, with the former being remunerated for their trouble and the latter securing more work. However, oftentimes, and unbeknownst to them, the sex worker colleagues in question were aged under 18 years old. Thus, this human trafficking occurred with consent in the absence of force, deceitfulness, or bribery. Consider Fa Ying’s and Hansa’s stories below:
“My mother passed away when I was young, and my father lived abroad [so] I lived with my grandmother. I stopped going to school in grade 6 because I needed to work to support my brother’s education. When I was 13 years old, I worked in a beauty salon but then I changed to massage [sex-work]. When I was 25 years old, I tried methamphetamine because it helps with weight loss [which was good for business]. I took a little bit [but] then it started increasing. I had many men [long-term clients] who give me money. They pay my rent for me and get me a car. Above the massage place where I work is a place where students could rent a room. These students provide sex services. Sometimes students come to chat with me. When my clients saw the girls, they wanted the girl. I called the girls to give a massage. I was arrested for human trafficking. They were like 14 or 15 years old. The girls told the police that I am innocent, but it didn’t matter what they said”.
(Fa Ying)
“I came from a poor family. My father died and my mother had a stroke. In grade 6 I started using drugs with my friends because I thought it would be fun. I got addicted. I used it every day. I started working [sex work] when I was 13–14 years old. I wanted to support my family. I was the main provider. Using drugs also gave me the courage to work. The police were my customers. I got pregnant so I couldn’t work and they [police] rung me and asked for girls. The girls wanted to make money, they contacted me, and I just hook them up. They were 14 years old, and I was 17 years old. It was a set-up. I took the girls to a hotel. I knew these girls were already sex workers. They wanted to earn money for hair extensions. They gave consent but when I delivered these girls to the hotel I got arrested. I didn’t know it was human trafficking”
(Hansa)
In contrast, no men were sex workers, and they had been incarcerated for a variety of offences, including sexual violence, human (sex) trafficking, and homicide. These men were either criminalised because of sexual offending that primarily occurred while they were out ‘partying’ and intoxicated on drugs, or for violence perpetrated within the context of earning a living in the underground economy. For example, Sakda was a drug dealer imprisoned for killing a client who owed him money. David provided personal security services to the “boss” of a casino. One day, his employer asked him to kill a rival, leading to David being behind prison walls for attempted homicide. Chalerm had been arrested “many times” by police for “committing crimes” to “make money for partying” (including drug use). He was dating a sex worker who “sent clients girls. That night [when he was arrested for human trafficking] we got a call asking to deliver some girls. There were three girls, they were all 14 or 15 [years old]”. Khemkhaeng and Kraisee were imprisoned for sexually assaulting young women. These offences occurred within the context of these men’s drug-using lifestyles, but as will be discussed later in this paper, their actions could have also been constituted on the pathway of destructive masculinity. Our choice to include them here is directly related to the fact that these men were very much caught up in lifestyles of contravention. For example, Chet, who since the age of 13 years, had been involved in gambling, used, and sold drugs, was imprisoned for rape. He narrated that “girls would sometimes have sex with me and get drugs in return. On that day I was at my friend’s house. Friends of my girlfriend came to see me [for drugs]. We took drugs together, had drinks and had ‘sex’ [rape]”. Similarly, Kraisee told us that, one night, he was at a “party” a “place where we were using drugs [yaba]”, and “two girls came to drink with us”. He was “drinking, chatting, and flirting with one of the girls [who was 13 years old]”. He explained, “we had sex [rape]. There was a medical report that said the victim had a tear in her private parts”.
5.7.2. Harmed and Harming Women
This women-only pathway encompassed n = 9 research participants. In contrast to the women on the previous route, everyone was imprisoned for a homicide offence, and only one, Pensri, had a previous arrest (for drug offending). Pensri and another woman, Pimchan, did have a history of drug use and sex work, but both women had “stopped using drugs”, and Pensri had found a legitimate job. Furthermore, in both instances, as was the case for every woman on this pathway, criminalisation was not the result of living a non-normative lifestyle. Instead, gendered abuse, trauma, and adversity, compounded by other problems in intimate relationships, manifested in either a loss of control, anger being directed outwards at harming others, or violence being used as a protective strategy against abusive men.
These women had endured multiple adverse events and traumas. Six had been the victims of direct physical and/or child sexual abuse, and another woman described growing up in a community where there was “a lot of murder, people were shooting each other”. By adulthood, all but one had survived domestic violence victimisation, and most had been intimately partnered with men who caused other problems. Husbands/boyfriends were described as jealous and controlling, unfaithful, abused substances, failed to support their families, had gambling addictions, and abandoned them. Two women reported drinking alcohol as a form of self-medication, as it helped them to cope with the psychological distress, and three women relayed that their trauma experiences resulted in a diagnosed mental health problem. Sreypov’s narrative illustrates many of these experiences in the one life story, and is a poignant elucidation of the trauma and emotional angst indicative of these women’s lives:
“I grew up in a poor family. When I was five, my father was robbed and murdered. My mother could not afford to look after me, so my father’s friend adopted me. Sometimes I didn’t feel like I belonged there. He did not love me like his own children. Later my stepsister got married and her husband came to live with us. He would touch my breasts. I was afraid no one would believe me, so I left. When I was 17, I married a relative of my mother’s. He was violent. He would kick me, call me names, and accuse me of cheating. He told the village that I was cheating, and it ruined my reputation. He would drink and hang out with his friends all the time. I had to do all the farming work. He didn’t help and used the money for other things. Later I found out that he was having an affair. I asked him to stop but he hit me with a stick. I left him and later, went out with another man. I got pregnant with this new man, but he cheated on me and didn’t want to take responsibility [for the baby]. He didn’t believe it was his child and when I insisted that it was, he locked me in the bathroom, then he hit and kicked me. When I was five months pregnant, I fell and lost the baby”.
Five of the women were in prison for homicide offences that they described as being a protective strategy against violent men. May and Karawek had both killed their domestically violent intimate partners in self-defence. Nin murdered a man known to her who had “psychically attacked” her after she asked him to return some money that he owed. Natcha and Pimchan murdered the abusive boyfriends of another family member. Below, Natcha and May’s stories are provided as an illustration of those who killed to protect themselves or others.
As a child, May had lived with domestic violence, with her father “hitting her mother often”, and, as an adult, she had a long history of violent victimisation at the hands of men. At 19 years of age, May was raped and subsequently fell pregnant. She had been in three intimate relationships with men who had all “physically abused” her, in addition to mistreating her in other ways. When relaying what life was like with her “second boyfriend”, May said that he went out “partying, drinking, gambling, had girls, used drugs, would get jealous, and incurred a lot of debt”. Like the other men, May’s third intimate partner, the person that she killed, was extremely violent, jealous, and controlling. On the day of the offence, May had spent the day with friends, and, upon returning home, her boyfriend brutally assaulted her for leaving the house and socialising. She explained what happened:
“When I came home, I opened the door and he hit me. Suddenly he hit me, not a single word was coming from him. He had a knife. He tried to stab me in the neck, but he missed. I tried to take the knife from him, I threw the knife away, so he strangled me. I couldn’t breathe, I thought he would kill me. I punched him in the ear and kicked him in the penis. He said I didn’t care about him because I spent time with my friends and family. He used bad words. He got the knife back and said ‘only one will stay alive’ so I grabbed a knife and stabbed him. He asked for help, so I took him to the hospital. A few days later he passed away”.
Natcha grew up in a “poor village”, her parents were both alcoholics, and there was a lot of “fighting between them [verbal and physical violence], they used the money for alcohol and not the family. I wanted to go to school, but we were so poor. It was an unhappy time. I can’t eat because they use all the money [to support their alcoholism]. Sometimes my mother would hit me. She was verbally abusive”. Like May, as an adult, Natcha was also the victim of domestic violence. She explained:
“When I was 16, I got married. He was quite abusive [and an alcoholic]. There’s a scar that I got from him from when he stabbed me. When I was three months pregnant, he kicked me, and I got a miscarriage. I feel really stressed. I got a medical condition for my mental condition because of stress. There was also verbal abuse, all those names, he used all the words and kicked and slapped, everything”.
Eventually, Natcha left her husband after he and his friend sexually abused their daughter. After ending this relationship, Natcha could not provide for her family and had nowhere to live. She put her children into “foster care”, and was homeless, “collecting garbage to sell”. Eventually, she formed another intimate relationship, and was able to retrieve her children from foster care, because this man provided them with a place to live. However, he was “addicted to meth”, so she left him. Her next boyfriend infected her with HIV, and sexually abused one of her daughters. Natcha started to drink alcohol regularly, because it “helped me feel relieved and I forget about the bad things”. She is in prison for the murder of her abusive son-in-law:
“He [boyfriend] would hit my daughter. I felt like, you can’t touch my daughter, you cannot hit my daughter. I want to protect her. I love my children so much. My daughter was so scared but at the time she loves her boyfriend so much. I didn’t want to see the same history that happened to me happen to my daughter. So, I made a plan [to kill the boyfriend] and I implemented it”.
Four women had killed people, in what their narrations suggested, was a loss of control and anger being directed outwards at others against a backdrop of lifelong trauma and adversity. Pensri had survived domestic violence and numerous relationships with drug-using men, who had fathered children with her and failed to support them. She told us, “that day I lost control [and] I got really angry. I didn’t plan to do it [stab him with a knife] but he [current boyfriend who was using drugs and not contributing financially to the family] would not find a job”. In another example, Sreypov (also discussed previously, see above) had lived with poverty, the grief of her father’s murder, maternal abandonment, childhood sexual abuse, the loss of a child, domestic violence, and other types of mistreatments by intimate partners. She is in prison for killing the girlfriend of her second boyfriend, the man who had beaten her, with whom she became pregnant and lost the baby. Sreypov explained, “this new girlfriend laughed at me, made fun of me, calling me all the time to saying bad things. My ex-boyfriend, too. He would text and say bad things”. Eventually, Sreypov wanted it to stop, so she took a knife to her ex-boyfriend’s house and got into an argument with “the girlfriend”. The knife “fell out of [Sreypov’s] purse so she grabbed the knife, just stabbed her in the stomach and ran away”. Sreypov said, “I still can’t believe that she died from one stab”.
5.7.3. Destructive Masculinity
This pathway included n = 23 men and n = 7 women. Unlike the harmed and harming pathway, no men were the victims of direct abuse as children or adults. Two women did report domestic violence victimisation, but, in contrast to the harmed and harming women, their offences were not characterised by anger or a loss of control, nor were they fending off a violent intimate partner. Furthermore, no one was in prison because of a lifestyle of contravention. Only n = 7 of the n = 23 men (and no women) reported having used illicit drugs, but in every case, this was sporadic, recreational, or in the past. As will be illustrated below, some men were under the influence of alcohol while committing their crimes, as was the case for one woman whose narrative suggested she was struggling with alcoholism.
The men’s violence was often presented as overly excessive, and some had been labelled aggressive by others (i.e., teachers and family members) from a young age, or they identified this trait in themselves. Aat, for example, described himself as “explosively violent”, and his teachers at school had labelled him “anti-social”. Kittibun stated, he was “hot-headed with a short temper”. The behaviours of the men on this pathway are presented as expressions and displays of toxic masculinity, underpinned by a sense of power, dominance, entitlement, and superiority. They killed other men who challenged them, used murder to punish former intimate partners for leaving them, and sexually assaulted girls and women. Sometimes the men acted alone, but, on several occasions, their crimes were committed in groups with other men.
In contrast, the women relayed being caught up in men’s acts of destructive masculinity, and they did not narrate having played an active role in the violence resulting in their imprisonment. Instead, the women were incarcerated for the actions of intimate partners, or in one instance, another male family member. More specifically, they were either a bystander to men’s physical assaults on other men, or they had failed to intervene and sometimes appeared to actively support boyfriends/husbands sexually abusing their daughters. None of the women had a history of past criminalisation, while some of the men had prior arrests for violence. This contrasted with those on the lifestyles of contravention pathway who only had prior arrests for drug-related offending.
Eight men were in prison for killing other men who had challenged them. Here, the violence was narrated as an expression of masculine prowess. By enacting aggression, these men demonstrated masculinity through a show of strength and power and were able to redress the insult or threat posed to their honour by other men. For example, Tanawat told us that, from a young age, he had needed to “learn how to fight [so] he could retaliate [against other men] if needed”. As an adult, Tanawat worked as a security guard for a large manufacturing company. He had no history of drug use or alcohol misuse. On the day of the homicide, Tanawat was “at work”, and one of his “colleagues, who [he] sometimes argued with, started shouting at [him], saying bad things about [Tanawat] and [his] family, all those rude words in front of everyone”. Because he was a security guard, Tanawat “always carried a knife”. He described being blinded by rage, and “stabbed him [the victim] seven times” in an inordinate display of aggression.
In n = 5 of these n = 8 cases, the homicides were acts of group violence (sometimes but not always fuelled by alcohol consumption), and, as such, presented as a possible avenue for male bonding and peer-group affirmation of masculinity. Here, the men were defending their honour in the face of threats posed by other groups of aggressive men. For example, Kasem was at a “festival” with “four friends” where they were “drinking”, and a “fight” broke out with another group of men. In the ensuing brawl, a member of the opposing group was “stabbed” and died. Kasem only drank “sometimes”, and he used “meth occasionally” in his twenties, but this ceased shortly after it began. Kasem had previously been imprisoned for another act of group violence. Namely, he had committed a “gang robbery” after consuming alcohol with the same group of friends. Somchai got “into a fight with some people just because they were staring” at him and his friends. One of the men in Somchai’s group had a gun for “protection”, and it “went off” during the altercation, killing a man from the opposing side.
Kittibun and Sirichai sought to punish their former intimate partners for daring to leave them and start a romantic relationship with someone new. They described being jealous and angry that other men were ‘sleeping with’ what was rightfully theirs. Sirichai took a gun to the house of his former girlfriend and “shot the guy [ex-girlfriend’s new partner], my [former] girlfriend, and my [former] mother-in-law”. Kittibun killed his former wife’s new “lover”. He explained that he had planned to do this for “revenge”, and that if he could turn back time, “I would have shot my wife as well”. Both men were in prison for murder.
The remaining n = 13 men were incarcerated for sexual violence. This included n = 11 men who acted alone, and n = 2 imprisoned for gang rape. Here, the sexual violations conferred a destructive performance of masculinity predicated on male dominance and sexual appurtenance to the bodies of women and girls. Perhaps the most conspicuous example of this emerged from the narrative of Asnee, who was imprisoned for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. Asnee explained he was intoxicated at the time, and that they had been “playing [flirting] with each other”. He wanted to have “sex”, but “she didn’t want to have sex with me”, even though she had been ‘asking for it’ by “playing” with him. So, in a disturbing illustration of sexual entitlement and power, he “raped her” and then “strangled her” to death. When asked why he made the latter decision, Asnee said, “because she screamed and kicked me and that made me angry”. By bravely resisting, fighting back, and “assaulting” Asnee, this young girl had dared to defy her attacker and challenge his destructive sense of masculine sexual entitlement. Asnee needed to ‘put her back in her place,’ and punish her recalcitrance. He said, “if she didn’t kick me, I wouldn’t have strangled her”.
All but n = 2 men were in prison for sexually harming or abducting (where there appeared to be a lack of evidence to prove sexual assault) girls and young women. Like Asnee, some were open about what they had done, while others claimed they were innocent, reconstituted what they had done as consensual sex, or engaged in a narrative of victim-blaming. Two men were imprisoned for the sexual violation of adult women. Runrot had sexually assaulted a work colleague (which he denied), and Aat a former intimate partner. Aat had a long history of perpetrating violence against the women that he purported to love. He had been to prison before for domestic violence and described himself as being “explosive” in intimate relationships, having “hurt and harmed” both his former wives. Aat was in prison once again for violence against a romantic partner. He held this woman hostage for nearly a month and repeatedly raped her, sometimes at gunpoint. Aat denied it was rape, and claimed it was just a continuation of their intimate affair. Reflecting on what he perceived to be an excessive term of imprisonment, Aat said, “I think I should have just killed her, that would have been easier”.
Although most of the men imprisoned for sexual violence had acted alone, Kam and Kla were in prison for gang rape. Like physical aggression, acts of group sexual assault provide opportunities for male connectedness and a way to execute masculine prowess within a peer-group setting. Kam and his group of four friends “meet two girls at a market” and took them out into the “fields”. Kam tried to “hug” one of the “girls”, but she resisted, and then “two other friends came to help me hold her down [then] two or three of my other friends had sex with [raped] this girl”. He explained that violating this girl with his friends made him “feel like we were a team, we were in this together”. Kam and his friends sanctioned their actions by blaming their victim for accompanying them, saying, “she came to that place” and, as such, was a ‘bad girl’ deserving of rape. Kla and his group of friends were arrested for the gang rape of a 14-year-old girl. Kla explained they had sexually assaulted young girls as a group “quite often, there were about four or five girls [previous victims]”. Kla said, “we were all drinking, and I just enjoyed it”. Kla expressed, “they were all bad girls because when my friends asked them to come with them, they did, a good girl would not do that”. Gang rape was not the only group violence that Kla and his friends engaged in, as they would also go “out drinking and fighting with other people”.
Three of the n = 7 women on this pathway were incarcerated for offences of sexual assault (or child abduction), and, in every case, the primary perpetrator was their intimate partner, and the victim their daughter. These women engaged in, supported, or facilitated, either through action or inaction, men’s access to the bodies of girls and young women. Thus, these women acted as auxiliaries to destructive masculinity, namely male sexual entitlement, in what were attempts at maintaining intimacy with these men in the wake of previously tumultuous romantic relationships.
For example, Chai Charoen was in prison for “conspiracy with my boyfriend to rape my daughter”, who was aged 13-years old at the time. She said, “my daughter told the court that I helped my boyfriend rape her”. The sexual violence had occurred multiple times over “a year”, and Chai Charoen’s daughter told police that her mother had “held her down, grabbed her arms and legs so that [her stepfather] could do something”. Chai Charoen denied actively participating in her boyfriend’s sexual violation of her daughter, but accepted that it had taken place, just without her knowledge. She said, “I didn’t know what happened because I was drunk and lost consciousness every day”. Chai Charoen had a long history of dysfunctional intimate relationships with men who “didn’t take care of me, I had nobody to support me, I had to look after myself”, including one previous partner who “hit me”. She narrated that her alcohol dependency began in the aftermath of this domestically violent relationship. Drinking helped her to cope. Given Chai Charoen’s history of intimate partner mistreatment, abuse, and abandonment, she appeared to be seeking to protect her relationship because, unlike previous men, “this one treated me well and the only bad thing was that he had ‘sex’ [raped] with my daughter”.
Kamala was also a victim of prior domestic violence, and, like Chai Charoen, was incarcerated for “providing my husband with my daughter”. In this case, Kamala appears to have ‘turned a blind eye’. Her “daughter testified in court that I was not home”. However, like Chai Charoen, there was a suggestion in Kamala’s narrative that not wanting to lose her husband may have underpinned what was, in this instance, inaction in the face of masculine sexual entitlement. She said, “my husband said in court that the reason I let him have sex [rape] with my daughter was that I wanted to keep him. I didn’t want him to get another girlfriend”.
The remaining women were criminalised as accessories to men’s homicides. Here, the women’s intimate partners (and in one case another male family member) had used violence in response to being challenged, threatened, humiliated, and disrespected by other men. For example, Boonsri was present when her husband stabbed a neighbour to death. She explained that the victim was constantly “drinking” and “shouting” abuse at them. Rochana was imprisoned for being an accessory to a murder committed by her boyfriend and his brother. On the day of the homicide, they had borrowed Rochana’s car (which is why she was deemed to be an accessory by the court), driven to the victim’s house, and killed him because he was having an affair with Rochana’s brother-in-law’s wife.