Singapore is a choice destination for many Thai 'working girls', but an unknown number are trafficked to remote locations on the edge of the city where they are essentially held as sex slavesNot far outside central Singapore, across from one of the city-state's foreign worker dormitories, is a small forest.
It appears ordinary enough - just trees, separated from the pavement by a steep embankment. If one looks closely, there is a trail; and if one is curious enough, it leads to a clearing that even at first glance, appears - part-dump, part-deserted camp - not quite right.
There's a spirit house at the base of a ribbon-wrapped tree, and just beyond that a cache of futons that have been flung in the brush. Tree branches are knotted with plastic bags. The site is strewn with beer cans, water bottles, planks of cardboard and a tremendous number of condom wrappers.
Yet what looks abandoned and random by day is reassembled and ready for business by night. The futons are brought out of the brush and laid on the cardboard mats, and a group of Thai ladies are brought in - either from forest hideouts or cheap hotels in Singapore's red light district - and lined up on a log bench.
There, they'll wait for their customers - Bangladeshis, Thais, Indians, an international coterie of foreign workers, almost all of whom will wander over from the dormitory across the road.
During the course of the night, a woman might service 20 men. She'll dispose of the condoms in the hanging plastic bags and wash herself using the water bottles provided. The air will be thick with mosquitoes, and she'll have sex, with ambiance and privacy provided by a tarpaulin, for S$10 or S$20 a session.
However un-Singaporean this may sound, such sites - also known as "forest brothels" - are long-established and relatively common in the tightly-regulated city-state.
Usually located in wooded areas surrounding Singapore's foreign worker dormitories (these tend to be zoned in areas on the outskirts of the city), the sites serve as one of the few - also the cheapest - sexual outlets available to the hundreds of thousands of men that migrate to Singapore on annual construction contracts (there are an estimated 43,800 from Thailand).
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