Htet Khaung Linn

Poverty drives Myanmar girls into underage sex work

RANGOON — Sixteen-year-old Wut Yee, left to fend for herself and her younger brother, was relieved when her exhausted mother finally came home after a week’s disappearance, but the feeling was short-lived. Her mother had two devastating pieces of news for her: Since her husband remarried she had been working as a sex worker to make ends meet and she had just agreed to sell her daughter’s virginity to a businessman for $3,000. Wut Yee, who requested to change her name for this story, had quit school to handle household chores and look after her brother and she had no other source of income. Money was in short supply. The monsoon was coming and their thatch-roofed house in Rangoon’s Hlaing Thar Yar Township required urgent repairs; her brother’s school fees and old debts also needed to be paid. “My mother said: ‘I’ve already accepted the money. I worry you would be in pain since you’ve never done it before, so I’ve paid an advance fee to the clinic at the top of our street to give you anesthetics.’ I cried the whole night,” Wut Yee said, recalling the events from two years ago. “The next morning, I had to follow…