Bringing up daughters: The new battlefield for parents

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advertising, alcohol, anorexia, anxiety, bulimia, daughters, Depression, Eating Disorders, family, media, mental health issues, parents, pressure, self-harm, social media, Teens

Bringing up daughters: The new battlefield for parents

It’s a freezing night in Bristol, and snow is forecast – but every seat at Colston Hall in the city centre was sold out weeks ago, and not only for Ronan Keating who’s playing in the main auditorium. Also packing them in is a 59-year-old, softly spoken Australian psychotherapist, who will take to the stage for 90 minutes with just a whiteboard and some ideas that will keep his audience on the edge of their seats.

The psychotherapist is Steve Biddulph, and most of the people queuing up to hear him are the mothers of teenage girls. A few years ago Biddulph toured Britain warning of a crisis facing boyhood: now he is back with a similar message about girlhood. And if the audience here is anything to go by, he’s definitely touched a nerve. “Parents of girls are seriously worried about their daughters,” says Saffia Farr, editor of Juno magazine and the organiser of the Bristol part of Biddulph’s country-wide tour. “They feel there’s this overwhelming tide of advertising that’s targeting their daughters, of inappropriate clothing being sold in the shops, of media messages that encourage their girls to grow up way, way before their time. And they want to know what they can do about it.”

Telling them what they can do about it is Biddulph’s mission. “A few years ago, boys were a disaster area – there was an epidemic of ADHD, they were underperforming in exams, they were drinking too much and getting involved in wild behaviour,” he says. “Back then, girls seemed to be doing just fine. But, about five years ago, that all changed – suddenly, girls’ mental health started to plummet. Everyone knew a girl, or had a girl themselves, who had an eating disorder or who was depressed or was self-harming. It was a huge change in a very short period; I started to investigate why this was happening.”

Biddulph lives and works in Australia, but the crisis he sees brewing for young girls seems to be echoed across the Western world – and, in Britain, the figures suggest it’s worse than in other countries. A few weeks ago, the charity Childline announced a 68 per cent increase in youngsters contacting them about self-harming, and said most of the increase was among girls. The problem also seemed to be affecting teenagers at a younger age, with 14-year-olds now likely to be among callers.

Anxiety and depression in teenage girls is also on the rise: research from the Nuffield Foundation last year found that the proportion of 15- and 16-year-olds reporting feeling frequently anxious or depressed has doubled in the last 30 years, and is more common in girls: it has jumped from one in 30 to two in 30 for boys, and from one in 10 to two in 10 for girls. Meanwhile, a report from the Department of Health found teenage girls in Britain are more likely to binge drink than teenage girls anywhere else in Europe; more than half of 15- and 16-year-olds admit they drink to excess at least once a month. A separate report in 2011 found that one in five girls in this age bracket who drink at least once a week have drunken sex and later regret it.

Anorexia and bulimia are also dramatically on the increase: official figures for hospital admissions released last October pinpointed a 16 per cent rise in hospital admissions for eating disorders, and showed that one in every 10 of these admissions was a 15-year-old girl.

“There’s plenty to be concerned about,” Biddulph says. “Everyone who has a teenage daughter right now sees this, in their child and among their child’s friends.” The people they blame, he says, are the advertising industry and the media. “They are driving girls’ sensibilities and making them miserable. The corporate world has identified them as a new market for products, and is preying on them.” During his talk, Biddulph describes teenage girls as being out in the wilderness, surrounded by hyenas: it’s starting to get dark, he tells his audience, but they are all alone out there.

His message, though, is one of empowerment: he encourages parents to get together, to challenge the advertising industry and to lobby the Government to impose more restrictions on advertisers.

“Take the drinks industry – about 30 per cent of the market is sales to underage drinkers,” he says. “Alcohol companies are extremely powerful – but parents are powerful, too, and they have to stand against this and stop the marketing of alcopops and push for a higher drinking age.”

But the battle needs to be fought on a domestic as well as a policy front. “What we need to do is re-evaluate how we think of teenage girls: the current philosophy is that they’re growing older, so they need us less. But I believe that teenage girls go through a kind of second babyhood, and they in fact need their parents more than ever. We have to spend time with our daughters at this age: talk to them, listen to them, keep in touch with them. Staying connected to their parents makes all the difference to how they cope with the pressures they’re up against.”

Case study

Lindsay Julian, 51, lives in Salisbury. She has three daughters: Emily is 24, Olivia is 14, and Amelia is 11. She also has a son, Alexander, 28

“Emily got into drinking when she was about 15, and she started taking drugs fairly soon after that. It was a real roller-coaster time for all of us: sometimes she’d drink a lot and run off, and we’d have no idea where she was. One time, she didn’t come back all night, and we ended up calling the police. They were difficult times.

“There are so many pressures on young girls today – you’re very aware of that as a mother of daughters. So when my younger girls got close to the age where things got difficult with Emily, I thought: we’re going to do things differently this time round. I sent them to a Steiner school, where I think the pressures are lessened: the philosophy is holistic, it’s not all about exam results, which I think can be very stressful for young girls.

“Some of my daughters’ friends spend a lot of time on social media, texting and on Facebook – but I’m careful to limit those things for my girls, and it does make a difference. They watch TV but I monitor it – in some homes, TV seems like a third parent, and I don’t want it to be like that in our house. A lot of teenage girls never switch off, they’re constantly connected, and that puts them under pressure from one another as well as from advertisers.

“We’ve got friends where you can see that their 14-year-olds are more like adults; the wanting to drink, to go to parties all the time.

“Emily is fine now: things turned around for her eventually, and she now works as a researcher and has written a book. She’s a rock for her younger sisters and I’m very proud of her. I know you could say that she was OK in the end, but I don’t think it’s an experience I’d want to go through with my younger daughters. I think their adolescence could be happier, and less fraught, than Emily’s was.”

Thousands of children sexually exploited each year, inquiry says

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abortion, abuse, alcohol, child sexual exploitation, Children, control, crime, drugs, gangs, humiliation, mental health issues, miscarriage, perpetrators, power, pregnancy, punish, rape, sexual assault, smartphones, social networks, STDs, support, threaten

Thousands of children sexually exploited each year, inquiry says

Thousands of children are raped and abused each year, with many more cases going unreported by victims and unrecorded by the authorities, according to an official study presented as the most comprehensive inquiry to date of the scale and prevalence of child sexual exploitation in England.

The disturbing and at times horrific study, which describes a range of traumatic and violent sexual crimes perpetrated mainly against girls, by male teenage gang members and groups of older men, was described as a “wake-up call” for safeguarding professionals by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England (OCCE).

It draws an alarming picture of serious sexual crimes against children: girls groomed, then drugged and raped at seedy “parties” in private homes and warehouses organised by groups of men, for profit or pleasure; assaults in public parks, schools and alleyways by gang members influenced by violent pornography, and intent on threatening, punishing or controlling young women by means of forced oral sex, and anal and vaginal rape.

The report says that victims commonly suffer serious physical and emotional harm as a result of their experiences, including severe mental illness, and drug and alcohol problems. Some victims contract sexually transmitted diseases, become pregnant, have terminations or suffer miscarriages.

“The reality is that each year thousands of children in England are raped and abused by people seeking to humiliate, violate and control them. The impact on their lives is devastating,” said the inquiry chair, deputy children’s commissioner Sue Berelowitz.

The inquiry was established in 2011 to investigate what it saw as mounting concern about child sexual exploitation. The inquiry team, comprising academics and senior safeguarding professionals from the police, NHS and charities, collected data and evidence from local authorities, police forces and primary care trusts. It took oral evidence from 68 professionals and 20 sexually exploited children across the country.

It concluded that too often police, local authorities and other safeguarding agencies have failed to spot or act on the warning signs of sexual exploitation, despite what it says is 20 years of evidence that large numbers of children are being sexually exploited in the UK. “Too many child victims are not getting the protection and support they need,” writes Berelowitz in the foreword to the report.

It criticises safeguarding professionals who labelled victims as “promiscuous” or “asking for it”. This “worrying perspective” suggested officials too often assumed that sexually exploited children, many of whom exhibited disruptive or aggressive behaviour, were “complicit in, and responsible for, their own abuse”.

Debbie Jones, president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, said: “It is clear that we cannot make assumptions about victims or perpetrators based on their age, ethnicity or whether they are in care. Making such assumptions will risk some children not being identified as being sexually exploited and not receiving the protection that they so desperately need.”

The inquiry’s interim report published by the OCCE says that despite media attention surrounding a number of high-profile court cases involving groups of Pakistani men and white British female victims, sexual exploitation was widespread. There was no evidence that perpetrators belonged disproportionately to a particular ethnic group.

“The vast majority of the perpetrators of this terrible crime are male. They range in age from as young as 14 to old men. They come from all ethnic groups and so do their victims – contrary to what some may wish to believe,” writes Berelowitz.

The study found the largest group of perpetrators were classed as “white” males, but because there were gaps in official data recording, and because many victims found it hard to identify their attackers, it was impossible to estimate accurately who and how many people were sexually exploiting children.

“What all perpetrators have in common – regardless of the differences in age, ethnicity, or social background (information on disability or sexual orientation was rarely available) – was their abuse of power in relation to their victims, and that the vast majority were male,” the report said.

Although it identified 2,409 children and young people as “confirmed victims” of sexual exploitation in gangs or groups over a 14-month period, and estimated that 16,500 children were at “high risk” of sexual exploitation during a 12-month period, the report said this was an undercounting of the true scale of the problem. The report did not consider cases of sexual exploitation by “lone perpetrators”.

Anne Marie Carrie, chief executive of Barnardo’s, which works with 1,000 victims of child sexual exploitation each year, agreed that the figures were undercounted: “We agree with the OCCE that it is likely that the figures of both confirmed victims and those at high risk only show us the tip of the iceberg.

All kinds of children and young people, both male and female and across a range of ethnic backgrounds, were sexually exploited, the report found. Although vulnerable youngsters in care or from dysfunctional families were most at risk, children “from loving and secure homes” were also abused by gangs and groups.

“The characteristics common to all victims are not their age, ethnicity, disability or sexual orientation, rather their powerlessness and vulnerability,” the report states.

The study found that 28% of the victims reported to the inquiry were from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. The report says: “This information is significant, given that the general perception appears to be that sexual exploitation by groups, in particular, is primarily a crime against white children.”

Technology was used widely to initiate, organise and maintain child sexual exploitation. Victims reported being harassed through text messages, and perpetrators would often film and distribute incidents of rape via smartphones and social networking. Younger perpetrators had in many cases been exposed to violent pornography, the inquiry found, and it speculated that this informed abusers’ understanding of sexual relationships.

Berelowitz writes: “We need to ask why so many males, both young and old, think it is acceptable to treat both girls and boys as objects to be used and abused. We need to know why so many adults in positions of responsibility persist in not believing these children when they try to tell someone what they have endured.”

The doctor battling drink and depression will see you now …

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alcohol, Depression, doctors, mental health issues, stigma, substance misuse, symptoms

The doctor battling drink and depression will see you now …

Thousands of doctors are continuing to treat patients while hiding their own problems with drink, drugs and depression because of a “culture of invincibility” among health professionals.

Each year hundreds of medics are treated for addiction and mental health issues, according to official statistics. But researchers investigating the issue say that this masks a much bigger problem, with thousands of doctors concealing their symptoms.

The extent of ill-health among doctors – often put down to burn-out caused by the high-pressure demands of their job – was highlighted in a General Medical Council report detailing 1,384 doctors who had been assessed for underlying health concerns over the past five years. Of these, 98 per cent were diagnosed with alcohol, substance misuse or mental health issues.

Some 544 doctors were found to have drink-related problems and 598 were diagnosed with mental conditions such as neuroses.

At the same time, the Practitioner Health Programme (PHP), a national service that sick doctors can contact to seek help, found that of 554 referrals, 85 per cent were related to mental health problems and 28 per cent to substance addiction.

Dr Max Henderson, from King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, believes that these numbers represent the tip of the iceberg because doctors are often deterred from admitting that they are sick and need time off by feelings of shame.

A recent study led by Dr Henderson showed that medics who do fall ill fear being perceived as “weak” or “a failure” by colleagues. “There is a feeling among doctors, that illness shouldn’t happen to them – that they should somehow be invincible,” said Dr Henderson.

“Doctors are particularly vulnerable to ‘presenteeism’ and we know they are reluctant to use mainstream healthcare services and will sit on their symptoms and not share them with anyone. So they may treat themselves or they try to get their friends to treat them through what are known as ‘corridor consultations’.

“The idea that there might be several thousand who have psychiatric problems and are unable seek help due to fear and issues of confidentiality is entirely feasible.”

Dr Steve Moorhead, a consultant psychiatrist at Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Trust, said: “When we treat doctors, we see the difficulty that they have coming to terms with their need for help. Maybe this is part of the health service culture of looking after other people first.”

There has been little evidence to suggest that patients have been harmed by doctors who remain at work despite being unwell. But Dr Henderson admitted that such physicians are likely to provide a “less good service” to their patients.

One of the most recent surveys on the health of NHS staff, which involved questioning 2,500 doctors in Birmingham, showed the extent to which doctors are willing to hide mental problems or substance abuse issues. Only 13 per cent of respondents said they would seek help for mental health disorders or addiction, while 87 per cent said they would self-medicate or seek informal medical advice.

Occasionally, however, this unwillingness to seek help tips over into tragedy, as in the case of Daksha Emson an Indian-born psychiatrist who hid her fight against manic depression as she built her career. In 2000, during a psychotic episode, the 34-year-old mother stabbed herself and her three-month-old daughter to death. An inquiry later found that Dr Emson had feared her illness would not remain confidential and that the resulting stigma would have “haunted” her work and her life.

Despite improved specialist support services for doctors since then, Dr Henderson says that taboos among doctors about their own mental health continue.

He argues that doctors remain wary about making official reports about their illness for fear of having to deal with the GMC, which could “take their career away”.

The Royal College of General Practitioners and Dr Henderson called this weekend for more funding for confidential support services for doctors, warning that looming cuts and the reform of the NHS would lead to an increase in the number of medics suffering poor mental health.

Dr Clare Gerada, chairwoman of the royal college and PHP’s medical director, said: “We are seeing more sick doctors, more GPs in particular, more shame, more presenteeism, as doctors are worried about their futures. ”

A Department of Health spokesman said yesterday that a new system of regular appraisals to support doctors is due to start next year.

‘I didn’t want to admit something was wrong. I just told myself to get over it’

Dr Peter Verow describes himself as a ‘type A personality’. A former champion squash player who represented Britain and a respected consultant, he is by any standards a high-achiever.

But five years ago, at 55, he was hit was a debilitating illness — not cancer or heart problems — but depression. He went from exercising every day and enjoying a top-level career to barely being able to get out of bed.

“The depression came on out of the blue,” he recalled. “It’s like having a permanent black cloud hanging over your head.”

At his lowest point, the occupational health specialist, now 59, admits that he even had thoughts of suicide. “But I knew that because of my wife and children I would never actually do that.”

Despite such internal struggles, Dr Verow kept his meltdown secret. “I was probably ill for six months to a year before I finally accepted I had to go off work. Colleagues and friends didn’t realise how bad I was.

“I didn’t want to admit that there was something wrong with me. I frequently told myself to ‘get over it, and pull yourself out of it’. But you can’t pull yourself out it.”

Dr Verow eventually sought help from a psychiatrist and took six months off work to recover. “My time away helped me to recognise that I had to change my work role in some way and so I went part-time,” he said.

Moken nomads leave behind their ‘sea gypsy’ life for a modern existence

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alcohol, assimilation, Burma, citizenship, culture, customs, decompression sickness, dive, education, employment, fish-bombing, gambling, integration, Language, livelihood, Moken, nomads, sea cucumber, sea-gypsies, stateless, Thailand, traditions, tribe, tsunami

Moken nomads leave behind their ‘sea gypsy’ life for a modern existence

Ngui takes one last breath and disappears with a tiny splash. Tunnelling through the turquoise waves, he dives past brightly coloured fish and coral, until he reaches the sandy bottom of the seabed, 20 metres deep, where he begins scouring for tonight’s dinner.

He wears no mask, no fins, and no diving tank. He prefers sarongs and button-down shirts decorated with seashell and starfish motifs but the most startling thing about him underwater is his eyes. They are wide open.

Ngui, 30, belongs to the Moken, a nomadic, seafaring tribe of hunter-gatherers who live in the southern seas of Burma and Thailand. Little is known about their origins, but it is believed they descended from migrant Austronesians who set sail from southern China around 4,000 years ago. Spending eight months of the year at sea, the Moken roam in small flotillas of kabang – boats fashioned from a single tree and shared by a nuclear family – and return to land only to barter fish and shells for essentials such as rice and petrol, or to wait out the monsoon season in temporary shacks. It is a way of life that has existed, unchanged, for centuries – but one that may not last for much longer.

The 2004 tsunami greatly depleted the source of the Moken’s only livelihood: the ocean’s once-abundant array of seafood. International fishing boats are now wiping out the little that’s left. Those Moken who have moved ashore are often forced to take dangerous jobs for menial pay. Those who stay at sea are sometimes arrested for lacking papers or permits. Others return to land after months afloat only to find their huts destroyed and luxury tourist resorts built in their place.

“The sea has changed and life has changed,” explains Ngui’s father, Jao. “Things we used to do we can’t do any more. Places we used to go we can’t go any more. Life isn’t fun any more.”

It would be difficult to find a family that represents the changes wrought on the Moken as well as Jao’s. He was born on a boat and spent his childhood at sea. He married at 16 and nearly pursued a traditional, aquatic lifestyle – until he and his wife decided to settle on land.

“Life was hard being illiterate,” says Jao in the cramped house in Kuraburi they now share with a 13-member extended family. “I wanted my children to go to school and have options.”

Education is still a relatively new concept to the roughly 2,000 Moken who live in the waters around Burma and Thailand, most of whom are stateless. A recent push by various charities and the Thai government to issue Thai identity cards has granted some access to state-run schools and healthcare, but claiming full-blown citizenship – by proving that they, or a parent, were born in Thailand – is a complex issue for a nomadic people who hardly use numbers and mark the date according to the tide, not the Gregorian calendar.

Even getting children to school can prove trying, said Sumana Sirimangkala, headteacher at the only school on Koh Lao, an island of 50 Moken families on the Thai-Burmese border. “Moken lack supplies like clothes, food, stationery, textbooks, shoes, raincoats, lifejackets, umbrellas – all the things that are necessary for children to come to school,” she says.

“Moken can’t afford any of these things, so the school has to provide it all – otherwise they don’t want to come.”

Moken children regularly drop out to help their parents earn money, students say. Some boys as young as eight are sent to work in construction, while others help their mothers dig for shells – backbreaking labour in the hot sun.

Nearly all the men on the island are hired by Thai fishing boats to plant explosives on the seabed, or to dive for expensive and exotic rarities such as sea cucumber. Sometimes they are sent down with air run through thin plastic tubes hooked up to a spluttery, diesel-run compressor; other times they dive without any air at all. Many succumb to decompression sickness (the bends) from ascending too quickly; some don’t return at all.

“I’m afraid of being killed, it’s so risky,” admits a 30-year-old Moken who has just returned from a fish-bombing expedition. “We wire together four to five dynamite sticks, connect another explosive wire that hooks up to the boat, and then I dive down to the bottom of the sea. When I come back up, the sticks are ignited with a battery.”

Sitdit, a Moken elder whose son died from decompression sickness during a job in the Nicobar Islands, says risks such as these are increasingly part and parcel of a new way of life.

“We are running out of resources, so our skills have to be adapted to the new challenges,” he says simply. “Sometimes the big boats get caught by the Burmese military and Moken are arrested. I had four relatives arrested by the Burmese military and they all died in jail.”

Apart from a handful of researchers who had studied their language and customs – notably the French father-son anthropologist duo Pierre and Jacques Ivanoff – the Moken were a relatively unknown lot until the tsunami, when headlines described the mysterious “sea gypsies [who] saw signs in the waves”. Charities and religious groups poured in with free supplies – food, petrol, boats and building materials – at such a velocity that some communities were left bewildered by the handouts.

“We had to become Christian to qualify for a boat, so I became a Christian – I even became a church leader!” explains Sitdit, his charity-built, two-room stilt house facing the “church”, an empty wooden structure with a simple roof. “All we had to do was follow the gospel and sing songs. But then the church [group] cheated us, and now nobody goes to church any more.”

Today, a different kind of communion is going on, one where Moken women in sarongs while away the afternoon heat with card games and whisky so strong it makes the eyes burn. When the men return from their jobs at sea, they too take to drinking and gambling.

“There’s an issue with their drinking a lot of alcohol – it’s everywhere,” says Jitlada Rattanapan of Plan Thailand, a charity working to support Moken children.

At Baan Tung Wah, a Moken village of around 70 families in the mainland resort town of Khao Lak, children with snotty noses and dirty T-shirts beg for sweets while elders take shots of strong drink. Most of the parents are away doing menial day jobs – working in construction, spraying insecticides, or scavenging for recyclables along the beaches and streets – leaving the children to play among puppies and chickens in the rubbish-filled streets.

“Everyone in this village drinks – they hit their kids, too,” says a shopkeeper, Kong Kwan, 35, who spends all day selling sweets and crisps to Moken children and petrol and whisky to Moken elders. “Sometimes the police come, but they can’t be bothered to deal with it.”

The community’s 20-year-old youth leader, Big, says that life in the village can be stifling, forcing many youths to look for a way out.

“We’re restricted to living in this area only – about five acres [2 hectares] – and because of the influx of hotels and resorts around here, the sea has been polluted,” he says. “That makes it difficult to go fishing. So a lot of young people just choose easier jobs, like working in hotels or at 7-Eleven.”

Big adds that the Moken youth have pretty much “assimilated seamlessly” into Thai society, so much so that “whatever ‘bad Thais’ do, Moken do now too”, he notes. “Drugs, stealing, marijuana, glue-sniffing. We never saw this before, and it’s getting serious.”

The village is trying to counter such behaviour by offering classes in Moken language and customs to the children, many of whom are unaware of their traditions. Other classes, directed at teens, offer training as tour guides.

The community leader, Hong, who heads the classes and created the village’s Moken museum, hopes that turning Baan Tung Wah into an ecotourism destination may help get people back on track.

“Moken are supposed to travel, to be nomadic, to travel freely. So if we cannot travel freely, we are dead, culturally at least,” he says. “Moken children use mobile phones, study English and choose to be educated. We’ve abandoned our old traditions so much we risk losing them entirely.”

While many charities working for the Moken promote education and citizenship as giving new “options” to such a vulnerable group, Narumon Hinshiranan – a cultural anthropologist at Chulalongkorn University who speaks fluent Moken and has studied the group for the past decade – says this kind of “one-size-fits-all development … limits their nomadic background”.

“I don’t see education as an ‘option’, I see it as integration into Thai society – so that they are essentially cut off from their roots.”

Those who have pursued this new kind of life – such as Jao’s 23-year-old daughter, Kang, who is so far the only Moken to have graduated from university – may determine what choices the Moken make next.

“I see myself as a bridge between the Moken community and the outside world,” says Kang, who this month starts her first job, as the only Moken teacher at the school on Surin island.

She will be living with her brother Ngui, along with some 200 other Moken villagers, but they will be parallel lives in what seems like a parallel world.

“I like to be out doing things,” says Ngui, thrusting a hand out to the sea to explain why he chose not to stay in school. “I dive to collect seafood, gather it up bit by bit, and sell it to shops. It’s enough to make a living for now.”

The Moken

• The Moken are one of many sea gypsy tribes across south-east Asia: there are the Orang Laut of Indonesia; the Bajau of Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and the Philippines; and the Salone (Moken) of Burma

• Thailand is home to an estimated 12,000 sea gypsies, divided into three groups: the Moken, the Moklen and the Urak Lawoi

• A 2003 study by Lund University in Sweden found that the underwater vision of Moken children was twice as good as that of their European counterparts

• Food sourcing is subsistence-based: men traditionally spear fish, or use nets or traps, to find seafood, while women catch crabs and oysters by hand, or dig for shells. They also engage in basic agriculture

• The Moken are often described as sincere and peace-loving, preferring to flee trouble than engage in disagreements

• Traditionally animist, the Moken perform a large spirit-offering festival in the fifth lunar month and celebrate death by singing, dancing and drinking

• Though the Moken give themselves only one name, the Thai monarchy has created surnames for them, among them “Klatalee” (“brave person of the sea”)

• A bucket of sea cucumbers, which the Moken dive for, earns about $10 a day. A small dish of the stuff sells for $30 or more in Taiwanese restaurants

• Moken are often called “dirty islanders” by Thai people, a phrase that has encouraged many Moken youth to adopt Thai fashion and haircuts to fit in

• Surin island, home to a large Moken settlement, was turned into a national marine park by Thailand in 1981, rendering illegal traditional Moken activities such as fishing and logging (in order to make boats)

• Burma has been rumoured to be looking to permanently resettle many of its Moken and has already turned one Moken island into a military base.