‘They used to use swords, now they use guns’: Inside Thailand’s student gang violence surge
Speaking quietly and wearing a chequered, collared shirt, Aof is an unlikely student gang member.
“I’ve shot people more than 10 times, but I don’t know how many of the people died,” he told The Telegraph from a juvenile detention centre in Bangkok.
He may not be sure how many other students he’s killed, but he remembers every detail of the murder that finally landed him in jail aged 17.
It began with a 9mm Glock pistol to his head.
He was heading home after an out-of-hours college study session in eastern Bangkok when he ran into rivals.
Aof, who asked to use his nickname to obscure his identity, was cornered in a quiet alley and had a gun pressed against his temple. His attacker pulled the trigger.
“It malfunctioned, so the bullet didn’t go off and I had a chance to run,” the slight and shy former electrical student told The Telegraph. “But I remembered the face of the boy who held the gun. And I wanted revenge.”
A week later, Aof was on the back of a friend’s motorbike, circling the neighbourhood to find the boy who tried to kill him.
When he finally spotted him, he didn’t hesitate: he shot his teenage victim three times in the back, puncturing his heart, lungs, and ribcage. The boy died of his injuries shortly afterward.
Their feud was based on little more than uniform; Aof didn’t even know the teenager’s name.
The pair had been sucked into a surge in student gang violence that is blighting the Thai capital, driven in part by easy access to weapons that have led to a string of high-profile shootings and calls to reform the law.
“Twenty years ago [students] used swords, knives or planks of wood, but increasingly they are using guns,” said Ticha na Nakorn, the director of Baan Kanchanapisek.
A progressive juvenile detention centre on the outskirts of Bangkok, Baan Kanchanapisek is where Aof spent three years living. A fifth of the centre’s occupants have been involved in gang violence, according to Ms. Ticha.
“It has become very, very easy to get hold of a gun here,” she added. “[Students] think it’s legendary to be part of the gangs, they think it’s cool to kill.”
Recent incidents include a teenager killing two people in a shooting spree at a high-end shopping centre in October, the death of a teacher caught in gang-related crossfire at a bus stop in November, and a 17-year-old’s murder in a drive-by shooting in February.
Getting hold of a gun is relatively easy in Thailand, even for teenagers.
Although you have to be over 20 to secure an official permit - which costs as little as five baht (10p) - the second-hand market is flooded with firearms from the military, police and civil servants, who do not need to return some of their weapons when they retire.
“They can sell the guns on the black market or even put them in the pawn shops… and that’s how a lot of guns get to the wider public,” said Dr. Boonwara Sumano, head of social development at the Thailand Development Research Institute.
Some people even make their own guns “Thai-style homemade guns with supplies from motorcycle repair shops, which are widely available,” she added.
The result is that there are 10.3 million guns in the country of 71 million, according to the small arms survey. Pakistan is the only country in Asia with higher firearm ownership rates.
“People are increasingly fed up,” said Dr. Sumano.
Police and the government did not respond to a request for comment. Last year, a police spokesman told AFP that the “education institution should be more responsible,” and the gang violence “only concerns us if it impacts citizens.”
Aof chose the route most of his peers use - he bought one second-hand.
Facebook marketplace
He purchased a Smith and Wesson .38 revolver via Facebook and learned to use it during weekly, clandestine training sessions at college arranged by the gang to pass fighting skills from one generation of students to another.
Gang memorabilia - including jackets, belt buckles, and rings emblazoned with the vocational school’s logo - were also passed down, used to mark out status and performance in the “military training” sessions. The older the item, the more “sacred” it was deemed.
Aof insists that the training was purely “about survival and self-defence,” but he admits it also “felt good” to fight.
His story is a typical one for Thailand’s teen gang members, most of whom attend vocational colleges.
Aof went to technical college a decade ago to train to become an electrician. He said he joined one of the many gangs at the institution to both “blend in” and escape a difficult homelife with an alcoholic father. The gang soon felt like a protective new family.
His gang regularly clashed with others from nearby technical colleges and he was happy to join in.
Ms Ticha - who met Aof during his sentence at Baan Kanchanapisek - said many boys who get entangled in the violence come from similarly challenging, lower-income backgrounds.
“Kids feel like they have been pushed out of mainstream society, and seek acceptance from friends - often by acting in a violent way… to prove they’re ‘brave’,” she said.
Dr. Boonwara said Thailand had a problem with using violence to resolve problems, pointing to the fact there have been two military coups in two decades.
“Guns are just a tool. Even if the government wanted to eradicate all of the guns, if the tolerance for violence or beliefs about how strong men should behave are still there, we’d still see people kill each other with big knives or other weapons,” she said.
Technical colleges, where students train for trades like construction or mechanics, are also looked down on in Thailand’s deeply stratified society, amplifying a sense of alienation.
“We need to address easy access to guns, but if we don’t address social norms and inequalities too, it’s not going to solve this problem of gang violence.”
Now 27, Aof has become a rare success story.
He is studying music at university and works as a mentor to encourage other boys in his neighbourhood to avoid getting embroiled in gang violence.
“I just tell them, look at me: I lost two friends, one became handicapped, most of the rest went to prison,” he said.
“I still ask myself, why did we do it? Why did I kill? I don’t really have a good answer, but it will stick with me for the rest of my life.”
