PHUKET: The Facebook site of a government family shelter housing Rohingya and Bangladeshis has disappeared mysteriously amid apparent conflict over whether Thailand's treatment of boatpeople should be transparent or only open to scrutiny when authorities permit.

The Phang Nga province family shelter, in the tourist centre of Khao Lak, north of Phuket, works closely with the UNHCR and the International Organisation for Migration - more closely than some other shelters and detention centres around Thailand.

Staff from the shelter, which normally deals with domestic violence, have been involved in the grassroots movement to expose human trafficking along Thailand's Andaman coast and to cease automatically classifying all arrivals by sea as ''illegal migrants.''

A clash of cultures is taking place within some Thai government departments as international scrutiny and wise advisers suggest a change in approach is needed now that the nightmare of the sea voyages and secret jungle camps has been revealed.

Seventy-seven Rohingya and two Bangladeshis, all women and children, are now at the Phang Nga shelter.

Since 2013 when the first Rohingya were accommodated there, many of the residents have escaped into the hands of traffickers.

People-traders at this centre and others once often walked in the front door posing as volunteer helpers, talking to the Rohingya women held at the shelter in a language that none of the staff could understand.

Instead of calming the Rohingya and telling them they are in safe hands, the ''helpers'' have often said words to the effect: ''Climb over the wall at 1am tonight and I'll meet you. There's room for 12 people in my pickup. I will get you to Malaysia.''

The big mystery remains why these kinds of traffickers - and the big league players trading scores of people directly from boats - have continued to escape detection on the seven-hour road journey south to the secret jungle camps along the Thai-Malaysia border.

Communications has always been the big problem - and that appears to still be the key issue involved in a protest this week by Rohingya inmates at a detention centre in Surat Thani.

Muslim Rohingya have in the past protested because their religious needs are not understood. Good translators who have only the best interests of the victims at heart are hard to find.

In Phuketwan's experience, there have in the past been traffickers posing as translators - and some who know that police would prefer to have the boatpeople defined as ''illegal migrants.''

This group of translators edit what they are told to suit that outcome.

What's changed for Thailand's shelters and detention centres in recent years is the mix of people in their care.

Before 2013, the Rohingya taking to the boats were virtually all men and teenage boys, leaving the women and children safely at home in Burma's Rakhine state, to be reunited later.

From late 2012, following the mid-year torchings of villages by hate mobs and the confinement of survivors in squalid refugee camps, the Rohingya women and children began to flee with their menfolk.

With nobody intervening to stop them and enforce the law in Thailand, traffickers expanded their business, employing touts to sell the trip south to a new market: the deprived young men of Bangladesh.

The prospect of a new life in Malaysia in a better-paid job enticed hundreds of Bangladeshi men to leave home - and to almost immediately become victims of beatings and extortion, just like the Rohingya.

Somewhere close to half the thousands of people fleeing poverty or persecution now are Bangladeshis.

That's a sign of the the rapid growth of the trafficking business from one that once involving purely victims of ethnic cleansing to one that simply demonstrates the efficient expansion of a successful business model.

Friday's gathering of representatives from 19 countries under a chandelier at a luxury hotel in Bangkok was a start to the process of fixing the problem.

The pulling down of the Facebook site of the Phang Nga shelter, though, could be a sign that some authorities in Thailand still feel a coverup of what's happening is best for Thailand.

They would be wrong. They have always been wrong.

Thailand must shake off its less-than-glorious past and accept a part in providing practical solutions to a regional problem.

What's needed to achieve that in Thailand are trustworthy translators and greater transparency, not the closure of harmless Facebook sites.

INTEREST in the brutal treatment of would-be refugees off Australia and Rohingya in Burma is growing with the photos accompanying this article from a protest last week in Melbourne, Australia, that drew scores of participants. ''Australia must resettle Rohingya refugees'' read some placards.