Cambodia
From American Gulag
Contents |
[edit] Somaly Mam and life as a sex slave
At 39 years old, Somaly Mam, a beautiful woman with a bright smile, dark skin and long brown hair, has become the heroine of more than 40,000 women and girls in Cambodia. After being orphaned as a small child, Mam was sold into sexual slavery when she was 15. For three years, she worked as a prostitute in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. Today, she runs a nonprofit organization that has rescued thousands of women from brothels, and brought thousands of cases against traffickers and brothel owners before the courts. Despite her best efforts, however, more women are trafficked in Cambodia every day.
Cambodia is one of the poorest countries in Asia, but its sexual slavery business is thriving. Women from nearby countries, such as Vietnam and Thailand, are sold to Cambodian brothels, but the majority of sex trafficking in the country is domestic. According to a 2005 report from the Future Group, a Canadian organization devoted to combating human trafficking, there are between 40,000 and 50,000 sex workers in Cambodia, and at least one in 40 girls born in Cambodia will be sold into sex slavery.
In her memoir, The Road of Lost Innocence, Mam writes that sexual slavery has become ingrained in Cambodian culture. Women are viewed as livestock, or “money on legs,” she writes, and they are often sold or leased into slavery at a brothel in order to pay off someone’s debt, whether a family member or merely an acquaintance.
“By working in a brothel where the moneylender has an arrangement, a daughter acts as collateral and repays the loan,” Mam writes. “In other cases, the parents sell their daughters outright to the brothel. It’s like they transfer ownership of her. A 12-year-old girl might bring in 50 or 100 U.S. dollars for her family.”
Girls as young as 5 are forced to have sex in these brothels. And because virgins command a higher price, girls are often stitched back up so their “virginity” can be resold numerous times. They are beaten if they talk back, and sometimes for no reason at all. Mam was placed in a punishment room where the brothel owner tied her up and dumped snakes on her. She was even electrocuted once, something she claims now happens regularly to prostitutes.
“My punishment was harsh, but the way they punish prostitutes today is far worse than anything I ever had to suffer,” Mam writes. “Now I see girls in brothels with nails hammered into their skulls. That sounds unbelievable, but we have photos. Girls are chained and beaten with electric cables. They go mad. We’ve rescued several children from brothels who have completely lost their minds.” This issue is nothing less than an outrageous human rights crisis. So why don’t we in the United States know more about it? For all intents and purposes, the West remains ignorant of Cambodia’s sex trafficking. The media is partly to blame. Since the 1990s, journalists have been writing about the issue of human trafficking, but most of the reports focus on Thailand, China and European countries. Cambodia tends to be forgotten.
[edit] Lack of attention in the U.S. media
When American journalists do write about sex trafficking in Cambodia, most of them report on the same things over and over again, like a broken record. Once you’ve read one article on Cambodian sex slavery, you feel like you’ve read them all. The Western media tends to summarize the problem rather than offer solutions. They are reactive and superficial. The women and children who are being bought and sold like cattle are, in many articles, as forgettable and faceless as a herd of livestock.
Take, for example, a story called "Girl, 6, embodies Cambodia’s sex industry" that appeared on CNN’s Web site on Jan. 26, 2007. It was written by Dan Rivers, CNN’s Bangkok correspondent who, from Thailand, covers news and business stories across Southeast Asia.
Rivers begins with a very brief, bare bones recap of the atrocities visited upon a 6-year-old prostitute named Srey. Rivers writes that Srey was sold to a brothel by her parents when she was 5, but he does not explain the disturbing trend that Cambodian brothels are looking for younger and younger prostitutes in order to satiate the desires of child sex tourists.
Rivers does not know how much Srey was sold for, but he says other girls talk of being sold for between $10 and $100. According to Rivers, Srey endured months of sexual abuse at the hands of pimps and sex tourists before she was rescued by Somaly Mam. “Passed from man to man, often drugged to make her compliant, Srey was a commodity at the heart of a massive, multimillion-dollar sex industry in Phnom Penh, Cambodia,” he writes. He points out that Srey—who is never described in any detail—is HIV-positive, and because she does not have access to decent hospitals or medical care, her future is bleak.
Nothing else is written about Srey. We get no information on how exactly she was rescued; what she looks like; how she acts; what she does at Mam’s shelter; or what health care is available to her. Rivers mentions another girl who resides at one of Mam’s shelters. He characterizes her as “especially disturbed,” saying that she had been imprisoned for two years in a cage, where she was repeatedly raped. Her age is not given, nor is her first name or how she was rescued, or what she looks like. There is no indication that Rivers even attempted to speak with any of the girls while visiting Mam’s shelters.
An Associated Press article from March 31, 2008, is equally superficial. It describes how pop star Ricky Martin visited a Cambodian center for sex trade victims. “Martin held infants and listened to a 14-year-old rape victim’s song during his visit to a shelter in the northwestern city of Siem Reap, home of the famed Angkor temples,” Ker Munthit writes.
The only other mention of any specific victims occurs when Munthit writes that Martin “also held the 3-month-old daughter of a 22-year-old woman who was sold by her father to a brothel and is now HIV-positive. The woman broke down in tears as she urged Martin to keep fighting against human trafficking. ‘I’m not going to stop,’ Martin said, pounding his fist on his knee as he sat on a tiled floor. ‘All of you are my heroes. You are a gift of my life.’ ”
The article goes on to briefly summarize Martin’s visit to Cambodia. Never does it explain that the shelter Martin visited was operated by Mam’s organization. Munthit writes that Martin visited other anti-human trafficking projects on his trip, and that he was astounded to find more than 200 groups working in Cambodia to prevent trafficking, but the article does not detail any of these projects.
There are a number of reasons why Cambodian sex trafficking does not receive much substantive attention from the U.S. media. The most obvious is that the dire state of the news industry has led to a drastic reduction in foreign correspondents, and therefore a decline in the resources available to investigate such stories. Another reason is the difficulty of getting to the heart of this issue—working around the frustrating Cambodian government and the corrupt members of the police and justice systems. One veteran American journalist has committed himself to furthering fair and accurate news coverage in Cambodia, including publishing stories on the issue of human trafficking.
[edit] Bernard Krisher and the Cambodia Daily
In 1993, Bernard Krisher, former Tokyo bureau chief for Newsweek, began publishing the Cambodia Daily, a nonprofit, English-language newspaper published six days a week in Phnom Penh. It covers many topics, such as trafficking, crime, corruption and international news. Not surprisingly, Krisher says, the Cambodian government isn’t fond of his publication.
“They don’t like us,” he says. “We print the news very objectively. We cover corruption. We have op-ed pieces by people in Cambodia—politicians and academics. They criticize the government.” Krisher says Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen often criticizes the Cambodia Daily in his speeches, but the government has never made any attempts to shut down the paper.
“There is a love-hate relationship between me and the prime minister. I believe he respects what I’m doing,” Krisher says. “They pretty much leave me alone. They know if they ever took any action against me or what I’m involved in, the public might be critical.” The other Cambodian newspapers, according to Krisher, do not have problems with the government because they focus mostly on tabloid-style sensationalism. Plus, their funding can be linked to political party members. “There’s a little bit of corruption there where journalists or publishers get paid by parties to print things,” Krisher says.
In an email, Sreang Chheat, a project coordinator at the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, writes that members of the American media do not encounter much difficulty when attempting to enter Cambodia. The real difficulty, Chheat writes, is gaining access to information regarding human trafficking, and to the locations where trafficking reportedly takes place.
“Cambodia’s rank of press freedom is better than most of Southeast Asian countries, but it is far from good,” Chheat writes. “The law prohibits censorship, but in practice the media has to censor themselves to avoid harsh reactions, including withholding of license from the Ministry,” and even death threats.
Considering this discouraging atmosphere, it’s not surprising that the country doesn’t receive much coverage in the Western media. Yet, there is one journalist who has not allowed the Cambodian government to dissuade him from returning to the country and hunting down traffickers and their victims.
[edit] Journalist Nicholas Kristof purchases the freedom of two prostitutes
Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times has been visiting Cambodia for a dozen years, and writing about sex trafficking there for at least five. As a columnist, he often straddles the line between activist and objective journalist. In December, he worked with Krisher to open a junior high school in Cambodia. And five years ago, he wrote a series of columns about his purchase of two Cambodian prostitutes.
It began with a visit to Poipet, a smuggling town in northwestern Cambodia, where Kristof wanted to meet and interact with victims of modern-day slavery.
“The only way to have access to the girls is to appear to be a customer. So I put out the word that I wanted to meet young girls and stayed at the seedy $8-a-night Phnom Pich Guest House,” he wrote in his Jan. 17, 2004, column “Girls for Sale.”
This is how he met Srey Neth and Srey Mom, two teenage prostitutes. Kristof decided to buy their freedom—something he refers to in one column as “dreadfully unjournalistic.” He purchased Srey Neth for $150 and Srey Mom for $203. The journey Kristof undertook to rescue these young girls is highly personal. Unlike most articles written about sex trafficking, Kristof described the two young prostitutes’ personalities in great detail, and in doing so put faces on an otherwise faceless crisis.
Kristof started the series by describing Srey Neth as a “lovely, giggly wisp of a teenager,” and recounted their first conversation. Sitting on the bed in Kristof’s hotel room watching TV, Srey Neth explained to him how one of her female cousins had arranged for her sale. Her virginity was purchased for $750. Afterward, she was confined to the brothel and sold for $13 a session. She worked as a prostitute for a month, and then she met Kristof. She had not attempted to escape for fear of being caught and beaten, and she refused to go to the police.
Senior police officials had paid to have sex with her. Srey Neth told Kristof, “The police wouldn’t help me because they get bribes from the brothel owners.”
When Kristof found Srey Mom, she had spent four years as a prostitute, her price for sex having gradually dropped from $27 to less than $3. Kristof purchased the girls and returned them to their native villages, and asked Krisher and his nonprofit organization to check in on them. A year later, Kristof returned to write a follow-up series on how the girls were doing. Srey Mom, hooked on methamphetamines, had returned to the brothel. Srey Neth was attending beautician school.
One thing that sets Kristof apart from the journalists who have timidly covered this issue is that he does not just write about the lives of the trafficked girls—he advocates for change, and proposes possible solutions. In his Jan. 3 column “If This Isn’t Slavery, What Is?” Kristof called for President Barack Obama to champion a “new abolitionist movement against 21st-century slavery.”
He proposes undermining sex trafficking by pressuring Cambodia’s government to organize sting operations and arrest both buyers and sellers of the virgin girls who are at the heart of the brothel’s business model. He also calls for the U.S. government and other countries to threaten Cambodia with economic sanctions until the country takes meaningful action against sex trafficking.
“Sexual slavery is like any other business: raise the operating costs, create a risk of jail, and the human traffickers will quite sensibly shift to some other trade,” Kristof wrote in his Jan. 10 column, “Striking the Brothels’ Bottom Line,” for which he spoke with a brothel owner.
There’s no question that Kristof’s unique brand of journalistic activism has helped draw more attention to the issue of sex slavery. In 2005, Kristof discovered that shortly after his articles about purchasing the two girls appeared in the New York Times, the Cambodian police raided the brothel where Srey Neth had been housed and arrested her pimp.
Kristof also is responsible for getting Krisher involved. In 1993, the same year he began publishing the Cambodia Daily, Krisher founded a nonprofit organization called American Assistance for Cambodia. Through this organization, Krisher started the Sihanouk Hospital Center of Hope, which treats the poor for free; he has built more than 450 schools with matching funds from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank; and he opened A New Life Orphanage. It was after meeting Kristof that he began to focus on preventing sex trafficking as well.
“I’ve found it very difficult to try to help people once they have been trafficked,” Krisher says. “It’s like a drug addict or an alcoholic. Once you are in it, it’s hard to treat this. So I started something new. I have a program now which basically is to prevent trafficking from occurring.”
The program, called Girls Be Ambitious, pays the parents of at-risk girls—those who are poor and live in the Cambodian countryside—$10 for every month that a girl has perfect attendance at school. Hundreds of girls are in the Girls Be Ambitious program, which is also training them for future health care jobs.
[edit] A long way to go
Kristof still keeps tabs on the trafficking situation in Cambodia and continues to call for reform. But Joel Brinkley, a visiting professor of journalism at Stanford University and a former New York Times reporter, says Cambodia has been unreceptive to pressure from other countries. “Cambodia is largely impervious to Western criticism because the West criticizes Cambodia for so many things so often that they don’t even listen anymore,” he says.
Because of this, Brinkley thought it was unusual for the Cambodian government to react so quickly following the release of the U.S. State Department’s 2005 Trafficking in Persons Report. The report listed Cambodia as a Tier 3 country—meaning its government did not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of human trafficking, and was not making significant efforts to do so. Brinkley says Cambodia was outraged at this and undertook cosmetic measures immediately to reduce the country’s rating to the Tier 2 level. In the 2008 report, Cambodia was still at Tier 2.
Brinkley, who is writing a book about Cambodia’s history since 1991, says there is much to be done in terms of eradicating sex trafficking. “Cambodia has been a place, and is still a place, where people come on child sex tours,” says Brinkley, who for a year has been maintaining a database of people in Cambodia who have been arrested for soliciting sex or for raping and/or molesting sex slaves. The length of time these criminals stay in prison, he says, is a joke. “Nine times out of 10, within a few months they are let free because it’s such a corrupt place all they had to do was pay off the judge.”
Last summer, Brinkley was in Cambodia for about three weeks. He saw plenty of children, ages 8 to 12, standing beside the streets, offering their bodies for sale.
In June 2008, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in a statement that while the U.S. appreciated Cambodia’s concerted effort to stamp out the sex trade, it still doesn’t fully comply with U.S. anti-trafficking standards.
That same year, Yash Ghai, the UN Human Rights Commission’s special reporter on Cambodia, resigned. He noted that Cambodia still faced serious human rights challenges and “deep-seated systematic deficiencies in the judiciary and other key institutions charged with upholding the rule of law and protecting the rights of individuals.”
When Somaly Mam published her memoir in 2005, she wrote that her organization had taken about 2,000 cases against traffickers and pimps before the Cambodian courts. They had won only 5 percent. And if the criminals did go to jail, they were usually freed within days. “We have laws in Cambodia, but everyone ignores them,” Mam writes. “Instead, what prevails is the law of money. With money you can buy a judge, a policeman—whatever you want. … Corruption is like a gangrene at the heart of the Cambodian police and legal systems. All too often justice is for sale.”
In 2007, the BBC followed investigators on undercover raids on Cambodian brothels.
