Former child sex slave elicits tears at Imagine Solutions Conference

Somaly Mam's foundation cares for rescued sex slaves in Southeast Asia. / MICHAEL ANGELO, special to news-press.com

Cambodian now saves girls from prostitution

Mar. 22, 2011
News-Press.com

• The Somaly Mam Foundation is the fundraising nonprofit formed in 2007 that pays for efforts Mam began in 1996 under the auspices of Agir pour les Femmes en Situation Precaire ("Acting for Women in Distressing Situations"), or AEFSIP.
• The foundations seek to end human trafficking and aid its young female victims with shelters, clinics and schools.
• For her work, Mam was honored as one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2009 and was featured as a CNN Hero. She received the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation, The World's Children's Prize for the Rights of the Child, and was named Glamour Magazine's 2006 Woman of the Year.
• For more information, go to somaly.org.

Somaly Mam was a child sex slave.

She's not sure how old she is now - probably about 40. A Cambodian, Mam owns a house near Phnom Penh. But "home" is not on a map. It is where "the girls" in her shelters are.

Through two nonprofit foundations, Mam has rescued more than 4,000 children who were victims of human trafficking. Most are 12 to 15 years old, and like Mam, they were commodities sold by their families into lives of prostitution.

Mam spoke Tuesday to attendees at the Imagine Solutions Conference at the Ritz-Carlton Golf Resort in Naples.

In an interview with The News-Press on Monday, she said her goal was to raise both money and awareness of human trafficking in her native country and throughout the world. "It's not easy to understand. It's scary and heavy for people, and emotional," said Mam, a petite woman with dark hair and the dark skin of a marginalized Cambodian ethnic minority.

As many as 500 girls at a time live in her foundation's shelters and clinics in Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand, she told the audience, who watched as photos of them - including a smiling young teen rescued at age 7 after her eye had been cut out by a client with a knife - were projected onto two screens.

They are as young as 3 years old, Mam said as a moan rippled through the room. They have been rescued from brothels and are recovering from lives of rape and other violence, racism and other punishments. Some have AIDS and do not recover.

At particular risk for AIDS are the young virgins, she wrote in her autobiography, "The Road of Lost Innocence," first published in French in 2005. They fall prey to a myth among Cambodian men, that sex with a virgin will cure them of HIV. It is a harrowing tale of her abandonment in childhood by her parents and "adoption" by a man who said he was her grandfather and sold her to a brothel.

With only a spotty elementary school education, Mam speaks Khmer, Pnong, Laotian, Thai, French, English and a little bit of Spanish. But asked which is her native tongue, she says none - and all - of them.

Like nearly all Cambodians, Mam was once Buddhist. But no longer. She finally has been able to stop believing that she is an "unlucky" or "broken" person for misdeeds in a past life. Most girls are sold into slavery in Southeast Asia as simply a way to pay off a debt, or to raise money to feed the family's other children - in particular, the boys, Mam said. But it is this cultural belief in their doomed karma that keeps them enslaved. They are not seen as worth saving.

But they are to Mam, who travels throughout the world and speaks, but cannot be away from the girls in her shelters for more than 10 days at a time, said Somaly Mam Foundation CEO Bill Livermore. After a week or 10 days, the nightmares begin again, he said. Mam nodded.

The speaking is necessary to raise the money to keep the girls recovering. "It takes five minutes to save them. But then what are you going to do with them?" Mam said. "It takes five to 10 years to recover them and give them the hope of a new life."

That takes economic empowerment, for the girls and their families as well - through a garment business in Cambodia and mulberry tree and silk production in Laos.

"We're researching other businesses to implement in the community," said Livermore, a former executive with Lexis-Nexis who worked with Mam on the company's behalf before joining the foundation full time. The father of two teenagers, he finds the twice-a-year trips to Southeast Asia both punishing and rewarding.

"It's heartbreaking to meet an 8-year-old girl who is terrified of you because you are a man," he said. But he's clear-eyed about the foundation's mission. Teaching the girls a trade helps the girls themselves and may allow them to return safely to their families. "If we can show that they're a revenue stream (rather than simply a one-time source of $100 for their enslavement), then they're more valuable to their families."

Regardless, some of the girls cannot return because they remain at risk of abuse by relatives who see them as permanently dirty. These children usually stay at foundation shelters until they reach age 18.

Mam is sometimes haunted by their stories. She carries with her an iPad and iPhone full of photos of the children, which helps her get through the days when she is away from them, she said.

"We teach them first of all forgive. Forgive the people who do this to you and forgive yourself," she said. "We say be happy with what you are now."

Kandi O'Donnell of Naples, a teacher at Immokalee High School, said she was "brought to tears" by Mam's speech, which she delivered in heavily accented English while standing alone on stage and several body lengths from the podium.

entrepreneurial talent, gave the example of 10-year-old changemaker Talia Leman from Iowa, who led a Halloween trick-or-treating campaign among kids to raise $10 million for Hurricane Katrina victims.

Christa Gannon founded FLY, a Bay Area program that teaches troubled youth about the legal system. She said it costs California $100,000 a year to jail a child; her program costs $8,000 a year per child.

"Instead of investing in their failure, let's invest in their success," she said.

Daniel Ravicher, executive director of the Public Patent Foundation, fights against undeserved patents that prevent the advancement of technology. His foundation filed a suit charging that patents on two human genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer are unconstitutional.

He said the patents prevent women from getting tested.