Stay away from Cambodian orphanages, campaigners ask tourists

October 21, 2011
ABC Radio Australia

Child rights groups in Cambodia have launched a campaign - backed by the government - to end what has become known as 'orphanage tourism'.

Those behind the campaign are concerned that some orphanages are thinly disguised businesses that exploit both children and tourists.

Presenter: Robert Carmichael

Speaker: Sebastien Marot, founder and chief executive of Friends International; Richard Bridle, country representative UNICEF

Click here to listen to the audio program (Windows Media)

CARMICHAEL: You don't need to travel far in Cambodia's tourist centres to see adverts encouraging anyone at all to turn up at a local orphanage and help out with the kids.

Aside from the obvious risks, there are others too. Experts say one of the latter is that children are damaged by forming short-term bonds with tourists or volunteers who are here this month and gone the next.

It's worth stressing that not every Cambodian orphanage is trying to garner tourist dollars, but plenty are and that has spurred this campaign to educate visitors and those who fund orphanages from afar.

Sebastien Marot is the chief executive of Friends International, an NGO that helps streetkids, and which is behind the campaign. He says there has been a rapid rise in the marketing of orphanages to tourists in recent years.

Related to that: Nearly three-quarters of the 12,000 children in Cambodia's orphanages have at least one living parent, and therefore shouldn't be there in the first place.

So why is this happening? Marot suggests the mass killings under the Khmer Rouge - which ruled between 1975 and 1979 - have something to do with it.

MAROT: Possibly because Cambodia is still suffering from the victim syndrome where everyone thinks that Cambodia is still coming out of the war and everyone comes here with this attitude toward Cambodia as this victimised country where all the children are miserable and in horrible situations, which is absolutely not the case any more - I mean the war was 35 years ago.

CARMICHAEL:The campaign is deliberately in your face: The caption reads: "Children Are Not Tourist Attractions."

The image shows two Asian children exhibited in a glass case with foreign tourists clustered around them taking photographs.

It is meant to be disturbing: The point is to get people to think before they visit an orphanage, and to understand that there are better ways to help.

Richard Bridle is UNICEF's country representative. He says the number of children in Cambodian orphanages has doubled in five years, as has the number of orphanages.

Bridle says it is not in the children's best interests to get attached to well-meaning volunteers, only for them to leave.

BRIDLE: What we would like to do is make sure that people understand that their well-meaning efforts are actually doing harm, and that there are better things that they could be doing. Certainly back home they could be putting pressure on their governments to meet their own commitments to much greater spending on official development assistance, and through that official development assistance - whether it comes to UNICEF, other UN agencies or whether it's dealt with through bilateral means - that's put into systems that will help children to stay in their families.

CARMICHAEL:The campaign has numerous facets with posters, fliers and adverts placed locally, and awareness-raising overseas through partners such as airlines and travel agents.

There is also a website - www.thinkchildsafe.org - with information and suggested ways to help.

Marot says the purpose is to start a discussion and get people to consider the consequences of orphanage tourism.

MAROT: Because there's always good ideas and good things to be done - and that's something we don't want to discourage - we want to encourage that - but to go in a positive direction that has a good effect on children.

CARMICHAEL:He says there's plenty tourists can do: They can support organisations that keep children within their families. They can buy products from shops that source from parents, thereby generating an income for the family. And they can eat at restaurants that run vocational training programs for young people.

And of course they can volunteer - but they should research carefully which groups they decide to spend their valuable time with.

Cambodia is a poor country and that brings its own challenges.

But in all the years Friends International has dealt with thousands of children from the most vulnerable families, it has always managed to find a family structure, he says, which is better for the child.

It is also cheaper - Marot says the cost of supporting a child within a Cambodian family is around one-eighth the cost of having them in an institution.