Part Two: Some of the lucky ones get rescued

Svay Pak, Cambodia: The top floor of the building is the crime scene where police investigators gathered evidence used to convict Canadian sex tourist Chris Neil. Neil, from Maple Ridge, B.C., is currently serving time in a Thai prison. (Photograph by: Courtesy, Ratanak International)

Trauma counseling, education and training help Da and Sophia recover.

March 23, 2012
By Daphne Bramham
Vancouver Sun
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia

It’s a long climb up three flights of steep, narrow steps on an outdoor stairway flanked by a wall topped with razor wire.

Even after reaching the apartment door, there’s another flight of stairs. At the top, a narrow landing separates the bathroom and kitchen — little more than a sink and a counter top — from a large single room.

It’s a typical Phnom Penh apartment. The main room has a bed and a mattress on the floor and an ironing board. A wide tiled balcony in front is filled with laundry drying on racks.

Until recently, Da and Sophia had never imagined such luxury.

The sisters — now aged 22 and 18 — and their 17-year-old brother are Vietnamese, but they grew up in a village called Svay Pak, only 11 kilometres from the Cambodian capital.

Svay Pak is an infamous pedophiles’ paradise. It’s where one of Canada’s most notorious pedophiles — Christopher Neil of Maple Ridge, B.C. — abused boys before an extensive Interpol investigation in 2007 tracked him down in Thailand, where he is now in prison.

It’s also where the first man convicted in Canada under the sex tourism law — Vancouver’s Donald Bakker — raped seven girls, one of whom was only seven.

Da, Sophia, their brother and their mother lived in a squatter’s shack that didn’t have full walls. People could peer in or simply walk in, if they wanted to do so.

There was no money, not even for public school where students must pay a $10 monthly fee. Da quit after Grade 2; Sophia and their little brother never went at all.

When Da was 13, their mother had a heart attack. There was no money for health care. That’s not free here, either.

“We all cried when my mother asked me to sell myself,” Da recalls, speaking through a translator. “I had no choice. My mother didn’t force me. I agreed. I told her I was willing to give up my virginity to pay for her health care.”

A neighbour came to their house, bought Da, and then resold her to a brothel.

It wasn’t fancy. None are in Svay Pak. Even the biggest ones, which are two- or three-storeys high, rarely have indoor plumbing. They’re built of concrete, with narrow hallways connecting dozens of little cells that are usually no more than nine-feet-by-nine-feet. The “furniture” consists of a wooden platform covered by a dirty woven mat.

“The guy gave some money to my neighbour and the neighbour handed $100 to my mother because we really needed the money for her medicine.”

Da knew nothing about sex.

“A few days later, there were 15 girls in the group and the brothel owner let the barang [foreigner] choose from the lineup. He chose three girls, including me. First, the foreigner gave me some candy and then he took me into a room.”

That’s where the foreigner raped her.

He didn’t pay that day. He said he’d come back the following day.

Haggled over price

“I went home and cried after the first night. I was in so much pain my mother gave me an injection because I was so weak.”

The foreigner didn’t pay her the next day, either.

After the third day, the foreign pedophile — who had initially agreed to pay $500 — haggled over the price. He claimed that because she hadn’t bled during the three times he’d raped her, she wasn’t a virgin. He was able to get the price down to $400.

“I hate that man. I had no choice. I’d already agreed to sell myself and I’ve had to sell myself for years because I only had a Grade 2 education and I didn’t know what else to do.”

Police raided the brothel a few years after her initial rape and took the children away. But Da wasn’t there at the time so the brothel owner sold her to another Svay Pak pimp, who supplied clients in guest houses.

A few years later, Da was rescued in a police raid on one of the guest houses and taken to a shelter run by the Cambodian Children’s Organization. She learned how to do some sewing and to make flowers, but she ran away.

“I really missed my mother,” she says. “And at that centre, the girls were not allowed to meet with their families. I was also afraid.”

Home to the brothel

Da went home — and went back to the brothel. Her mother owed a lot of money. Soon, Da did as well: for rent, food and crystal methamphetamine.

Forced to have sex with seven or eight men a day — most of them foreign sex tourists — Da took meth to ease the pain and keep her high through her long hours of work.

When Da was 15, her mother decided to take her north to the tourist town of Siem Reap near the famous temples of Angkor, leaving Sophia, 11, and DA’s even younger brother behind with an aunt.

Da’s mother got a job doing laundry for a massage parlour and arranged for Da to work in the brothel, operated in the backrooms.

One night, an investigator from the International Justice Mission came to the massage parlour posing as a buyer. He asked a few questions, then left. Within minutes, police showed up, arresting everyone on site, including two Vietnamese clients, Da, her mother and nearly 40 other girls.

The girls were put in the back of a truck and taken to the police station. Da was sent to World Vision’s trauma recovery centre.

“When I first arrived, I just kept crying and screaming because there was nobody at home with my sister and brother. There was nobody to earn money because my mother was in jail.”

Over the next six months, Da and six other girls from the massage parlour were weaned off drugs, given extensive trauma counselling and offered literacy classes and training programs.

Da also had many meetings with lawyers, who prepared her for court. Da had to testify against her mother.

Nine months later, her mother was sentenced to three years in jail. The brothel owner’s sister and a couple — husband and wife — who sold coffee in the brothel were also convicted.

“The person who owned the massage parlour escaped because he has a strong network,” says Da.

At the World Vision centre, Da took cooking and housekeeping training along with language classes in Khmer, Vietnamese and English.

The programs’ counsellors helped her get a job as a housekeeper at one of Phnom Penh’s luxury hotels, where she earned enough money to send some home to her siblings and to share in the rent of a small house with a group of other girls from the centre.

One day while she was working, she received a call on her mobile phone from Sophia.

“A gangster had entered the house and had touched her. The house is so small and so old, he could easily get in. She was really scared.”

Da called her counsellor at the trauma centre and her great aunt, who still lived in Svay Pak. The aunt went to the head of the village and demanded that he take care of Sophia. World Vision, meanwhile, had contacted its area development program staff working in Svay Pak.

Both Sophia and her brother were rescued. Sophia went to World Vision’s trauma centre and their brother went to one of the very few shelters for boys.

For the first time in their young lives, even with their mother in prison, all three children were safe.

Two years ago, Da’s mother was released from prison. Unable to find work in Cambodia, she moved back to Vietnam last year for a job that pays well enough she can help support her children in Phnom Penh.

In the middle of 2011 — after Da got a job as a nanny for an Irish couple with two children — the siblings were finally reunited, with World Vision helping with the rent for their apartment.

Likes her job

Da likes the job, but hopes someday to work for the International Justice Mission, which helped rescue her.

“I want to tell people to help more girls who live in this situation [in brothels],” she says. “It’s really hard to deal with the problems in this country because of corruption. So we need help to make things better.”

Meantime, she has a boyfriend who is going to university and works as a security guard.

Sophia is now in Grade 9, while their brother is in Grade 8 – astonishing achievements since they’d never been to school until two years ago. Both of them want to be lawyers.

Sadly, stories like these are rare.

An estimated 30,000 Cambodian children are sexually exploited in brothels, karaoke bars, massage parlours or are involved in street-level prostitution. Only a few hundred are ever rescued and, of those, not all recover from the trauma.

Of the girls Da knew in the Svay Pak brothel, one is now married and has children. But at least one other is a drug addict and has returned to the brothel to pay for her habit.

Of the 15 rescued with her in the massage parlour raid in Siem Reap, two returned to the commercial sex industry because they couldn’t find other work. Several others returned to the massage parlour to pay their gambling debts.

Of the girls Da met at World Vision’s trauma centre, at least one returned to a brothel. Another girl — with the help of counsellors and government officials — was repatriated to Vietnam. She had been brought to Cambodia illegally by traffickers, but is once again at home with her family.