Girl, 12, on a mission: Help Asia’s enslaved girls

Tuesday, April 24, 2012
By Ben Nelms
The Citizen (Fayetteville, Georgia, USA)

Twelve-year-old Caroline Statzer is clearly on a mission. It is one aimed at providing needed items for girls in Cambodia after they are rescued from that nation’s notorious sex trade.

Caroline’s Little Princess Project is making a personal difference in the lives of young girls who already have seen horrors that many of us could never imagine.

Caroline makes a host of different items from T-shirts and sells them on Facebook and at a local women’s ministry shop in Fayetteville. The funds raised go to girls once trapped in the sex trafficking industry in Cambodia, with a smaller percentage designated for a local safe house project for girls.

60,000 children in S-E Asian sex trade

Fri, Mar 20, 2009
ANN/AFP

DENPASAR, BALI - IN A frightening statistic that is still creeping upwards, over 60,000 children in South-east Asia are being exploited in the multi-million-dollar world of sexual businesses and sex tourism, a seminar was told on Wednesday.

Startlingly, law enforcers at times hesitate to swoop in to the rescue because the child may be a family's sole source of income.

"The number falling victim to sexual abuse is increasing," said Mr Frans van Dijk, regional director of Terre des Hommes Netherlands, a Dutch aid body focused on children. The countries most affected are Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand.

At the South-east Asia Conference on Child Sex Tourism here, Mr van Dijk urged governments to take the issue more seriously.

The situation was especially bad in Asia because some Asian men believed that having sex with children increased longevity, he said.

The core problem, he added, was poverty and lack of education.

An Indonesian speaker, Mr Irwanto - the president of the National Coalition for the Elimination of Commercial Sexual Exploitation - noted that officers were sometimes hesitant to make arrests because it would mean the loss of a family's basic income.

He said children were being groomed for prostitution with financial incentives such as payment of school fees.

Children in areas prone to natural disasters, like earthquakes, floods and cyclones, were particularly at risk, especially orphans or those who had lost a parent.

"Children in disaster-affected areas like Aceh are a particular concern because they are very vulnerable to this form of grooming," he said.

The Asian tsunami of 2004 killed around 170,000 people in Aceh.

Mr Marco Scarpati, president oF the Italian chapter of End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes, said the rapid growth of technology, especially the Internet, played a major role in exacerbating the phenomenon of child-sex tourism.

Local demand fuels Cambodian child prostitution

21 Oct 08
Al Jazeera

The problem of child prostitution in Cambodia is often depicted as an industry which serves predatory foreign tourists.

But the vast majority of customers who pay for underage sex are local, Cambodian men.

It has been suggested that one in 40 Cambodian girls is sold into sex slavery.

David Hawkins reports from the capital, Phnom Penh.

They're going to Cambodia with a camera

Sarah Stroschein, (left to right) Nicole Severson and Laura Senko are part of the organization Saving Hope International. (Times photos by Jason Wachter, jwachter@stcloudtim)

May 25, 2008
By Frank Lee
St. Cloud Times (Minnesota, USA)

SAUK RAPIDS — Children should not be having sex — period.

But many children around the world are being exploited for sex, according to Nicole Severson, who started a nonprofit organization to bring attention to the atrocity.

“We want to learn more about these children who have been sold into the sex trade — children as young as 3, some say — because we’ve been horrified by the research,” said Severson, president and founder of Saving Hope International.

The recent St. Cloud State University graduate will fly to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, today with a Web designer and a videographer to capture what they see and can learn about the sex trade there.

As of last year, the United Nations estimates 30 percent of the sex workers in Phnom Penh were younger than 18.

“Our goal is to go into Cambodia not with the mentality of ‘We know what you need’ but to assess what they need, to talk to other nonprofits that are already there and just kind of figure out what we can do and what our role will be,” she said.

Saving Hope International became recognized as a tax-exempt charitable organization in November. Its goal is focus attention on child sex workers and victims “to carry their story through imagery to the world.”

Sarah Stroschein, a St. Cloud State junior majoring in graphic design, and Laura Senko, a 28-year-old documentarian from Toronto, will accompany Severson on the monthlong trip.

“The research I’ve done is that the average age of a young girl being exploited is somewhere between 11 and 14 years old,” Severson said.

The 28-year-old from St. Cloud graduated with a major in nonprofit management and minor in photojournalism. She will be putting both knowledge areas to use in Cambodia, a country the group has not visited. The trip to Cambodia is the volunteer organization’s first major project.

“I lived in Mozambique, Africa, for three months in 1999, where there was a girl — one of many — whose home had been invaded by rebels and she was raped continuously over a period of time,” Severson said.

The United Nations estimates that 700,000 to 4 million women and children are trafficked globally. The highest concentration — 225,000 people — is estimated to come from Southeast Asia.

“I’ve gone overseas and seen the poverty and deprivation, so my heart has always been to bring hope to these children, which is why I called my organization Saving Hope International,” Severson said.

Mother Of Lost Children

Herself a victim of abuse, Somaly Mam has led Cambodia’s battle against child prostitution. (Photo courtesy: Stan Honda/AFP)

2008-05-22
By CHRISTINA SCHOTT In Phnom Penh
The Jakarta Post/ AsiaNews

When Somaly Mam feels depressed, she drives to the countryside of Kampong Cham province—two bumpy, dusty hours from Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh. Here, the woman who, is Cambodia’s symbol of the fight against child prostitution, feels at home.

In front of a long stilt house in Thlock Chhroy village, Somaly Mam stops. Immediately, a giggling bunch of girls rushes up to the delicate woman who almost disappears among ponytails and embracing hands. “My girls,” the 37-year-old, herself a mother of three, says lovingly.

The children’s gaiety belies trauma and turmoil. Little Mok Teta was just five when police found her in a brothel. Her face was so swollen from beatings that she could hardly open her eyes. Her body was covered with scars from stubbed-out cigarettes. In her head was a hole: somebody had hammered a nail in it.

"In 1992, she received an opportunity."

At least she was not HIV positive like her friend Srey Maeh, who at the same age almost was raped to death by her father, uncle and neighbours, before she was rescued by social workers.

Such tortured children don’t prefer to be with adults, including psychologists. They are aggressive and shut themselves off. Nevertheless, Teta and Maeh now go to school and are able to socialise.

Together with 32 other abused girls from age eight to 16, they found a home in the shelter of the non-governmental organisation, Acting for Women in Distressing Situations (AFESIP), which Somaly co-founded. Here, they can share their suffering without words: Somaly understands them by just taking them in her arms. She has experienced their story herself.

Somaly never met her real parents. Born in the mountain region of Mondulkiri, she lived with people of her tribe, the Phnong. When she was 10, she was sold to a travelling trader, whom she called grandfather. She had to cook and clean for him. If he was drunk, he would beat her brutally.

When Somaly was 14, the ‘grandfather’ forced her to marry a soldier, who beat and raped her. When the husband didn’t return from battle, the grandfather sold her to a brothel in Phnom Penh. She was 16. She then spent six tormenting years in different brothels, where she and other girls were broken physically and spiritually through beatings and other abuse.

“Sometimes I ask myself why I never ran away,” Somaly says. “But in our society, abuse is normal. People expect the younger to sacrifice themselves for the elders. Since they bore and fed us, we must obey and be grateful for the rest of our lives.”

However, when a pimp shot a friend in front of her eyes—for refusing to sleep with a client—Somaly decided to do something against forced prostitution in her country.

In 1992, she received an opportunity.

At a party, she met the man who would later become her husband and the father of her children, the Frenchman Pierre Legros (with whom she recently separated). Together they opened a bistro, which enabled her to finally quit prostitution.

In 1996, she and Legros founded AFESIP. A year later, they opened a shelter for prostitutes in Phnom Penh. Today, AFESIP runs three shelters in Cambodia and offices in Thailand, Laos and Viet Nam, and employs more than 300 people. The organisation has rescued almost 4,000 women and offers such victims psychological and medical treatment and vocational training.

For her struggle against child prostitution, she was conferred upon the Prince of Asturias Award in 1998 and has since then received support from Spanish royalty. In 2006, she was named Glamour’s Woman of the Year which facilitated her entry into the United States, where with much pomp the Somaly Foundation was founded last November to raise donations for AFESIP.

“AFESIP is my life,” Somaly says. “The girls in the shelters break my heart. I try to give them love and warmth, like in a real family. And they give me the same back. That’s where I find my strength to continue.”

Anti-sex slavery activist in Denver tonight

Somaly Mam (John Prieto, The Denver Post)
Somaly Mam and two former U.S. Air Force Academy cadets — Nic Lumpp, far left, and Jared Greenberg — are launching a private U.S. effort to fight the multi-billion sex trade that governments and police have been unable to kill. (John Prieto, The Denver Post)

04/04/2008
By Bruce Finley
The Denver Post (Colorado, USA)

Working as a teen-aged sex slave in a Cambodian brothel, Somaly Mam says she served up to 30 clients a night. Some hit her. "I never thought, just lived hour by hour. I played with nothing. In my head: nothing. It was dark, dark, dark. I never trusted people," Mam said Friday during a visit to Denver.

"I was dead."

She tried suicide, she said.

Her turning point: the day a brothel pimp fired a bullet through the head of her friend, Srymom, who dared refuse customers - warning other girls to obey. Mam said she then began trying to help a newcomer, a girl with dark skin like her, and eventually used the brothel keys to set her free.

Brothel owners soon released Mam, deeming her too old for Cambodia's booming sex trade.

Ever since, Mam has been arranging rescues of child sex slaves - more than 4,000 over the past decade. The group she formed - Acting for Women in Distressing Situations - counsels and rehabilitates them at shelters in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam.

Now Mam and two former U.S. Air Force Academy cadets - Nic Lumpp and Jared Greenberg - are launching a private U.S. effort to fight the multi-billion sex trade that governments and police have been unable to kill.

Based in Denver, the Somaly Mam Foundation (www.somaly.org) has raised $400,000 and aims to collect $1 million by July, thanks to corporate and celebrity backers such as actress Susan Sarandon.

"We need the United States. Americans are more active," Mam said. Cambodia's own efforts to combat the sex trade have been crippled by corruption of police and courts.

A preview of the film "Holly" tonight at Denver's Starz film center - continuing through next week - is designed to help publicize the effort. A fund-raiser has been set for next week in New York. And Mam's published account of her slavery - "The Road of Lost Innocence" - is scheduled for release this fall.

After graduating from the Air Force Academy in 2005, Lumpp and Greenberg resolved to do something about the global sex trade.

"It outraged us," said Lumpp, 25. "We couldn't just stand by and talk about it. It's a blatant disregard for human life."

Greenberg now works as a management consultant in Los Angeles, and Lumpp runs a Denver-based web business that helps parents teach children financial skills.

They discovered Mam's work and sent her emails. She received these with great skepticism, she said, and told the Americans to come to Cambodia if they wanted to help.

They visited for 10 days last year.

Mam said she still doubted them, suspecting they were sex tourists or pedophiles.

Meeting them at the airport, "I looked at them thinking: They are young. If they have commitment, that's good. I don't think they are pedophiles."

She brought them to one of her 60-person shelters and watched them carefully as they met recently-rescued girls. "I wanted to see their attitude," Mam said.

Lumpp and Greenberg played games. They worked with interpreters to ask girls and young women questions. Lumpp said they noticed those in Mam's shelters aspired to become educated, whereas those in brothels seemed listless.

Mam said she saw the two crying. "I said to myself: we can trust them."

"My staff said: You trust them? I said: Yes. They said: Why? I said: I just do. Normally I never trust men."

The foundation's approach is twofold: campaign to stop foreign sex tourists and others from entering southeast Asia in the first place, and fund continued rescues and rehab for girls and young women at shelters in Cambodia and neighboring countries.

Today sex trade owners seek younger girls, as young as 4, said Mam, who was sold from her village into slavery around age 12 after a "grandfather" used her as a household servant.

Rehab is difficult, Mam said. One girl at her shelter, 7-year-old Sokchea, seemed to recover well at first, starting school and excelling. Then after three months she quit. "We cannot release the pain inside her," Mam said. Another former slave, Srymuch, "has AIDs and is going to die."

U.S. diplomats have visited the 60-person shelters, where girls receive counseling, medical care, basic education, and training on sewing machines.

Rescues are high-risk operations based on tips received at Mam's shelters. Brothel owners have threatened to kill her, and thugs broke up a shelter in December 2004 after a raid on a hotel.

U.S. officials quietly offered her protection, Mam said. But leaving Cambodia is out of the question. "My heart is with these girls," she said.

"If I didn't run these shelters, maybe I could not survive."

Bruce Finley: 303.954.1700 or bfinley@denverpost.com

A NightLight for Bangkok's sex slave women [including 9-12-year-old Cambodian prostitutes]

4/1/08
By Julie Ascosi
The Mountain Echo (Maryland, USA)
(Student newspaper of Mount St Mary's University)

She was a 12-year-old Cambodian prostitute in Bangkok. While others her age may be selling flowers or shining shoes to make money, she was "going with the men". But she was not alone.

American missionary Annie Dieselberg discovered there were four girls, ages 9-12 who were in the sex trade and eventually there was a bust. The girls were sent back to Cambodia. But within a few months they were back at the bars. All but one. The fourth girl was gang-raped at the border and disappeared. Within a short time, two more girls disappeared and were under the care of a Danish man somewhere in Bangkok.

"Those events gave me a vision to start a children's center," Dieselberg said. Dieselberg hoped to start a ministry that would be a light in the midst of the dark reality of sex tourism in Bangkok.

About 12,000 children per year are trafficked for sexual exploitation in South East Asia, mostly to Thailand according to research by the International Labor Organization (ILO). But children are not the only ones being exploited.

"[I discovered] that there were large numbers of women trafficked from Eastern Europe and Central Asia in this other area of town," Dieselberg said. "Their issues were not being addressed either and I began to pray for opportunities to help them."

Dieselberg and her husband had worked in various ministries in Thailand for years, reaching out to prostitutes, but Dieselberg felt called to something more.

"I was bursting with vision but there was no room for it in the other ministry. That ministry was well established and I finally realized that God did not want me to stay in that setting but to take the vision He had given me and begin a new work," Dieselberg said.

Dieselberg left her ministry and spent a couple months in prayer and fasting.

"At the end of that time, I came together with four other women who were seeking ways to minister with women in prostitution," Dieselberg said. These women had been part-time volunteers with another organization but had left, hoping to start something new and soon embraced Dieselberg's idea to light the way for the prostitutes.

A Light Shines in the Darkness

In the West a nightlight gives comfort to children and lights the way to safety. Acting on her vision and playing off of this imagery, Dieselberg established NightLight in 2005 in Bangkok, Thailand. NightLight doubles as a business and ministry. Specifically the ministry reaches out to women and children working in the bar areas of Nana/Sukhumvit. While most organizations for prostitutes focus on vocational training and discipleship, NightLight is unique as a for-profit ministry that reaches both women and children in prostitution and trafficking regardless of their ethnicity or place of origin.

"We believe that the women most urgently need a decent job," Dieselberg said.

As a registered Thai business, NightLight makes a profit by selling the jewelry that the Thai women have been taught to design and make. They sell the jewelry online at www.nightlightbangkok.com and through a network of churches throughout Thailand and the U.S. By providing the women with a job complete with good wages and benefits and providing assistance to children, NightLight helps them stay out of prostitution and move forward.

But NightLight is much more than just a business.

"Deep down, we believe that they have other more significant needs…Our program includes then the other areas which they need healing and restoration such as spiritual, family, wounds, physical, education, training, and financial," Dieselberg said.

There are eight paid staff, six of whom are Thais, and more are being added to their number. In addition to the eight are about twelve more staff who establish trusting relationships with the women and children in the bar areas in order to provide them with alternatives and assistance.

In Thailand, trafficking is a 500 billion baht (U.S. $15.3 billion) annual business, which is 50%- 60% of the government's annual budget and more lucrative than the drug trade according to the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. In addition, a study published by the ILO, says that the sex industry accounts for between 2% and 14% of the countries' gross domestic product. It is no wonder that the authorities are hesitant to get involved in stopping such a lucrative business.

In addition, alleged corruption and apathy among police can be disheartening to those trying to help especially in emergency situations.

"One time, I witnessed a woman being held at knifepoint by a man. She was crying and resisting. As she was across the street, I looked around for assistance. Behind us was a [man] who was watching but not doing a thing. I asked him if he was going to do anything to help her and he said, 'It's just his girl.'" Dieselberg said. "I laid into him but he was nonplussed and just walked away. The woman was dragged into a car and driven off."

Despite attempts at befriending various cops who often attend the bars, situations such as these have taught Dieselberg and her staff to rely on reputable links who know who to best turn to for help.

Today the sex trade in Cambodia is one of the largest money making businesses in the nation ... bigger than drug trafficking

Child sex trade: The sad truth

3/16/08
Opinion by Gino Troiani
The Beacon (Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, USA)

The nation of Cambodia is located in Southeast Asia, just west of Vietnam. It is largely underdeveloped, poverty stricken, and lacks a strong central government.

To support themeselves, many Cambodians live and work on farms, or in factories. In a nation where the average annual salary is around $350 a year, some citizens turn to illegal activities such as narcotics or the sex trade to make money.

Brothels have been an easy way to generate revenue for Cambodian pimps since the early 1900's [KI-Media: 1990s?]. When the United Nations (UN) entered Cambodia, sending troops to supervise the country's transition to the current democratic government, there was a large demand for prostitutes. Not long after the UN left, brothel owners discovered that they could market young girls to huge numbers of foreign clientele.

Today the sex trade in Cambodia is one of the largest money making businesses in the nation.

Out of an estimated 20,000 sex workers in Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital, the average age is around 15.

According to the U.S. State Department, sex trafficking is becoming a bigger business worldwide than drug trafficking. This means that every day thousands of young girls and boys are bought and sold into slavery.

The big question is, how do these young people find themselves as sex slaves?

According to a recent MSNBC article, one of the most popular ways of recruiting is by promising young girls steady work and shelter, an appealing prospect for girls who hope to help their families with much needed income. When they agree, they are brought to the brothel and sold for money. Because many young women in Cambodia are homeless and uneducated, one can imagine how easy this type of recruiting is. It is also not uncommon for a struggling family to sell one of their own children into the sex trade. The article reported that one woman recalls being tricked and sold to a brothel by her newly wed husband for $200.

The majority of brothels are usually filthy, run down shacks, that offer subhuman living conditions. Upon arrival, the young women are usually beaten, cadged and drugged.

Dateline also reported that, it is also common for the pimps to show pornography to the youngest women, as "educational" background so they know how to service a paying customer. Because Cambodia is ravaged with HIV, AIDS, and numerous sexually transmitted diseases, it is considered good luck for a Cambodian man to have sex with a virgin. Because of this, it is not uncommon for the young girls to have their hymen re-stitched so that they can be sold as virgins more than once for a larger sum. Their ages range from 4 and up.

CNN recently reported that, a young girl only fifteen who was recently rescued from a brothel testified that she had been "locked in a cage," and forced to service at least fifteen customers a day. If she objected she was starved, and shocked with electric rods. She was also given a methamphetamine tablet several times a day to cloud her memory and keep her in an altered state.

What is being done?

There have been numerous efforts by both internal and external organizations to break up the sex trade in Cambodia, but the struggle is far from over. The Cambodian government has set up an anti-trafficking department, but it is poorly funded, and many of the enforcement officers partake in the illegal activity themselves, such as taking handouts and tipping off the brothel owners.

For the girls who do find a way out of the sex trade, many of them turn to specialized shelters, which are dedicated to the rehabilitation of the young women. Here they receive both medical and psychological attention. The sad truth is that most of these girls die at a young age because of AIDS or other physical problems. Also a large number of the girls end up leaving and returning to a life of prostitution because it is the only thing they know.

Most of these young women have been exploited and abused on a daily basis for the majority of their lives. They have been stripped of their basic human rights, and demoralized to the point where there is nothing left but an empty shell. The United States and other developed countries have a moral obligation to educate and hold Cambodia to ensuring basic human rights for all.

Suffer little Children: Legacies of War in Cambodia

March 6, 2008
David McNeill
Japan Focus

Despite a “crackdown” on rampant illegal sex, Cambodia is still a world capital of pedophilia.

At 12, Pov knows the sexual geography of the riverfront area in Phnom Penh like the seasoned prostitute he has become. The four middle-aged Frenchmen in front of us? “They like girls,” he explains, giggling. “Small girls.” The sun-blackened and tattered woman a few yards away? She will rent her daughter for the price of a hamburger. If I don’t like boys he can fetch girls. Otherwise, in exchange for the meager contents of my wallet, Pov and his three barefoot, scruffy friends will guide me to a safe hotel and stay the night. “What would we do there?” I ask. “Up to you,” he says.

Child-sex broker in Poipet on the Thai border. He approached me in the street and asked me if I wanted "young girls" aged 10+. He brings customers to local brothels on the Cambodian side. "The best customers are Japanese and Koreans. They have money." (All photos David McNeill)

As the sun sinks over the Mekong, Sisowath Quay in Cambodia’s choking capital is a slow-moving river of human traffic. Young couples walk arm-in-arm, tourists gaze at one of Asia’s most beautiful sunsets and children like Pov ply their trade, zeroing in on what they call rich foreign “lady-boys”, or gay men. In the crowd of mainly brown-skinned people, white men stand out like flies on a cake. Some are alone, wearing hats and jackets in the stifling evening heat, strolling or sitting on the river wall, eyeing the crowd. The Frenchmen stand chatting and smoking, exuding the easy calm of long-term residents.

“Girls?” says one of the men in heavily accented English, naked gut bulging over the waist of his khaki pants. “There are too many girls here; as young as you like, as often as you like.” 　A man with a Liverpool accent calls Cambodia a “sweet shop” before becoming suspicious and hurrying away. These are no idle boasts. Give any city taxi driver five minutes and he’ll find a brothel where 12-year-old girls are hawked for US$20-$40. For $500-1,000 and a little more time, they will locate a virgin, boy or girl. Campaigners say children as young as three are still being trafficked and rented out all over this country, mostly to Asian men but also to foreign tourists pouring in through some of the most open borders in the world.

“I know of a brothel with 100 under-aged girls run by high ranking police and military officials,” says one NGO worker who requested anonymity. “There are brothels in some parts of the country where the clients are brought in buses.”

Such stories should belong to the past. After a decade during which Cambodia earned its reputation as a haven for pedophiles, anti-trafficking campaigners have recently begun to bare teeth. Dozens of foreign men have been imprisoned or sent back to courts in Europe and the US, many by the tough deputy head of Phnom Penh’s anti-trafficking bureau Keo Thea. The 2002 deportation to Vietnam of faded glam-rock star Gary Glitter, who was renting a house in the city center, also served notice, said then Minister of Women's Affairs Mu Sochua, that Cambodia was no longer open for business to the world’s child abusers.

Last year, the local courts convicted two of the most notorious pedophiles in the country, Karl Heinz Henning and Thomas Baron von Englehardt, of raping girls aged 10-14. Henning and Englehardt, a ponytailed German who claimed aristocratic descent, paid US$30 per girl to pimps, often parents, before taking the children to a Phnom Penh apartment, drugging them with ecstasy and videotaping hundreds of hours of sex sessions. Some of the children were bound and gagged while the men tortured them in Nazi regalia. The police were called after neighbors heard screaming.

But these successes only scratched the surface. Cambodian Minister of Women's Affairs Mu Sochua quit soon after Glitter was kicked out of the country, saying corruption was making her job impossible. Two years ago, the US threatened sanctions after the State Department said Cambodia had failed to meet "minimum standards" to tackle the trafficking of children.

Today, with tourism increasing by 30 percent a year and many police, judges and politicians on the take, the illegal sex trade is booming. At an age when Western kids think having their first illegal drink is a gas, Cambodian children are being abused by men three or four times their age. US charity World Vision last year said that 15 percent of the Cambodian boys they surveyed had been sexually abused before reaching their tenth birthday. About a third of the roughly 80,000 – 100,000 prostitutes in Cambodia are children, according to Canada-based NGO Future Group. The area around Siem Reap, home to Cambodia’s most popular tourist destination, Angkor Wat, is experiencing an “explosion” of brothels, says Mr. Brewster

The abuse of children is so routine that local newspapers barely cover it. “Its levels of depravity,” explains Irishman Kevin Doyle, editor of the Cambodia Daily. “You think you’ve seen it all and then something new comes along. ‘Ok, Nazi porn S&M and four year-olds; we haven’t had that before,’ you know?”

Arrests are often smothered with cash. Men pay off the families of the victims and the authorities in a country with a barely functioning legal system where the average civil servant earns about US$30 a month. “The families are happy to get the money and drop charges,” says Sourm Dear, Cambodian Director of Rapha House, a center for victims of sexual abuse, who says his organization has to pay the police to chase down missing girls. Traffickers and pimps, protected by military police and even politicians, target poor, broken families, paying $20 to locals for information on potential victims.

Sarom Vath was 15 and living with her grandmother near the border with Thailand when she was approached by a woman with an offer to work as a waitress. Instead, the woman sold her virginity and locked her in a room with the buyer, a middle-aged taxi driver. “It hurt a lot,” recalls Sarom. She was sold to a brothel, drugged and forced to have sex with up to a dozen men a day. “We were given pills and something to smoke, so I couldn’t sleep and didn’t care about anything.” Now 16, and living in a center for abused children, Sarom is angry and rebellious, but says talking about what happened helps “lighten my heart.”

Children like Sarom get a brutal crash course in the economics of flesh. For many -- 38 percent, according to a 2007 report by the International Organization for Migration -- entry into the sex trade comes by selling their virginity, sometimes for as little as $100. Some do so ‘voluntarily’; most are trafficked or tricked. Rady Yen, for example, was 15 and alone on Sisowath Quay when she took up an offer to work cleaning tables, only to find that her virginity had been auctioned off to a Japanese tourist. “I got sick and couldn’t see any more men,” she says.

Rady Yen, tricked in Phnom Penh into selling her virginity and subsequently raped. Now 18 and living in a refugee centre for sexual victims.

She escaped, but the market value of girls who stay in the sex trade plummets: a couple of hundred dollars for a pre-teen, up to $40 for a 12-year-old and on a steadily sliding scale thereafter. Sarom has no idea how much she changed hands for, but thinks it was $5-6 a time.

Rady with her family in Sisophon, a dirt-poor area menaced by sex traffickers.

Crushing poverty fuels the trade. In a festering Phnom Penh slum known simply as “the building”, where naked children play on garbage dumps, watching parents hawk their beautiful 13-year-old daughter to sweating, middle-aged tourists makes twisted sense; she is the only thing of value they have. This slum is home to prostitutes like Kanha Thy, who sold her virginity, aged 14, to a foreign man “aged between 40 and 50” for US$150. At the time her mother was sick and bleeding following a miscarriage and a male neighbor peddled her to the foreigner, persuading her that her mum would die if she didn’t work. The man earned $50 for finding the client. “He tricked me.” She says. Today, Kanha is pregnant with her second child but hides her bump as she works Phnom Penh bars like the “Martini” for foreigners, as does her friend Rous Mach, who has been a prostitute for the last year.

Missing girl poster on lamppost in Poipet.

Foreign intervention, in all its forms, has played a central part in the country's modern tragedy. French control ended in 1954, but in the mid-1960s, the country was sucked into the Vietnam maelstrom. As the US-led war accelerated, Cambodia’s leadership leaned toward China and North Vietnam.

In the early 1970s in an attempt to eliminate North Vietnamese troops en route to the South, the US carpet-bombed much of the country illegally and relentlessly for three years. This destabilizing of the countryside laid the foundation for the rise of the Khmer Rouge regime, which ran Cambodia into the ground and may have been responsible for well over a million deaths by the time a Vietnamese intervention overthrew the regime in 1979. Three decades later five top surviving Khmer Rouge leaders are in prison facing trial for crimes against humanity and war crimes, in a special tribunal set up by the Cambodian government and the United Nations. But the country has yet to recover from its traumatic past. "Cambodians have developed a numbness to horror because of their history," says Don Brewster, an American who moved here with his wife in 2004 to set up a shelter for sexually abused children. "There are no barriers; they will do anything for money and they live for today."

Astonishingly, given how freely pedophiles operate there, Sisowath Quay is the most heavily watched area of the country. Undercover cops and NGOs patrol here and the post-2002 crackdown has pushed some of the trade underground. The notorious brothel area of Svay Pak, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, no longer sells children openly on the street to men with British, American and Irish accents, though pimps with mobile phones still hover around the area.

But outside the capital, anything goes. In Poipet, a booming town on the Thai border fuelled mostly by gambling and prostitution, the tuk-tuk motorcycle taxis ferry hundreds of Thai, Chinese, Japanese and other tourists daily to brothels on the Cambodian side, where children of any age can be bought with a handful of dollars or Thai Baht. The street vendors even sell Viagra for about $14 a pack. 　According to Mr. Dear, “In some cases trafficked girls are worth less than the price of a cow,” he says.

Sign on the road leading into Cambodia from Thailand: Absoutely against Child Sex.

He deals with the consequences. At Rapha House, rescued girls are brought back to normality, sent to school and taught to sew, fix hair and grow vegetables. They must come to terms with their experiences and the fact that in this culture they are devalued because they are no longer virgins. “Everybody knows that I’m a victim because I stay at this center,” says Sorum. “People feel sorry for me. That makes me sad.” Some open up and emerge relatively unscarred. Others rebel, fight with other girls, cut themselves or try to leave, often back to poverty, then prostitution. The “recidivism rate” for rescued child prostitutes is 80 percent, according to Pierre Legros, founder of a Phnom Penh NGO that fights trafficking. “The hardest work is not rescuing the girls, it is making a life for them afterwards,” he says.

On the sidewalk of Sisowath Quay, in front of the city’s best restaurants, Pov and his friends tuck into a pizza, bought by a tourist. Like many of the street children here, he is an unsettling mix of naivety and knowingness, his hand resting on my thigh as he pleads for the name of my hotel. He and his friends are desperate because he knows that most of the foreign men come for girls. But later, when photographer Androniki Christodoulou begins to take pictures, the boys drop their sales pitch, curl up like cats on the Quay wall, and smile shyly. They are, after all, just children.

David McNeill writes regularly for a number of publications including the Irish Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is a Japan Focus coordinator. Earlier versions of this article appeared in The Irish Times and The South China Morning Post. Posted at Japan Focus on March 6, 2008.

Afesip Offers New Start for Abused Girls

Somaly Mam

By Nuch Sarita, VOA Khmer
Washington
26 February 2008

As founder and director of the group Afesip, Mam Somaly is actively fighting to bring an end to sexual exploitation.

Her group has rescued scores of women from brothels in Cambodia and has won numerous international awards along the way.

Founded in 1996, Afesip provides psychological counseling to young women rescued from brothels.

It also trains victims in trade skills like sewing and hairdressing to give them employment opportunities when they leave the counseling center.

Afesip has three centers, in Phnom Penh, Kampong Cham and Siem Reap, housing more than 200 women and girls, as well as one health clinic, Mam Somaly said Monday, as a guest on "Hello VOA."

In Cambodia, a girl can be sold by her family to a brothel or trafficker for as little as $150, Mam Somaly said.

"My organization has helped save nearly 4,000 victims and given them normal work," she said.

Their goal: Saving kids [in Cambodia]

Don Brewster talks at Adventure Christian Church, where he once was pastor. (Photo: Bryan Patrick / bpatrick@sacbee.com)

Sunday, January 20, 2008
By Jocelyn Wiener - jwiener@sacbee.com
The Sacramento Bee (California, USA)

Lincoln couple gave up all to fight sex trafficking.

The first time Don and Bridget Brewster learned about child sex trafficking in Cambodia – from a "Dateline NBC" television special – they wept openly.

The pastor and his wife had just returned from a brief trip to the Southeast Asian country to help support their church's mission. The heat, open sewage, abject poverty and hopelessness all conspired to make Bridget miserable. They both assumed they'd never return.

But the television program left them horrified. As many as 30,000 children as young as 5 and 6 were being sold as sex slaves to adult men. Many of those men came from the United States.

How could the Brewsters, in good conscience, do nothing?

That was four years ago.

Bridget and Don, a former advertising executive, did some research on the issue, then flew back to Cambodia for a few weeks to meet with advocates and child victims. They learned that the country desperately needed safe places for rescued children to live and recover.

Don, now 53, and Bridget, 55, tried to think of someone who could start up such a shelter in Cambodia's capital city of Phnom Penh. They prayed about it.

Then, while celebrating their 14th anniversary over a fancy Italian dinner, Don looked at Bridget and Bridget looked at Don. And they knew.

So three years ago, the couple sold their 1,500-square-foot home in Lincoln and almost everything in it. They said goodbye to their friends, their congregants at Adventure Christian Church in Roseville, their four adult children and eight grandchildren.

And they moved to Cambodia, to try to make things right.

The couple are now helping run a shelter serving 39 young girls, as well as a community drop-in center for other girls and their families. The children receive intensive cognitive therapy, education, medical care, voluntary spiritual guidance and unconditional love. Many have grown up without consistent access to food and are shocked to receive three meals a day.

In the spring, Don and Bridget will accompany five of the girls from their shelter to Los Angeles to testify against an accused American pedophile named Michael Joseph Pepe. News reports on Pepe's case support the Brewsters' account that Pepe, who is in his 50s, was arrested for raping and torturing at least three young girls.

The monthly budget for Agape International Missions – the 19-year-old Rocklin-based organization through which the Brewsters work – is $60,000. Don and Bridget make periodic trips to the states to help raise money and have been amazed at people's generosity. One couple handed them a check for $75,000 after they spoke at a church.

The other day, Don sat in a cafe at Bayside Church in Granite Bay, meeting with a couple potential volunteers.

Don, with longish gray hair, plastic-rimmed glasses and blue flip-flops, leaned over a polished wood table, showing the women pictures of the girls.

He described cases of children being raped and tortured by one pedophile, then passed on to another. Sometimes the girls' families are complicit, he said. Others get tricked. All are mired in poverty. In some poor villages, he said, every girl can expect to be sold into prostitution by age 10.

Kim Jacobson, Bayside's international volunteer coordinator, said she wishes there was a way to reach out to pedophiles and make them understand the error of their ways.

"Of course, the first reaction is 'Let's kill 'em,' but my heart also breaks a little bit for them," she said. "How could they be so dark inside as to think it's OK?"

Don can't feel sorry for them, he said, though he knows someone should.

"It's too hard when you see what they've done," he said.

Last year, someone offered to sell Don two 5-year-old girls. Another time, a brothel told him they had at least 36 children available for rent – two apiece for himself and 17 friends, if he wanted.

Kaign Christy, the Southeast Asia regional director for International Justice Mission, a faith-based human rights agency based in Washington, D.C., describes the Brewsters' shelter as professionally run and nurturing. He says the couple made a significant difference in the lives of juvenile sex trafficking victims.

"They just deserve to be held up as two people who left their comfortable homes in California and literally sacrificed everything to bring relief to these victims of just unimaginable crimes," he said.

Don and Bridget are more circumspect. As scrutiny increases, they say, more of Cambodia's child prostitution simply goes farther underground.

"Is it better? I would say probably it's better," Don said. "But it's still very bad."

Eventually, the couple hope to create two more centers in rural parts of the country, then leave the shelter and drop-in center entirely in the hands of Cambodians.

Hope, they say, wells up in all sorts of ways. They see it when a little girl realizes that she's not "dirty" or worthless, that she has a future and potential and something to hope for. They see it when a child hugs them or tells them that she finally feels beautiful.

They see it in the transformation they have undergone since that night they switched on the television set and wept. Back then, after all, Cambodia was the last place on earth they'd wanted to go.

Perv took my virginity for £250

Exploited ... 12-year-old Kiet (Photo: Marc Giddings, The Sun)

Tuesday, December 11, 2007
The Sun (UK)

THE sickening trade in child sex is flourishing worldwide as paedophiles pursue their evil desires at the expense of the most vulnerable members of society. On Day Two of our special investigation into this sordid sex market, SHARON HENDRY relates from Cambodia the harrowing accounts of two innocent young lives defiled by perverts.

Kiet's story

DRESSED in a “teddy” T-shirt and chattering on her mobile phone, 12-year-old Kiet strolls along the pavement of her local town centre.

But Kiet is not out shopping or on her way to meet friends – she is touting for business as a prostitute.

This is the reality of life for thousands of children in the former war-torn Cambodia, where the average annual wage is less than £175 and life expectancy a mere 59 years.

It has made the country a haven for Western paedophiles who exploit the hungry street children, some as young as five.

Brits are among those who cruise bars such as Dolls’ House, Kit Kat and DV8 – the most notorious being pop star Gary Glitter who was deported from the country in 2002 over child sex offences.

Kiet works the streets of a notorious slum area in the capital Phnom Penh. Along with her 14-year-old sister, she quit her job in a garment factory and made the ten-hour bus journey to the city from her village home.

Kiet’s youthful appearance is a precious commodity for local pimps. Speaking in soft tones, she explains how a Western tourist bought her virginity for £250.

I was very nervous because I had never had sex with anyone before or even kissed a boy properly but my pimp told me there was a man prepared to take my virginity for £250.

It was more money than I could earn in months in my old job stitching clothes in a big factory so I had no choice.

The man was kind to me but afterwards I felt like crying because I had always hoped I would first have sex with someone I loved. It was also very painful.

I was allowed to keep that money but now I have to hand over half my earnings to the owner of my brothel. I am expected to get at least four or five clients a day at £5 a time. Some of the other girls have told me horrible stories about how they are treated by some of the men but I am hoping it won’t happen to me.

Srey Mom's story

Tricked ... Srey Mom (Photo: Marc Giddings, The Sun)

THIRTEEN was horribly unlucky for Srey Mom. That is how old she was when she was forced into the sex industry.

The country girl had become separated from her family and was taken to the country’s capital, allegedly to be reunited with her mother.

But there was to be no reunion – Srey Mom was sold to a brothel.

Now 20, she works for a charity warning girls about the Cambodian child sex industry. This is her story.

The brothel owner told me I had been sold to them and I would have to work as a prostitute.

When I refused, they put me in a dark room with no food and water and gave me electric shocks by tying wire around my body and plugging the live ends into the mains supply.

Eventually, I decided to accept customers. I would have sex with between five and 20 per day.

Most of my customers were from places like Britain and America. Lots of them took Viagra so they wanted sex several times.

Sick

There were about 50 girls in the brothel and we were told to charge £2.50 for quick sex.

I hated having sex with strangers – some of them smelled terrible and I was often in a lot of pain.

After a few months, I became very sick and when I could no longer work, the brothel owner sent me to the hospital.

The blood test showed I was HIV positive.

I begged men to use condoms when sleeping with me but most refused and I couldn’t tell them I had HIV because I needed the money to eat.

One day, a taxi driver offered to take me to a hospital which he said would take care of me. During my recovery I met someone from the charity World Vision. They supported me with hospital fees, clothing and even got me antiretroviral drugs.

Later, they asked me to work for them. Now I give talks to groups of girls warning them not to be tricked into prostitution like I was.

'Holly' details Cambodia sex trade

Independent film focusing on lives of child prostitutes opens today in Long Beach

11/22/2007
By Phillip Zonkel, Staff Writer
Long Beach Press Telegram (Long Beach, California, USA)

In March 2002, Guy Jacobson, on vacation near Phnom Penh, Cambodia, was surrounded by 15 girls, aggressively soliciting him for prostitution.

One 5-year-old girl told Jacobson, "I yum yum very good."

She begged Jacobson for money and said the madam of her brothel would beat her if she returned empty-handed.

Jacobson gave the girl $20, and she left.

But Jacobson didn't forget.

That encounter is recreated word for word in the new independent film "Holly," which opens today at the Edwards Long Beach Stadium 26, among other locations. The film is about a 12-year-old Vietnamese girl who has been sold by her impoverished family and smuggled into Cambodia, where she is forced to work as a prostitute.

Holly is played by 17-year-old Thuy Nguyen, a Westminster High School senior.

Jacobson wrote the film's script with director Guy Moshe.

"I was horrified to find it wasn't an isolated case," says Jacobson, one of the film's producers, during a recent telephone interview from his New York City residence. "When I realized how much of a global problem it is, a light bulb went off and I decided to write a movie about it."

The numbers are huge and reach into all countries.

Every year, more than 1 million children, women and men around the world are sold into sexual slavery, according to UNICEF.

The U.S. State Department estimates 800,000 victims are trafficked across international borders annually with 17,500 sold in the United States. Nearly 30 percent of the victims are between the ages of 9 and 15, and some are as young as 5 or 6 years old.

The $12 billion sex slave trade is the third most profitable criminal industry, behind only narcotics and weapons, according to Interpol.

In "Holly," Patrick (Ron Livingston, "Sex and the City"), is an American card shark and dealer of stolen artifacts, who, for many years, has lived emotionally numb in Phnom Penh. Then he meets Holly (Nguyen), a 12-year-old Vietnamese girl, in a red-light village inhabited by child prostitutes.

The girl has been sold by her impoverished family and smuggled across the border to work as a prostitute.

Holly's virginity makes her a lucrative object, and when she is sold to a child trafficker, Patrick embarks on a frantic search to bring her to safety.

For Nguyen, a Vietnam native who moved to Westminster in 2003, working on the film was an eye-opening experience.

"I had heard about human trafficking in general, but didn't know much about it," says Nguyen, who was 14 during film production.

Filmed on location

"Holly" was shot on location in Cambodia, including several scenes in actual brothels and Phnom Penh's infamous Svay Pak, also known as K 11 (it's 11 kilometers from Phnom Penh). For years, that notorious red-light village has been the premiere destination for thousands of child molesters and sex tourists coming to Cambodia to prey on children, some as young as 5 years old, for as little as $5.

For her research, Nguyen, who was 14 at the time, met with a 16-year-old Vietnamese girl who was a former child prostitute.

The girl told Nguyen that before working in the K 11, she had been raped by her stepfather and uncle.

"It was really sad to hear about her life," Nguyen says. "But it helped me to understand my character better and what these kids go through."

While on location, Moshe was troubled at the open acceptance of child trafficking and slavery.

"It's horrifying how these things happen and people just go about their daily lives," Moshe says during a recent phone interview from Hollywood. "That's more shocking than anything."

Difficult, dangerous

The 190-day production schedule for "Holly" began in January 2005, and it seemed like no one in Cambodia wanted "Holly" made.

Less than 12 hours before the first day of shooting, Moshe - with an armed bodyguard - sat in a hotel lobby counting $60,000 in cash to a local gangster - also with an armed bodyguard - to secure the release of the film's sound equipment.

During filming in and around the K 11, which is reported to be owned by the Vietnamese mafia, the cast and crew worked under heavy protection from guards armed with AK-47s.

Moshe, 33, says he knew ahead of time filming would be difficult and potentially dangerous, but "I went out and did it anyway. It was a job that had to get done." No one was hurt during production, he says.

At the end, a lot of people made the film for more than cinematic reasons.

"This is a crime against humanity," says Jacobson, who helped form www.redlightchildren.org, a grassroots initiative to increase awareness and inspire immediate action against the child sex trade. "Many of us don't look at `Holly' as simply a film. We were trying to make a difference with the film."

"I'm glad I was a part of this movie," Nguyen says. "It will help people be more aware of human trafficking."

Report: Demand for virgins brings girls into Cambodian sex trade at young age

Friday, September 14, 2007
The Associated Press

"Thirty-eight percent of the women and girls interviewed had their virginity sold, and they collected an average of US$482 (€347), the report said. In most cases middlemen pocketed sizable amounts from the deals" - Eleanor Brown, author of a report on sexual exploitation in Cambodia

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia: The strong demand for young virgin girls from men who patronize prostitutes in Cambodia fuels the entry of underage women into the commercial sex trade, a humanitarian group said in a report Friday.

More than one-third of female sex workers surveyed for the report by the International Organization for Migration said they entered the sector through the sale of their virginity.

"Like other Asian men, they (Cambodian men) have a strong cultural desire for virginity," said Eleanor Brown, author of a report on sexual exploitation in Cambodia.

Some Asian cultures believe that sleeping with young virgins helps preserve virility and vitality.

The report said 203 women and girls working in brothels and places like nightclubs and bars were interviewed in depth for the study.

The average age of girls who sold their virginity was 16-17 years old, it said.

Though some girls sold their virginity voluntarily, many were tricked into the trade by friends and relatives or were forced by poverty and domestic violence into it, the report said.

"While in the majority of instances this trade appears to be voluntary for women and girls selling their virginity, there was a high use of force and incapacitation through drugs or alcohol at the time of commercial sex," it said.

It said 18 percent of women and girls were incapacitated in some way, with up to 10 percent being completely unconscious.

The findings indicated that Cambodian men, who accounted for 49 percent of the market for virgins, are the primary customers for commercial sex trafficking, especially the trade in virgins, the report said. Other Asian clients were Chinese, Japanese, South Koreans, Taiwanese, Thais and Filipinos, it said.

Westerners accounted for 9 percent, it said.

The study was conducted in Siam Reap and Koh Kong provinces and in the city of Sihanoukville, which are trafficking "hot spots" in northwestern and southwestern Cambodia mainly because of their links with tourism and foreign-led demand, IOM said.

Thirty-eight percent of the women and girls interviewed had their virginity sold, and they collected an average of US$482 (€347), the report said. In most cases middlemen pocketed sizable amounts from the deals, Brown said.

Trafficking of women and girls for sexual exploitation is widespread in Cambodia, which has weak law enforcement. In recent years, authorities have stepped up efforts to crack down on sex offenders, but have focused on Westerners who prey on children.

Children for sale (Dateline NBC 2004 Original report)

Click on the photo to view Dateline video
2004: Dateline's Chris Hansen reports on the illegal sex industry that victimizes Cambodian children, and the efforts to stop it.

Student documents plight of Cambodian street children

By: Clayton Norlen
The Daily Utah Chronicle (Univ. of Utah, USA)
Issue date: 7/30/07
Section: News

In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, it is common for children living on the streets to beg, sell books, offer shoeshines or fall into the sex trade just to survive.

David Alder, a junior film major, traveled to Cambodia this summer alongside amateur filmmakers Alisa Garcia and Maera Grove to document the condition of these street children. The documentary focuses on what the organization Child Safe is doing to improve the situation of homeless children in Cambodia.

Alder described scenes in Cambodia where young children between the ages of six and 17 would carry around infants, rented from mothers, to aid in their begging.

"Filming this documentary made me look at my immense privilege with my many resources here in the (United) States," Alder said.

Street children are also at risk of ending up exploited in the sex trade by gang members or other adults who sell them to pedophiles.

According to the documentary, there are currently 24,000 children living on the streets in Cambodia.

Childsafe.org explains that the money tourists give to children who are begging or selling items doesn't help the situation because children are still on the streets and not in school. The money children make is often split between gangs they may be involved with or given back to the family members and bullies who sent them to work on the streets.

"Tourists are unaware that they are contributing to the problems with street children by giving money to children directly," Garcia said. "Tourists are adding to the problem because they feel guilty or want the children to go away."

The documentary captures the everyday scenes of children living in the streets in Phnom Penh and Child Safe's efforts to educate locals and tourists.

The organization says children are put at risk and into abusive situations in Phnom Penh because communities facilitate or ignore the signs of abuse. Child Safe works with community members to teach them ways to protect and educate children living on the streets in their areas.

c.norlen@chronicle.utah.edu