The scandal of orphanages in tourist resorts and disaster zones that rent children to fleece gullible Westerners

11th April 2011
By Ian Birrell
Daily Mail Online (UK)

As a child welfare expert who has worked amid bullets and bombs in some of the world’s toughest war zones, Jennifer Morgan is not someone easily shaken. But even she admits she was shocked by some of the orphanages she visited recently in Haiti.

‘Outside it is a sunny day. Then you step inside the walls of an orphanage and realise that the children there have been exposed to rapes, severe beatings, emotional and mental trauma,’ she said. It was even more disturbing, she added, than the damaged children she came across amid the deadly mayhem of Darfur.

But perhaps the most troubling thing is that these tragic scenes in Haiti are not unusual. In dozens of places around the world, unregulated orphanages have become a boom business trading off Western guilt. Our desire to help is backfiring in the most dreadful fashion.

Aussies rescue four child sex workers [in Aranyaprathet, Thailand]

September 13, 2010
AAP

AN AUSTRALIAN organisation comprising ex-police and special forces soldiers has rescued four child sex workers from an illegal brothel near the Thailand-Cambodia border.

The team of volunteer operatives from The Grey Man, a Brisbane-based charity, staged the successful operation at a brothel in the Thailand town of Aranyaprathet, 1km from the Cambodian border, on Saturday.

Organisation president John Curtis said the brothel trafficked girls from Vietnam and Cambodia to Thailand where they were being offered to customers for sex.

"The Grey Man team in an initial investigation obtained video and audio and then called in the Royal Thai Police force for assistance," Mr Curtis said.

"The Thai unit was briefed on the location and a plan formulated.

"The Grey Man operatives then re-entered the brothel with police nearby ready to conduct a raid."

Mr Curtis said 20 Thai police officers were involved in the raid with the Grey Man team - all of whom had a background in the police force or in Australian special forces.

He said four Cambodian girls aged between 14 and 15 were rescued from padlocked rooms with bars on the windows.

"Thai police made multiple arrests including the Mama San (brothel manager) and a number of Thai males assisting in the operation of the brothel," Mr Curtis said.

The girls are currently being cared for by Thai government officials before spending a year at a Khmer centre for vocational training in Cambodia.

The Grey Man's team leader for the operation, who asked not to be identified, labelled the operation as a good outcome.

"Working with the Thai police has shown us that the Thai government is serious about tackling the problem of human trafficking," he said.

In January, Grey Man volunteers also rescued two Vietnamese girls, aged 10 and 14, from a brothel in Cambodia.

Women Lobby US Reps to Help Children

By Sok Khemara, VOA Khmer
Original report from Washington
11 March 2010

At least 250 women from 30 US states gathered in Washington Tuesday, moving from office to office of members of Congress and lobbying them to do more to fight child trafficking and high mortality of children and mothers.

The group, Women of Vision, which is part of US World Vision, wants to see the passage of bills on both issues in the Senate.

“We need women from individual constituencies to lobby their representatives to additionally support the bills,” said Haidy Ear-Dupuy, communications manager for World Vision in Cambodia.

Group members had brief meetings with congressional staff members, informing them on the issue of trafficking, including in Cambodia, where many parents fall prey to traffickers in desperate attempts to escape poverty. Cambodia remains on a US watch list of countries that should be doing more to combat the crime.

“When [the children] migrate to other countries and to Phnom Penh, they don’t have clear information, and they don’t have legal documentation,” Ear-Dupuy told VOA Khmer. “When problems happen, they don’t know who that can contact, so they can fall into human trafficking: a girl will be sent to work in a brothel and a man will be sent into forced labor on a boat.”

US officials estimate a total of 1 million children are trafficked every year into the global sex trade, while 1.2 million are trafficked into child labor. Meanwhile, 24,000 children die every day due to preventable diseases like diarrhea, measles and malaria.

Women from the group walked door to door on Capitol Hill, but none was able to meet any congressmen, though at some offices, staffers took notes and promised to pass them on.

The women want support for The Child Protection Compact Act and the Newborn, Child and Mother Survival Act.

“If the senators get on board and become a co-sponsors, we will get these bills passed,” said Terresa Bulger, a resident of Virginia and a member of Women of Vision, which is part of World Vision.

The US would then be a leader on the issues and help other countries draft similar laws and regulations, she said, urging more people to contact their representatives. Child victims do not know how to protest against the abuses, she said.

Cassandra McDonald, a resident of Ohio, said aid agencies and other organizations needed to step up on the issue and women and girls need to be wary.

“Evil is everywhere,” she said. “It may not be as pronounced [in all places], but it’s everywhere, and we need to address it.”

Brisbane charity rescues trafficked children in Cambodia

January 26, 2010
David Barbeler
CourierMail.com.au

A BRISBANE-based organisation that rescues child sex workers in southeast Asia has cracked its first Cambodian syndicate, saving two girls, 10 and 14.

The rescue was carried out by the Brisbane-based charity The Grey Man, comprising former Australian special forces soldiers, former police and civilians.

A spokesman said the group's director of operations - a former Sydney policeman who uses only the name Tony to protect his identity - was in Cambodia on a fact-finding tour when a motorbike driver offered to arrange some young girls for him.

"Tony contacted our partner agency International Justice Mission (IJM) who in turn engaged with the police," the spokesman said.

The motorbike driver took Tony to a hotel late on Monday where a pimp showed him two Vietnamese girls, aged 10 and 14, the spokesman said.

"He (Tony) asked for both girls and on the pretext of going to an ATM to get the $US600 ($A665) to pay for them, he briefed police," he said.

Police and an IJM investigator then accompanied The Grey Man director back to the room to arrest the pimp and the motorbike driver.

The girls, who'd been trafficked from Vietnam, have been placed in the care of a British aid agency. The Grey Man will assist in supporting the children.

It's understood The Grey Man representatives are working with Cambodian police to arrest others involved.

The Grey Man's president, a former special forces soldier who uses the pseudonym John Curtis, said it was the organisation's first official operation in Cambodia, having previously rescued more than 100 children and women in Thailand and Laos.

"Without our intervention these girls would have been tossed onto the street in a few short years with AIDS," he said.

"I commend the Cambodian Police and IJM for their assistance.

"It is particularly apt that on Australia Day, Australians from The Grey Man charity are putting themselves in harm's way to rescue children in southeast Asia."

[Cambodia's "wild east" border town] Poipet: Where Cambodians Are Trafficked into Thailand

June 12, 2009
Huffington Post (USA)

I had traveled to Cambodia's "wild west" border town of Poipet, in search of a story about human trafficking.

It was certainly the edgiest assignment I'd ever undertaken with World Vision. Everyone knew that trafficking was rife, yet nobody wanted to talk to us about it.

"There are no illegal crossings on our border," said an officer with the Cambodian border police. "Trafficking happens through the immigration post."

"There is no way people can pass through immigration illegally," said a Cambodian immigration officer. "That would require a high level of corruption from both Thai and Cambodian officials. They cross the border instead."

In fact, we were told in an anonymous interview, people go willingly and illegally across borders, across rivers, in casino cars straight through immigration. Hundreds of them every month. As many as half of them under-age.

Our source refused to be named because he said that would endanger his family. He said he was telling us because he was tired of it all, he wanted it to stop. He had children of his own.

The immigration officer told us that one of his duties was to bring back the bodies of Cambodians killed in Thailand. According to him, there were several each month, sometimes shot in bungled drug deals or arrests, sometimes beaten and left to die, or drowned in the river that forms the border.

Most of them had crossed illegally; without paperwork, it was difficult, upsetting, and sometimes impossible, to identify them.

"Why do people go with traffickers?" I asked everyone I met.

"Because they are poor. Because here they earn $3 a day; there they earn $8."

"Are children trafficked?" I asked.

"Yes," they answered. "But not on our watch."

Grasping at Poipet's slippery underbelly felt more like investigation than reporting. I will admit to suffering a twinge of regret that I could not push harder, break the crime rings with an exclusive "hidden camera" expose and the masked evidence of my anonymous source.

But in fact, what World Vision is already doing is probably more important than that. One major solution to the problem lies in advocacy, in working with governments across borders on their will to change, working with communities to teach them how to protect themselves and understand their rights.

World Vision has formed and joined coalitions that push governments to ratify and uphold legislation, including last year's groundbreaking Thailand law that finally recognized that boys and men could be considered victims of trafficking.

Last year World Vision also hosted a workshop for border authorities in Poipet, with both Thai and Cambodian officials in attendance to learn about the causes, effects and legalities of human trafficking.

Many of the police we met told us with pride that they had been in attendance.

"The situation is definitely improving," our source told us.

It's not time to rest just yet, though. Poipet is still a transient, dirty, lawless little town. Poverty still pushes people to take risks that will cost them dearly.

We met Phu Pean, a grandmother at home with her two grandchildren; her daughter travels across the border to Thailand each day to make shoes at 2 baht a pair.

"When should children work?" I asked her.

"Oh, once they can talk," she said. "Then they are able to look after themselves."

"Your grandchildren are talking now," I told her. "Would you ever send them to live and work in Thailand?"

She thought. "I would," she said, "but I don't know how to find the people that would take them."

At least -- unlike most of the other people I met in Poipet -- she was telling the truth.

-- Katie Chalk

World Vision released a report today called "Ten Things You Need to Know About Human Trafficking" [PDF]. Video of the interview with Phu Pean, as well as other people living and working in Poipet, is available online at World Vision.

Katie Chalk is a writer and researcher who has been working for World Vision in the Asia-Pacific for the last four years.

Petra Nemcova - Nemcova Haunted By Cambodia Charity Trip

15/04/2008
ContactMusic.com

Supermodel-turned-humanitarian PETRA NEMCOVA was horrified after witnessing first-hand the brutality of human trafficking during a recent visit to Cambodia.

The Czech Republic-born model was so jarred by the experience she has teamed up with Southeast Asian-based charity the Somaly Mam Foundation in an effort to raise awareness for the devastating crimes.

She says, "It makes me so angry. Girls and boys get sold as young as four-years-old and are put in animal cages. Some of them never see the light anymore. We met this girl who was 13 and a pimp made her lose her right eye. The words 'pimp' and 'child' should never be in the same sentence."

Nemcova was so moved by the Foundation, which seeks to rescue women and girls from the horrors of a life in brothels or on the streets, she wore a dress hand-sewn by women rescued by the group to a recent charity gala.

The model suffered her own hardship during a 2004 vacation to Thailand, surviving multiple broken bones and internal injuries when a tsunami hit land, killing her then-boyfriend, photographer Simon Atlee, and leaving her stranded for hours in a palm tree.

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.

Children Continue to Face Sex Predation, Trafficking, Expert Warns

Sok Khemara, VOA Khmer
Washington
01 October 2007

Cambodia's young are still prey to sexual predators and deceit from at home and abroad, a rights investigator said Monday.

Children can be sold or tricked into the sex trade in the provinces and Phnom Penh, or trafficked abroad for sex or labor, said Thav Kimsan, a child rates coordinator for the rights group Licadho.

The practice can be hard to fight, but victims should report to those they most trust—like their mother or other authority—if they suspect abuse, exploitation or potential trafficking, Thav Kimsan said, as a guest on "Hello VOA."

"There is shame for victims when they are victimized, but relatives should be aware if something abnormal is happening to a family member," he said.

Children are sometimes forced into labor, or work in begging rings, including those younger than 15, which is illegal, Thav Kimsan said.

Children who face physical violence, sexual abuse or overwork are protected under strong laws, where violators can be severely prosecuted, he said.

Undercover in SE Asia's brothels

Many trafficked children have horrific stories to tell

Friday, 27 July 2007
BBC News

Reporter Thembi Mutch spent seven weeks in Thailand and Cambodia, finding out what life is like for children trafficked into the region's thriving sex industry.

I arrived in Thailand on Friday morning, and by the evening my researcher and I were already scouring the bars of Bangkok, attempting to work out our game plan.

We were in the region to find children who had been trafficked into sex work - those who are hidden away, often by armed pimps and traffickers in suburban bars and houses.

Prostitution is illegal in Thailand, although women and men are allowed to do bar work over the age of 18.

But in both Thailand and Cambodia, sex work is so lucrative for everyone involved that it is more blatant than almost anywhere else in the world.

It is not just tolerated, but unofficially, according to many non-governmental organisations (NGOs), it is actively encouraged by both the police and the government.

Posing as tourists

A recent memorandum of understanding between the countries in the Mekong region - including Thailand and Cambodia - has done much to stem child prostitution.

So too has more 10 years of aid work and advocacy by NGOs such as Save the Children and World Vision.

But despite this, resorts like the Thai beach town of Pattaya seem to be more like industrialised brothels than functioning towns.

The sex industry has also expanded to Cambodia, with many children employed as domestic workers, bricklayers, in fish processing plants, while at the same time dipping in and out of the best paid option, sex work.

Most of these children are not there voluntarily - they are trafficked.

Trafficking is helped along by the economic boom in South East Asia. The frantic rate of construction springing up in the region has brought more staff with a desire for young sex workers.

It is not an easy task to pose as "interested tourists" in these areas. We hung out on the streets at night, and got information of where children were working from local sex workers.

We recorded in blacked-out vehicles, changed hotels regularly, and I could never let the recording equipment be seen, or check my recordings, until I was safely inside the hotel.

Once, in Cambodia, we recorded traffickers making deals of children over coffee in a cafe in broad daylight.

The atmosphere was hostile, and the men were clearly on hard drugs, and drinking.

"Who are these people," I muttered to Ang, the ex-prostitute who was my fixer.

"They're Vietnamese and Cambodian government officials," she replied, and my heart sank.

We left immediately, aware that it costs $50 (£25) to hire a hit man in Cambodia.

We were followed almost continuously that day, and also on several others. Men on mopeds and motorbikes would pull up beside us as we raced through the capital Phnom Penh - me clutching Ang's waist, sitting pillion on her moped.

They would take a good, thorough look at my face, and then fall back behind us.

Tales of trafficking

As for the trafficked children, their stories defy words.

A 15-year-old girl in Cambodia said her parents had sold her to a man for her virginity. The man had drugged and raped her whilst she was unconscious.

After a week in the hotel room with this man, she was sold onto a brothel. There, she was gang-raped by 10 men posing as clients.

She escaped, by hiding in a rubbish bin, but was then tricked into prostitution again, staying for three years. Eventually she escaped, and knocked on the door of some strangers, who cared for her.

She then made a two-day bus journey to Phnom Penh, where she arrived three months ago.

I also met a chatty, bright and wide-eyed nine-year-old, who, under a mango tree in the countryside, described how she had been kidnapped from the streets of the capital, locked in a house for a month, and made to watch pornography and drink water with human faeces in it.

The traffickers know what they are doing. She and the other girls were beaten regularly and never allowed out - all part of a systematic campaign to break down the children so they were too confused to do anything about it.

These children did not even know what sex or trafficking is, and whether they will ever "recover" from their ordeal is an ongoing debate.