A Thorn in the Heart: Cambodian Men who Buy Sex [-Staggering and shameful statistics]

Executive Summary

We interviewed 133 Cambodian men who had bought sex from adult women in prostitution, with 37% also acknowledging having bought sex from minor girls. Almost all (95%) of the men interviewed for this study stated that children were available for paid sexual abuse in brothels, bars, and massage parlors in Phnom Penh. In order to measure the men's attitudes and behavior, we used previously validated and standardized questionnaires, and a structured interview, yielding both quantitative and qualitative data. Conducted by a specially trained team of 8 interviewers, the interviews each lasted about 2-3 hours. Most of the men said that they had a wife or girlfriend when they used a woman in prostitution. They reported having many sex partners throughout their lifetime (21% had 21-50 sex partners and 35% had 50 or more sex partners). Prostitution was the first sexual experience of most interviewees, many of them having responded to peer pressure and the need to prove their manhood by using a woman in prostitution. Almost all of the men bought sex once a month or more often. Like men in other countries, they bought sex both indoors and on the street. Almost all the men bought women in brothels where they reported observing extreme violence, coercion and threats - evidence that may indicate sex trafficking. Thirty-nine percent of the interviewees described having seen trafficking of women and children. Almost all had bought sex from a woman who was controlled by a pimp. Most frequently the pimps were women but sometimes they were men.

In these interviews, the men dehumanized women in prostitution, seeing them as inferior to other women. They tended to blame prostituted women for the spread of HIV. The sex buyers believe that prostitution prevents rape, although there is no empirical evidence for that. In fact the opposite is more likely to be true: men's prostitution activity is associated with an increased incidence of rape. 1 The men who most strongly supported the institution of prostitution were also those men who had a hostile masculine self-identity. Such men think that dominance is important in love relationships and see relationships with women in adversarial terms. Those men with hostile masculine identities also tended to believe rape myths (for example they believed that women say no to sex when they mean yes, and women who dress provocatively are seeking to be raped).

The study found that men who bought women for sex generally lacked empathy for the women, failing to grasp the extremely negative feelings that the women say that they feel during prostitution. Most of the men in the study told us that in addition to acts of violence against the women they bought for use in prostitution, they had also committed sexually aggressive acts against their non-prostituted partners.

Pornography was used by almost all sex buyers. The men who watched the most pornography bought sex most often. The men who watched more violent pornography reported more frequent incidences of sexually coercive behaviors against both prostituted women and non-prostituted women. Most of the men explained that they copied what they saw in pornography with the prostituted women they bought.

An important component of this research study was the development of a greater understanding of gang rape/bauk prostitution, assumed by some to be a uniquely Cambodian form of gender based violence. From the men's narrative responses to the structured interview and also from statistical analyses, it is clear that viewing gang rape pornography from other cultures (especially western/Caucasian, Japanese, Chinese, and Thai) has a strong effect on some men's decision to perpetrate gang rape against women in prostitution. Many Khmer men reported that they watched gang rape pornography from other cultures and imitated what they saw when they perpetrated bauk against prostituted and non-prostituted women.

The sex buyers indicated that effective deterrents to prostitution would include greater criminal penalty and public exposure. Recommendations based on this research include enforcement of existing laws on prostitution and trafficking against buyers while at the same time decriminalizing women in prostitution, educational programs about the toxic influence of pornography in Khmer culture, and education and prevention programs for youth that challenge the notion that buying sex enhances masculinity.

https://www.box.com/s/4535374ec410a1d4fe32

Gang rape in Cambodia an increasing trend [-Shameful statistics for Cambodian men (mouse?)]

Wednesday, 18 July 2012
Mom Kunthear and Bridget Di Certo
The Phnom Penh Post

What would Chou Bun Eng say if she is the victim of gang rape?

Chou Bun Eng, secretary of state at the Ministry of Interior, said that the government today does not want to criminalise the perpetrators or victims. (sicko!!!)

"At the end, she was in so much pain, I was afraid she had died,” a Cambodian sex buyer recounted to the Cambodian Women’s Crisis Centre and US-based Prostitution Research & Education in reference to a gang rape in which he had participated.

Gang rape is an increasingly normalised human rights violation in Cambodia, research presented by the CWCC and PR&E yesterday highlighted as part of their campaign to discourage men’s demand for prostitution.

“Sex buyers have negative attitudes toward all women, not only women in prostitution,” PR&E’s Melissa Farley said at yesterday’s presentation.

“We are here to shine a light on these men who buy sex and cause such great harms to women,” Farley said, emphasising that too often the perpetrators of violence against women in prostitution were “invisible”.

Nearly 40 per cent of Cambodian sex buyers interviewed for the research blamed the prevalence of Western pornography in Cambodia for a fascination with gang rape.

“The sex buyers we interviewed described gang rape as an opportunity to relax with their friends, (sick!!!)” the three-year research presented by the two groups reads.

CAMBODIA: Women victims of Khmer Rouge demand transparency

Phnom Penh, Cambodian women cry with memory of Khmer Roughe atrocities during prayer ceremony. Image: Guardian News Global Development

Hanna Hindstrom – WNN MDG Stories

(WNN) Phnom Penh, CAMBODIA: Net Saveoun was 18 when she was gang raped by Khmer Rouge soldiers. She was one of 30 women selected to “carry salt” and taken to the forest in Pursat province, western Cambodia in 1978. Each of them was beaten, brutalised and had their throat slit before being tossed into an open grave.

“I was the last one,” said Saveoun. “I was hit with an axe and my clothes were torn off and then they raped me. They hit me three times with an axe. Then I was thrown into that hole full of blood. Everyone else was already dead.”

But Saveoun is not a witness in the proceedings that began last week in the extraordinary chambers of the courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Instead she addressed a separate hearing last Thursday, held on the other side of the city as part of the Cambodian 16 days of action on violence against women to highlight sexual crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge.

Gang Rape Pervasive Across Cambodia

December 31, 2008
By Rachel Snyder
NPR.org (USA)

The tiny Southeast Asian country of Cambodia has seen explosive economic growth in the past five years.

Skyscrapers will soon dominate the country's skyline and predictions of oil wealth offer hope that the country is finally beginning to outgrow its grisly past.

But a chilling form of recreation — gang rape — reminds everyone that for Cambodia, the past may yet still loom.

One Woman's Story

Mao, 18, is from Pursat, a small village with a few hundred families. Through a translator at the Cambodian Women's Crisis Center in the capital of Phnom Phen, she says she is too ashamed to say her last name.

"There was a wedding in Pursat, and I went to participate," she says. "At the wedding this man asked me to dance and I went to dance with him."

The man then said he had a friend with a question for her, and he led her from the wedding to a field nearby.

"When he dragged me out, there was his two friends with him and three more were waiting in the fields," Mao says.

Two of the men raped her before others were alerted by her screams. Eight days later, she told her story from a safe house.

What happened to Mao has a name in Cambodia: bauk. Its literal translation means "plus," but it also means gang rape, a chilling social phenomenon among young men in the city.

A few years ago, a local nongovernmental organization put together a video of victims and perpetrators. In the video, one voice is distorted to hide the victim's identity. This girl says she was raped and sodomized by four men in a guest house. The next morning, she says, she called the police, but they told her she had no evidence.

'Socially Acceptable'

David Wilkinson, a consultant living in Cambodia, and his colleagues were studying condom usage among college boys in 2002 when they found that bauk was a socially accepted form of recreation for young middle-class Khmer men.

"They described it as a situation where one or two young men would procure the services of, generally, a street-based sex worker, then they would take her to a guest house to have sex, and when they got there they would have arranged for between four and 10 of their friends to be waiting," Wilkinson says. "And they would coerce or try and induce the woman to have sex with all of them. Very often she was verbally or physically abused and would then be subsequently gang raped."

Generally, bauk happens to sex workers, but it can also happen to what the men in Wilkinson's studies call "normal" girls — girls like Mao.

"There is growing indication that the groups of victims extend now beyond those involved in sex work, and we've got stories of school girls, garment factory workers, middle-class young women being gang raped," Wilkinson says.

Napsarin Sreynoth, the secretary general of the Cambodian Women's Crisis Center, says prostitutes don't seek help in their shelters because they think bauk is part of their job. But other bauk victims, like Mao, do come.

"Some victim, they are under 15 years old," says Tong Sophrach, who worked with Wilkinson on the initial research. "Every month that we receive the gang rape or rape bauk and the victim — they are from Pursat, Kompang, Chnnam. It everywhere happen in Cambodia."

Tong says they interviewed taxi drivers in rural areas and found evidence of bauk in at least 21 of Cambodia's 24 provinces. Tong adds that the young men who commit the rapes think it's funny.

Possible Explanations For 'Bauk' Proliferation

Wilkinson says there are many possible reasons why bauk has proliferated. Many believe it's a male-bonding experience: It costs about $15 to hire a prostitute for the night and paying for just one prostitute saves money. There are also few recreational opportunities for young people.

Wilkinson says the bauk phenomenon may be linked to the genocide in 1975-1979, when up to 1.5 million people died from starvation, disease or execution.

"It's difficult to say whether this phenomenon is a result of the deprivations imposed by the Khmer Rouge regime, but what you've got is a generation of young people now whose parents didn't really experience adolescence and so have no real models or norms on which to base how to be good parents," he says. "And it's possible this has had an effect on how they relate to their sons."

In addition, Wilkinson says, bauk may be triggered by the kind of pornography available in Phnom Penh, which he says is the worst that researchers have seen.

'An Aberration Of Khmer Society'

The government, however, blames outside influences.

"Rape itself is very often happening in Cambodia due to the influence of the Western culture with the illegal entry or import of pornography film," says You Ay, from the Ministry of Women's Affairs.

But many fault the government for not denouncing bauk more publicly. Tong says that while there have been arrests, he knows of no prosecutions specifically for bauk. Wilkinson, who has lived in Cambodia for a decade, says he believes a high-level government condemnation of bauk could begin to solve the problem.

"It's really just an aberration of Khmer society, and so as such, it wouldn't be difficult for the political leaders to put a stop to it," he says. "With the backing of senior levels of government this would happen."

In Wilkinson's follow-up research, he asked young people what most concerned them. The girls' responses were all about avoiding rape.

"The interview with the boys was more intriguing," he says. "They wanted to know how they could either coerce or bribe the girl afterward not to take action against them."

A famous adage in Cambodia says that men are gold and women are cloth. The former is easily cleaned; the latter easily stained. Mao says she feels this stain. She is angry and ashamed.

"Everybody, you know, none of us are perfect and I also feel it's my fault because I wanted to go to the wedding," Mao says.

For now at least, Mao says she can't go home. "I do not dare to think about the future," she says.

Reported violence against Cambodian women rising: rights group

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Call Cambodia paradise and kiss it goodbye

A plague in paradise

July 1, 2007
The Sunday Times (UK)

Sold to a brothel by her family as a toddler, Yorchi Hong Nhea is one of in Cambodia. Few clients these days are western sex tourists: 30,000 sex slavesmost are Cambodian men. Three decades after the Khmer Rouge devastated the country, Jon Swain witnesses a surge in violent sexual exploitation

As dusk falls, the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh is at its most appealing. It is bathed in a soft and purplish evening light. The air is filled with tropical scents. Lovers stroll along the river bank by the old Royal Palace. The visions of Cambodia at peace after years torn by civil war are enchanting.

But the glitter of dusk over the city hides an ugly reality. For all of its exotic charm, Phnom Penh can be a cruel place. It is a city of terrible sexual exploitation and depravity. Between the Independence Monument and the Mekong lies a municipal park where desperate sex slaves - teenage girls - sit on benches selling their bodies.

The park is named the Jardin de Hun Sen after Cambodia's prime minister, whose house overlooks one side of it. Hun Sen has been in power since 1985 and is the longest-serving leader in Asia. But his government has been incapable of stopping Cambodia's multi-million-pound sex business despite periodic crackdowns by the police, who are underpaid and known for their extortion and corrupt ways.

Gary Glitter, the convicted British paedophile, used to live in a house next door to Hun Sen, paying thousands of pounds in rent for the privilege. He is now serving a three-year prison sentence in Vietnam for sexually abusing girls, after being permanently expelled from Cambodia on suspicion of having done the same there.

But the teenage girls who congregate in the park at dusk are not selling sex to western men. Phnom Penh has become dangerous for western paedophiles to operate in. It is full of campaigning and vigilant NGOs seeking to stop underage sex tourism by westerners. More than 100 people actively monitor child sexual abuse in Phnom Penh, and over the years an increasing number of arrests of paedophiles have taken place. The penalties are harsh. One convicted New Zealander is currently serving 20 years in a Cambodian prison for raping five girls. The girls in the garden are mostly selling themselves to Cambodian men on their way home after work.

There are estimated to be 30,000 sex slaves operating today in Cambodia. In Phnom Penh alone, 8,000 girls are working in the sex industry. There are 124 brothels, 83 massage parlours, 56 karaoke bars. In one establishment there are 300 working girls. Perhaps one in three is HIV-positive. Many have been sold into brothels by their families. Many are in their early teens. Some are as young as five years old. So it is that nearly three decades after the end of the Khmer Rouge reign of terror, in which 1.7m people died, Cambodia is gripped by another kind of scourge. It is completely different in kind, of course, but it is ruining thousands of young lives. Cambodia is home to some of Asia's most sordid brothels.

The perception held by many concerned people in the West is that the cause of this big explosion in prostitution is sex tourism by western men, who come to southeast Asia to exploit vulnerable young women and children in a poor, underdeveloped country. In Phnom Penh recently I heard an Australian man describe the city as "PPP heaven" - meaning, as he so eloquently phrased it, "pot, piss and pussy". But the perception that western men are the reason for the existence of Cambodia's legion of sex workers is far removed from the wretched reality of what is happening.

When foreigners are engaged in underage sex, the nationalities are predominantly Asian, but the reason the country is awash with prostitution is primarily to service Cambodian men. With millions struggling to live on less than 25p per day, many women turn out of desperation to jobs in the sex industry, and poor parents sell their children when they are five or six for as little as £50. Girls prostitute themselves for £1 a trick, but at least half of this goes to their pimp or the brothel where they work, so they are left with very little themselves. The brothels are mostly tin-roofed wooden shacks with tiny windowless rooms, furnitureless except for a bed with a soiled mattress, with used condoms and cigarette ends on the floor.

The girls at the Jardin de Hun Sen charge a little extra for operating from a more salubrious part of town. Also considered to be a better class of prostitute, they can command higher fees: they are paid £2.50 for sex. Most of the clients are Cambodians, but there are also men who come to Cambodia from other Asian countries, particularly China, Japan and Korea, for whom the pretty, naive Cambodian country girls are playthings to be enjoyed on holiday or to be bought and taken back to their own countries as brides. It's a multi-million-pound industry.

Nobody knows this hard truth and the extent of this prostitution better than Somaly Mam, a 35-year-old Cambodian woman, energetic, doe-eyed with jet-black hair, who leads Afesip (Action for Women in Distressing Situations), an association that rescues girls and young women from the brothels. Born amid the tumult of war, she does not know who her parents are. She was abandoned and raped when she was 12 and two years later was sold off and forced to marry.

Her husband would get drunk, beat and rape her and fire bullets that passed close by her head and feet. When she was 15 she took his gun and shot him in the foot to hurt him as he had hurt her. He then sold her into a brothel, where she had to accept five or six clients a day. One day a client called her and another girl. He said he was with just one other man. In fact there were 20 of them, who abused the girls terribly. Later she married a Frenchman and had three children. Last year she indirectly became a victim of sex slavery a second time when her daughter Ning, 14, was kidnapped, drugged and raped, possibly out of revenge for her mother's work.

When I met Mam in Phnom Penh she was exhausted, having just returned to the capital from trips to Italy and Singapore to publicise the plight of Cambodian women in the brothels, and a gruelling 10-hour road journey from Pailin, a remote and squalid town in the far west of Cambodia which was once a Khmer Rouge stronghold and is now paradoxically a centre of pornography, prostitutes and gambling.

Though wearied by the travelling, she insisted on setting off almost immediately to visit the girls in her main refuge in the countryside, a three-hour drive away, where former sex workers attend school and learn skills like weaving and sewing so that they can earn a living outside the brothel.

She had received news that a six-year-old girl, along with her sister, had been sold into a brothel. The girl, later rescued, had developed full-blown Aids and was now dying. When we arrived, the little girl's face lit up at the sight of Mam, whom she had been crying out for. She put out her arms and hugged her. "I haven't seen her and the other girls for a month," Mam said.

"It is too long. Many of these girls are orphans or have been sold by their parents and I am their mother. They did not have a childhood, and I am trying to give back what they lost."

Here is Chim Chanry, who at the age of seven was raped by her uncle while she slept at her brother's house. When she revealed what had happened to her brother, he tried to kill her with a knife. Rejected by her family after the incident, she was sold into a brothel by her sister. 'she has never been home," said Mam.

Here is Keo, a 15-year-old orphaned Vietnamese girl who lived with her stepmother, who sold her via Cambodia into a brothel over the border in neighbouring Thailand. The brothel-keeper sold her on to another brothel, where she lived off a packet of noodles a day. When she became sick, the owner beat her and tortured her with electric shocks. Rescued by a Thai sister organisation of Mam's organisation Afesip, she does not know who her parents are or where they live. Still today, months after her rescue, her eyes are expressionless, dead, the eyes of someone who has borne the unbearable.

Here, too, is one of two sisters who was sold to a brothel by her mother when she was five - nobody knows how much for. She was drugged and beaten, passed from man to man, until she was rescued by Afesip and brought to the centre. How is she doing, I ask. Mam pauses. 'she is HIV-positive," Mam says. "We are going to make her life as comfortable as possible until she dies. It breaks the heart."

Also there is a little orphan girl. Her mother, a prostitute, had arrived at the centre covered in blood. She had been mutilated by a client who was trying to take out her unborn baby to offer it to the temple to bring him good luck. Horribly injured, her mother died while giving birth and the little baby was brought up by another former prostitute who had a baby of the same age.

These are just a few of the examples of the 45 girls at the Kompong Cham centre learning a new life. Being in Mam's care, they are the luckier ones. For every girl Afesip saves, there are dozens more who suffer in silence and isolation.

Prostitution and underage sex are nothing new in Cambodia. The great Chinese traveller Chou Ta-Kuan, who was an emissary to the kingdom of Angkor, describes on his travels through Cambodia in the 13th century the pinnacle of Khmer civilisation: the deflowering of young girls in a religious ceremony. Still today in the countryside, parents take their daughters to the monastery around the age of 14 to be deflowered by the head monk.

It is meant to bring good fortune. There is another reason why very young girls are in demand in Cambodia: as virgins they are thought through intercourse to cure Aids.

Ta-Kuan also described how the king had four to five thousand women in his palace, and even in modern times there is no law governing the number of young concubines the kings of Cambodia may have. Famously, in 1951, when he was 29 and already had four concubines and 10 children, Cambodia's playboy King Norodom Sihanouk took Monique Izzi, a half-Italian, half-Cambodian beauty, as his fifth concubine when she was only 16. They quickly had two children.

One of the great charms of Cambodia was that its people were pleasure-seeking and insouciant and lived simple, natural lives revolving around the family, Buddhist festivals and the rhythm of the seasons.

Perhaps that is too idealistic. Behind the enigmatic Khmer smile there were always undercurrents of violence, which exploded into the open finally with the war and the savagery of the Khmer Rouge. But the country's cultural values have been warped since by unbridled greed, consumerism and massive exploitation.

I well remember what a Cambodian foreign-ministry official said to me as Cambodia struggled to get back on its feet in the 1980s after the Khmer Rouge tyranny which had turned the clock in Cambodia back to Year Zero.

"Go and tell your investor friends that Cambodia is like a beautiful woman lying on her back with her legs open waiting to be taken," Chum Bun Rong said.

How true in every context this is. Sexual slavery has got such a strong grip on Cambodia now that defeating it is almost impossible. It is spreading like a cancer, and a new phenomenon that Mam and others combating the sex trade find particularly virulent and disturbing is the accompanying terrible rise in sexual violence.

Prior to 1990 there were no words for gang rape in the Khmer language. It did not exist. Now young Cambodians have invented the word bauk for it. Gang rape has become the norm in urban youth culture. Why exactly this is so, nobody knows, but the spread of violent pornographic films that are constantly playing in some local bars is thought to be part of the reason. In Phnom Penh the other day an old Indochina hand said to me: "Call Cambodia paradise and kiss it goodbye."