Myrna Raffkind: Cambodian tells gripping story

Sunday, May 9, 2010
Myrna Raffkind
Amarillo.com (Texas, USA)

Once in a while we read a book that jolts us out of our comfort zone and literally opens our eyes to the many benefits, rights, and privileges we have as a result of living in the United States of America. Such was the experience I encountered when reading Somali Mam's book, "The Road of Lost Innocence."

Somali Mam grew up in Cambodia and her book chronicles her life from early childhood until adulthood. She was abandoned by her parents, grew up as a child of the forest, and sold into sexual slavery at age 12. She lived in brothels until she was in her early 20s, and at this time married a diplomat who took her to France.

Somali Mam was not able to acclimate herself to life in Europe and returned to her native Cambodia to do whatever she could to eliminate the business of brothels and trafficking of sex slaves. She started a foundation dedicated to protesting and has since devoted her time to making the world aware of the horrors the young Cambodian women experience when they are sold as sex slaves.

Undoubtedly all of us in this country can recall incidents where people are treated unfairly and/or even tortured. And yes, most of us know or have heard about incidents where parents have even gained monetarily by forcing their children to engage in illegal or immoral acts. Yet, what's different in America as contrasted to a country such as Cambodia is the institutionalization of sex trafficking and the sanctioning of this practice by government. Fortunately in America, we not only have laws that protect against inhumane practices such as selling children into slavery but we also have a system for enforcing these laws and punishing their offenders.

And yet, what many have forgotten or fail to realize is that in our blessed country rights for women and minority groups have not always been such a vital part of our government. They came only after years of struggle and overcoming resistance and lives were lost in the process.

For example, even though America was founded on the principle of equal rights for all, it was not until 1865 and the passage of the 14th Amendment that blacks were freed from slavery. Fifty-five years passed before the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote was signed into law in 1920. The Civil Rights Act that barred discrimination in employment on the basis of race and sex was not passed until 1964 and in some states the use of contraceptives by married couples was prohibited until 1965.

There are times when I question the misuse and even abuse of some of the rights we enjoy as citizens. I become angry when I read about members of the Westboro Baptist church disrupting funerals with their protests of gays and lesbians. I experience fear when I hear about the stockpiling of weapons by militia groups and I am dismayed when I hear hecklers at political rallies denounce politicians whose views I favor and support. Yet, at the same time, I realize that these signs of protest are but a small price to pay for freedom of speech, assembly or the right to bear arms.

Those who have grown up and live in Cambodia or other countries ruled by tyranny have no safeguards for human rights.

They must fear for their lives when they speak out or protest against inhumane and immoral practices such as selling children to brothels. In order to institute change they must rely on the support of others who live in free countries and who are willing to advocate for their causes.
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Somali Mam will be speaking later this year on the WTAMU campus at Freshman Convocation. She is coming to WTAMU as part of the Readership WT Program, the same program that brought to campus Elie Weisel (Holocaust survivor and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize) in 2007; Valentino Deng (one of the lost boys of Sudan), in 2008, and Khaled Husseini (author of "The Kite Runner") in 2009.

In speaking to the students and youth, these authors have told of genocide, cruelty, and torture imposed in their native countries by corrupt regimes and despotic leaders.

Hearing their stories, the young people of today and the leaders of tomorrow cannot help but have a greater understanding and appreciation of the value and meaning of freedom.

Myrna Raffkind is a retired West Texas A&M University faculty member. She lives in Amarillo.

The Herstory of Somaly Mam

Somaly Mam (left)

March 2, 2010
By Eryn-Ashlei Bailey
Conducive Chronicle

On September 8, 2008 I was fortunate to hear Somaly Mam speak at Fordham University in New York. Somaly is a survivor of rape, forced prostitution, and a forerunner in the fight against human trafficking. She was Glamour Magazine’s Woman of the Year in 2006. She’s been a guest on the Tyra Banks show alongside Susan Sarandon. Somaly Mam has even met with the Queen of Spain. These are but a few of the wonderful accomplishments of this genuinely sweet and lovely woman from Cambodia.

Somaly Mam has a very moving story. She pioneered her own shelter in Cambodia for young children and adolescents who have worked in brothels in Cambodia and across the world. In the brothels of Cambodia and elsewhere, there was, and still is, little choice for the young women and children who work in them. Many are there out of economic need. Some are sold by family members for a profit, others are kidnapped and sold to the brothel, and others would rather work in a brothel than to see their families hungry and sick. In her speech, Somaly reflected back to the time when she lived the brothel life. She witnessed a friend’s murder, and admitted to wanting to murder that man who left her only friend slain. For Somaly, she didn’t know what love was growing up. She didn’t know what life was.

At 12 years old, Somaly was sold to a brothel by a man that she called her grandfather. She considered escaping the brothel, but then wondered why. No one loved her outside of the brothel. Somaly pointed out that child prostitutes are victimized three-threefold. They are punished by laws that don’t give due process. They are stigmatized by society,and by their families. If girls become prostitutes, their families won’t take them back because they are seen as “bad luck”. Men are rarely prosecuted for crimes related to prostitution in Cambodia. Somaly shared that out of 4,000 cases of child prostitution that she knew of at the time of this speech, only 3 men were convicted and sentenced to the maximum 3 year sentence.


Somaly Mam also shared the following figures and facts about child prostitution in Cambodia’s Phnom Penh: 70% of the patrons at these brothels are local males. They target young girls as young as age 4 and 5. In the West, sex with children ages 4 and 5 is considered statutory rape, reprehensible, and these men would be labeled as pedophiles. Somaly Mam detailed specific reasons why these brothel frequenters target incredibly young children and explained that it is due to the belief systems of the society. For example, these men that sexually exploit children believe that sex with a virgin will cure HIV, give them white skin, and perpetuate longevity etc… After losing their virginity, many young girls will get stitches to be sold as a virgin again because virgins turn a higher profit than children who have already lost their virginity. Unsurprisingly, 30% of the patrons of these often dirty and clandestine brothels are Westerners. Somaly Mam also shared that these victims of this abuse are HIV positive and they are going to die. Although brothel owners turn immense profits from reselling the virginity of these young children and exploiting these teens and adolescents, these forced child prostitutes will still die of HIV because money for the resources and medication to treat them is in the pockets of the sick individuals who fuel this system. Their lives are short- lived and horrific. Their innocence is stolen for 5 minutes of pleasure to satisfy the unquenchable appetites of pedophiles.


Women don’t have equal rights in Cambodia. They sacrifice their lives for the family. One question posed to Somaly was, “How do we combat human trafficking?” She answered, “Work with politics and government. Law and commitment to those laws need to be in place in order to make a change. We need to react more encouraged.” She suggested that attenders visit her website at somaly.org as well visit the Red Light Children’s Organization. Somaly Mam has done incredible work with establishing programs for young woman who have sold themselves to the brothel and has worked with these young girls to reclaim their lives. It is absolutely inspirational work that she is doing with these young people. Perhaps the most important contribution that Somaly Mam has made in the fight against human trafficking is sharing her testimony and making the world aware that it is such a global problem. Human trafficking is the second most lucrative business only to arms trafficking.

Progressive steps that Somaly has taken to change the faulty thinking of brothel goers includes speaking with military officers in Cambodia about changes in sexual behavior. If there was no demand for sex with children, there wouldn’t be child brothels. Hence, she speaks to military personal about love-making with their wives, using condoms, HIV, and awareness of other STD’s. The discussion also included a need to attack transnational-child pornography. Attenders were encouraged to talk about these issues of human trafficking, transnational pornography, pedophilia and child prostitution with friends, families, colleagues to spread awareness.

The best resource for learning more about Somaly Mam’s incredible story is her autobiography: The Road of Loss Innocence. It’s one of the best books that I’ve ever read.

Book Review: The Road of Lost Innocence - The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine by Somaly Mam

November 14, 2008
Written by Jennifer Bogart
Blogcritics Magazine (USA)

Some books are dangerous; reading them opens your eyes and makes you see the world around you in a different way. After reading them this new understanding of reality lingers and is not easily dismissed. Stories like these drive you to action, serving as a call to take up arms. Somaly Mam’s memoir, The Road of Lost Innocence, is one such book.

Born in Cambodia during years of political turmoil, Somaly never knew her parents – she still doesn’t know what became of them. Left by her grandmother in a tribal village, her early years were spent outdoors, roaming amongst the huts looking for food. These years were happy compared to those that would follow after leaving northern Cambodia with a man who claimed to know of her parents at the age of six.

This man, her “grandfather” would proceed to beat and molest her, sell her virginity to pay his debts at the age of 11, marry her to an abusive husband at the age of fourteen and finally sell her to a brothel at 16. As you can imagine Somaly’s story is not an easy, feel good read. The list of travesties, betrayals and corruption she has known is far too lengthy to detail here.

Catching glimpses of a better life, Somaly is eventually able to escape from the bondage of sexual slavery. Using the only currency at her disposal she begins to make alliances with foreign men – those with wealth and power – and uses them to begin her slow ascent out of prostitution. After achieving her freedom the girls she left behind haunt her. Knowing the devastation trafficking in girl-flesh wreaks she cannot stand motionless while atrocities are committed; hopefully you won’t be able to either when this story comes to a close.

Presented in spare, matter of fact prose the writing itself mimics the Cambodian attitude towards life; silent, understated. Coming from a people who disguise their emotions to the utmost – simply writing this memoir is a break with traditional Cambodian culture. Somaly however, has long since ceased to be a traditional Cambodian.

The words seek to describe without betraying the depths of emotional pain behind them, but it still seeps through. Between each and every line, in the silences and pauses the pain is there alongside the fear and anger. The Road of Lost Innocence is the anguished soul cry of a woman who has never truly been loved, the heart breaking sobs of a shattered little girl.

Somaly brutally exposes the truth of modern sexual trafficking in south-east Asia through her own story and that of those she has rescued from slavery. She outlines the beginnings of her non-profit organizations that rescue girls and women from brothels, sketching out plans for their reintegration into society. Free of her physical bonds and able to offer hope to those in chains, she remains a broken woman. The aching sadness created throughout her life’s circumstances is still present; only slightly mitigated by her relentless drive to rescue the weak and defend the defenseless.

She tells her story not to evoke sympathy for herself, though her pain is apparent. She writes, offering herself up to the public eye to draw attention to the plight of the girls and women who are still captive; taken against their will and viciously used. Somaly truly wants nothing for herself other than the opportunity to continue working with the victims of sexual trafficking and to draw awareness to their plight.

Truly, every responsible citizen of the world should engage Somaly’s work. The difficult stories need to be told, more than that - they must be acted upon. Only with eyes opened to the atrocities surrounding us can we step out in faith, reaching into the darkness to rescue those bound there.

Visit the Somaly Mam Foundation to learn how you can make a difference in the lives of those affected by sexual trafficking.

Ex-sex slave crusades against forced prostitution

By Gary Crosse

NEW YORK, Sept 28 (Reuters) - Abandoned as a child in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge's murderous reign, Somaly Mam has no memory of her family and doesn't know her true age or name. But she recalls when she was sold to a brothel.

She traces a dramatic and haunting journey from sex slave to crusader against forced prostitution in her newly released memoir, "The Road of Lost Innocence," which reads like a Dickensian tale of triumph over adversity.

Remarkably, she does not see her path from a remote mountain region of Cambodia to an international campaigner as awe-inspiring.

"I never feel that way, I'm still Somaly. I used to work in the fields and now I help victims," she told Reuters in an interview.

Born in the early 1970s, she fleetingly recalls the Khmer Rouge's rule, when an estimated 1.7 million people were executed or died of torture, starvation or disease during a disastrous four-year agrarian revolution in the late 1970s.

Set adrift, she was taken in by an elderly man whom she called "grandfather," an honorific title that belied his cruel character. When she was about 16 years old, he sold her to a brothel to pay off his debts.

FIRST HOT SHOWER

Held captive for years, she watched in horror as the brothel owner one day shot a girl in the head for insolence -- one of many acts of violence in Cambodia's notorious sex trade where poor families sometimes sell a daughter to pay debts.

Laws to prevent abuse against women are poorly enforced.

With the help of a Swiss patron employed by a nongovernmental organization, Mam paid the brothel owner $100 to let her go, one of the few ways women can leave safely.

At his hotel, she experienced her first hot shower. "He ... turned on a shiny thing, like a snake, and it flashed to life, spitting at me ... That was the first time I ever used proper soap, and I remember how good it smelled, like a flower," she writes.

Mam eventually married and lived in France for a time before returning to Cambodia determined to help "the girls" in whatever way she could. She started by distributing condoms and soap -- both of which were rarely available in Cambodia's brothels.

Shunned in their home villages, Mam and others formed a shelter for women and girls, the Agir pour les Femmes En Situation Precaire -- Acting for Women in Distressing Situations (AFESIP).

The largely Spanish-funded grass-roots group expanded to neighboring Thailand and Laos, providing counseling, shelter and education on AIDS prevention. Its members also speak to men on the perils facing girls in the sex trade.

'WOMEN ARE NOT TOYS'

Future Group, a nongovernmental organization that combats human trafficking, estimates the number of prostitutes and sex slaves in Cambodia at up to 50,000, with at least 1 in 40 girls born in Cambodia expected to be sold into sex slavery.

Today, Mam travels the world raising money for the Somaly Mam Foundation to draw attention to forced prostitution, estimating that 2 million to 4 million women and children will be sold into the global sex trade in the next 12 months.

Legalization of prostitution is not the answer, she said, at least not in Cambodia.

"Women are not toys," she said. "All of us, we need equality. If you want to live with dignity, it is without prostitution, without this violence."

Fighting to close notorious brothels made her enemies in Cambodia. Shelters run by her group have come under armed attack and women have been abducted.

In 2006, Mam's teen-age daughter was kidnapped. She was eventually rescued, but Mam still faces threats in her battle against underworld figures who control the trade. Undaunted, she says the work is too important to walk away from.

"You know, these victims and me -- we have the same heart, the same body, the same pain," she said. "It's not just Cambodia. If I can help around the world, I'll do it."

(Editing by Jason Szep and Xavier Briand)

A Heroine From the Brothels

Nicholas D. Kristof (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

September 24, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The New York Times

World leaders are parading through New York this week for a United Nations General Assembly reviewing their (lack of) progress in fighting global poverty. That’s urgent and necessary, but what they aren’t talking enough about is one of the grimmest of all manifestations of poverty — sex trafficking.

This is widely acknowledged to be the 21st-century version of slavery, but governments accept it partly because it seems to defy solution. Prostitution is said to be the oldest profession. It exists in all countries, and if some teenage girls are imprisoned in brothels until they die of AIDS, that is seen as tragic but inevitable.

The perfect counterpoint to that fatalism is Somaly Mam, one of the bravest and boldest of those foreign visitors pouring into New York City this month. Somaly is a Cambodian who as a young teenager was sold to the brothels herself and now runs an organization that extricates girls from forced prostitution.

Now Somaly has published her inspiring memoir, “The Road of Lost Innocence,” in the United States, and it offers some lessons for tackling the broader problem.

In the past when I’ve seen Somaly and her team in Cambodia, I frankly didn’t figure that she would survive this long. Gangsters who run the brothels have held a gun to her head, and seeing that they could not intimidate Somaly with their threats, they found another way to hurt her: They kidnapped and brutalized her 14-year-old daughter.

Three years ago, I wrote from Cambodia about a raid Somaly organized on the Chai Hour II brothel where more than 200 girls had been imprisoned. Girls rescued from the brothel were taken to Somaly’s shelter, but the next day gangsters raided the shelter, kidnapped the girls and took them right back to the brothel.

Yet Somaly continued her fight, and, with the help of many others, she has registered real progress. Today, she says, the Chai Hour II brothel is shuttered. In large part, so is the Svay Pak brothel area where 12-year-old girls were openly for sale on my first visit.

“If you want to buy a virgin, it’s not easy now,” notes Somaly, speaking in English — her fifth language.

Somaly’s shelters — where the youngest girl rescued is 4 years old — provide an education and job skills. More important, Somaly applies public and international pressure to push the police to crack down on the worst brothels, and takes brothel owners to court. The idea is to undermine the sex-trafficking business model.

In her book, Somaly recounts how she grew up as an orphan and was “adopted” by a man who sold her to a brothel. Once when Somaly ran away, the police gang-raped her. Then her owner, on recovering his “property,” not only beat and humiliated her but tied her down naked and poured live maggots over her skin and in her mouth.

Yet even after that, Somaly occasionally defied him. Once two new girls, about 14 years old, were brought in to the brothel and left tied up. Somaly untied them and let them run away. For that, she was tortured with electric shocks.

As Cambodia opened up, Somaly began to get foreign clients, whom she vastly preferred because they didn’t beat her as well, and she began learning foreign languages. Eventually, a French aid worker named Pierre Legros married her, and together they started Afesip, a small organization to fight sex trafficking. They have since divorced, and Somaly works primarily through the Somaly Mam Foundation, set up by admiring Americans to finance her battle against trafficking in Cambodia. It’s a successful collaboration between American do-gooders with money and a Cambodian do-gooder with local street smarts.

The world’s worst trafficking is in Asia, but teenage runaways in the United States are also routinely brutalized by their pimps. If a white, middle-class blonde goes missing, the authorities issue an Amber Alert and cable TV goes berserk, but neither federal nor local authorities do nearly enough to go after pimps who savagely abuse troubled girls who don’t fit the “missing blonde” narrative. The system is broken.

A bill to strengthen federal anti-trafficking efforts within the U.S. was overwhelmingly passed by the House of Representatives, led by Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York. But crucial provisions to crack down on pimping are being blocked in the Senate in part by Senators Sam Brownback and Joe Biden, who consider the House provisions unnecessary and problematic. (Barack Obama gets it and says the right things about trafficking to the public, but apparently not to his running mate.)

With U.N. leaders this week focused on overcoming poverty, Somaly is a reminder that we needn’t acquiesce in the enslavement of girls, in this country or abroad. If we defeated slavery in the 19th century, we can beat it in the 21st century.

I invite you to visit my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.

Book Review: The Road to Lost Innocence by Somaly Mam

September 14, 2008
Written by Carole McDonnell
BlogCritics.org

I am often amazed at human nature and how cultural differences such as education, religion, and culture affects it. Rousseau, for instance, believed in the noble savage. I have read so many memoirs of missionaries in far-off lands, histories of the wild west, and war stories that I have come to believe that innate human nobility is a rare find. Sure there are those one-in-a-million tribes and countries where everyone in the clan is like a living saint but usually it’s not that way with we humans. Especially when power and money is involved.

In The Road to Lost Innocence, Somaly Mam’s account of her life in Cambodia before and after the Khmer Rouge, we see this kind of savagery. Now, I’m not an expert in Southeast Asian history and born even before the war it seemed that certain cultural cruelties were pretty ingrained, as if they were a part of a thousand-year culture. Specifically, the oppression of women, racial prejudice against dark women and dark tribes.

Somaly belongs to the Phnong, a dark tribe that lived in the deep forests of Cambodia. Unlike the Khmer, who were lighter, the Phnong were considered savage, stupid, dirty. Yes, yes, I know. Sounds familiar, but as Somaly Mam writes, all these Asian countries like light or white skin. War and poverty, of course, only made these racial prejudices and the oppression against women even more cruel.

After a harrowing childhood of whippings, cruelty, and abuse, the author’s “grandfather,” a Muslim man who has been abusing her, sells her into a brothel. He had originally sold her to an abusive husband to pay off a debt but when the soldier didn’t return from a battle, the grandfather came by and sold her to a Muslim woman, a meebon, a keeper of a brothel. Somaly then became a srey kouc, a “broken woman” who could never be fixed.

I don’t know much about American prostitutes, their johns, their drug addictions, or their pimps but it seems to me – from American movies, anyway — that American prostitutes don’t suffer as horribly as their Asian counterparts. They aren’t thrown into dark sewage pits, for instance with snakes crawling over them. They don’t have cruel men beating them or murdering them. They don’t have Chinese men renting their services then taking them to a room somewhere to service twenty other Chinese men. They weren’t forcibly aborted. And generally, the mothers of American prostitutes aren’t prostituting their daughters. Neither do American johns seek young virgins to sleep with in order to be cured of AIDS. The trouble is that after war ends, and sophistication and education supposedly arrives, prostitution still exists.

Somaly Mam tells about how she gradually lost all her heart and soul as an abandoned child and sex slave. Slowly, through the help of barang, “foreign” men, she began to gain her heart. This rebirth of her heart began through her compassion toward other sufferers like herself and through her contact with other foreign men who perhaps used her but who were not as bad as the men she knew as a child when she was working off her grandfather's debts. Through contacts at Doctors without Frontier, she stumbled into her life's work: preserving women from prostitution and rehabilitating them.

In the end, I came from this book with two strong opinions. The first was truly a painful one, but it’s a truth I have always somewhat known. I suppose I only had to be reminded of it again. It is this: that humans need to be spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically trained to love their neighbors — and even their children — as themselves. When one reads of women selling their own daughters into sex-slavery or fathers raping their own daughters to “hurt their mother” (because “the woman carried the child, not me”) one has to shake one’s head. Perhaps living in the United States where the US media continue to train its viewers how to live in the shoe of the other — other races, other sexes, other religions, and even others in our family — has contributed to the opening of the human mind.

The second truth is that humans can be emotionally healed of anything and after they are healed, they can help to heal others. Somaly Mam became a great hero and is the cofounder and preident of AFESIP (Acting for Women in Distressing Situations) in Cambodia. Under her inspiration and leadership, she has saved, rehabilitated, and restored many former victims of secual slavery in Southeast Asia.

We get a glimpse of the history of Cambodia, of course. But that isn’t what is important. We in the west are too used to studying war as the strategies of good men versus evil men. That may or may not be true, but here is a war from the point of view of those indirectly involved – non-combatants in a war-torn country where the old evil mixes with the new evil. And aside from the specifics of a particular war, we see the ongoing eternal war in which the powerful oppress the weak.

Highly recommended.