Part Six: From poverty to social pariah

Twelve-year-old child at the Trauma Recovery Centre in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. This girl is among the children at the centre who have been sexually abused. Most of the abusers are local men, but some of the children (not the girl pictured) have been the victims of so-called sex tourists. (Photograph by: Sopheak Kong , World Vision)

Svay Pak children watching cartoons at The Sanctuary. (Photograph by: Courtesy Brian McConaghy, Ratanak International)

A twelve-year-old girl with recovery worker at the Trauma Recovery Centre in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. (Photograph by: Sopheak Kong, World Vision)

Girls are educated at the Trauma Recovery Centre in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. These girls are among the children at the centre who have been sexually abused. Most of the abusers are local men, but some of the children (not those pictured) have been the victims of so-called sex tourists. (Photograph by: Sopheak Kong, World Vision)

Girls at the Trauma Recovery Centre in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. These girls are among the children at the centre who have been sexually abused. Most of the abusers are local men, but some of the children (not those pictured) have been the victims of so-called sex tourists. (Photograph by: Sopheak Kong, World Vision)

Prostitutes have few chances for other employment or for ever getting married

March 23, 2012
By Daphne Bramham
Vancouver Sun

Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Sreylin is tiny. Her dangling flip-flops barely touch the floor even though she’s sitting on the edge of her chair.

She has a classic Khmer face, like the enigmatic Buddhas at Angkor Wat. But she’s dressed in jeans and a black Calvin Klein T-shirt with rhinestones. Her thick, black hair is pulled back in a ponytail.

Sreylin is 16 with only a Grade 4 education. She was rescued by police from the commercial sex trade in 2010. She got there by selling her virginity for $200.

“Everything I have done, I have done for my family to help improve their living conditions,” she says, softly. “I just wanted to help them.”

If you can read this article without shedding a single tear, you are no longer human being! What a shame for Cambodian men!!!

A cruel world

Editorial by Richard Cannavo
The Nouvel Obs (France)
Translated from French by Luc Sâr

"In Cambodia, it is well known that virginity is a business." - A police officer

Sold as children, as mere commodities, abused, raped, many small Cambodian end up in brothels before dying from AIDS.

“I sold my virginity for $500 to an old man to help my family: that was the only thing of value that we have.” In Cambodia, women have no say in this matter and even less when they are young adolescents. Mostly innocent and ignorant, the poorest of them are snatched from their peaceful countryside by either a relative, a friend or a neighbor under the false promise of a better life, some are kidnapped and drugged before being sold. "The person who betrayed me was a friend. I was to suppose to work in a restaurant for $145 a month. But, I was raped…" She is still dazed: “I called for help but nobody came. I was sold. The client could do anything he wanted with me.” Sometimes the evil deed comes from no other than their own mother: “I was in debt and I was trying to survive. I had to sell my daughter for $300 dollars. Now I'm sorry for her...” Very young girls are commodities like everything else, in this country where people seek to buy virginity because it is endowed with magic powers. “Men think that if they have sex with a virgin, it will whiten their skin and that they will be rejuvenated and will live longer.” “The police and the general public have no idea of what pedophilia is. There is no word in Khmer to describe this scourge!" the head of a NGO lamented. "In Cambodia, there is no equality of the sexes,” an old woman explained. “It is said that if a man misbehaves, he can wash himself off and become clean again. In contrast, women are like a white cloth: if they do something wrong, the fabric will be dirty for the rest of their lives... " Therefore, a girl who lost her virginity attracts dishonor to her family and becomes a pariah.

Stylist seeks to end human trafficking

Teav Mam mentors five girls who were rescued from Cambodia, teaching them how to cut hair as well as enjoying activities like hiking and creating hair adornments. (Kim Palaferri • The Telegraph)

7/13/11
By Laura Newell
Folsom Telegraph staff writer (California, USA)

More than 800,000 people are trafficked annually and 80 percent are women and girls with the average age of 13 years old.

Teav Mam, 33, of Folsom is working with other locals to help stop these statistics.

On July 17, through a one day cut-for-a-cause event, the hairdressing community will be raising money to teach women in developing countries how to cut hair as an alternative to prostitution and human trafficking.

Mam said her difficult life has made this cause a passion for her and helping save these girls is her goal. Mam was born in Cambodia during a genocide. Her parents escaped with her and eventually came to America when she was 7, she said.

'America's Most Wanted' Airing Special Exposing American Pedophiles in Cambodia

John Walsh and child rescuer Somaly Mam. (FOX/AMW)

November 12, 2010
By Hollie McKay
Fox News

In a special episode of “America’s Most Wanted” airing on FOX this Saturday, host John Walsh will take viewers to the front lines of the international battle against child predators in Cambodia, a nation frequented by pedophiles.

“We’re profiling American pedophiles who have fled to other countries. Westerners go over there primarily to have sex with small children, 6-8 year old boys and girls,” Walsh told Pop Tarts. “I took a small crew with me and went undercover with a British cop and infiltrated brothel nightclubs. It was really heartbreaking to see it.”

Walsh said that within two minutes of being in a Cambodian bar, they were approached by a madam offering them very young children, and believes audiences will be shocked at how easy and how prevalent it is that Westerners involve themselves in such acts.

“It is our garbage that goes to Cambodia and preys on these young children. It is our garbage from America, England, the West that goes to the East and preys upon their poverty,” he said. “People are going to be surprised about how easy it is to do, and how many Westerners fly there just to solicit and have sex with children.”

The episode also provides a rare exploration of a Cambodian prison, and an interview with two British men arrested for their illicit involvement with young children.

“They [the British prisoners] were very arrogant and blaming society for getting caught. There is also this concept that people can pay off the police or even the judges if they get caught,” Walsh explained.

But among the devastation, the veteran TV host was overcome by the strength of one woman in particular, Somaly Mam, a tireless advocate who has dedicated her life to rescuing Cambodia’s children from the sex trade. A sex-crime victim as a child, Mam operates a center for other victimized children, offering them hope for the future.

“Somaly Mam herself had been kidnapped and forced into sex trade when she was 14; now she goes and rescues the poor children one at a time, at great risk to herself. In fact her own 14-year-old daughter was kidnapped by pimps and brutally sexually assaulted, but this didn’t deter her,” Walsh continued. “She is still going in and trying to save these boys and girls from a life of prostitution.”

Walsh also believes it is in our nation’s best interest to assist in tracking down the American pedophiles profiled on the broadcast.

“The number one thing is awareness. These guys will go over there and come back and function as pediatricians, scout masters, school teachers. We need to tell our officials,” he added. “People may ask ‘why should what’s happening in Cambodia affect me?’ Well, the guys that go over there and molest Cambodian kids come back and molest American kids. I’ve been to Haiti, Katrina, Ground Zero and seen some rough things… but the trip to Cambodia was really, really life-changing.”

Former sex slave fights illegal trade

"Girls are taught only shame and ignorance about their bodies and men have their first sexual experience in brothels. Rape is the only thing they know." Photo: AFP

June 22, 2010
AAP

Somaly Mam emerged from a life of sex slavery in Cambodia to become a champion of women's rights and one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people on the planet.

Abandoned by her parents, Mam was raped at 12, forced to marry at 14 and then sold into prostitution.

She suffered years of abuse before escaping with the help of a Medicin Sans Frontieres worker, whom she later married.

Mam has never had any formal schooling, yet she now speaks five languages.

She has become a tireless activist heading two organisations which fight sexual slavery, and has received international humanitarian awards.

Mam spoke about her extraordinary life during her first visit to Australia, in between a flurry of book signings, public lectures and meetings with politicians.

Her autobiography, The Road of Lost Innocence, has been reprinted many times.

It is a grim story of abuse - young lives broken by rape, torture and starvation together with betrayal by the very people who should have protected their own children.

Poverty also causes Cambodian families to sell their daughters into prostitution.

Mam says her story is symptomatic of a country with a long history of treating females worse than livestock.

"Cambodian society is about violence and submission," she told AAP.

"That smile people associate with gentle Cambodian women is a lie.

"It's always been like that. Women have been beaten slaves since before the Khmer Rouge, who killed any compassion there was.

"Although the situation is changing, 30 years later Cambodian society is still struggling. People only care about themselves."

Cambodians are a silent people, Mam says, and women's suffering is also endured in silence, compounded by a lack of education in all spheres.

"Girls are taught only shame and ignorance about their bodies and men have their first sexual experience in brothels. Rape is the only thing they know."

Up to 70 per cent of brothel clients are Cambodian men and the remaining 30 per cent are foreigners including paedophiles targeting children, she says.

Although Mam was able to escape her past by living in France for a while with her French husband Pierre, she continues to be haunted by nightmares and post-traumatic stress.

Mam says she felt driven to rescue girls like herself. Together with Pierre she started saving victims of sexual slavery in Cambodia even though police and corrupt politicians were as bad as the pimps and clients who wanted her gone.

She was one of the founding members of AFESIP (Acting for Women in Distressing Circumstances), which has rescued and rehabilitated over 4000 women since 1996.

Now divorced, Mam says her traumatic past makes it impossible for her to be in a relationship.

But becoming a mother helped her feel love for the first time.

Mam has three children aged 18, 14 and eight. The oldest girl, Ning, is her sister's daughter whom she adopted.

"I'm not a gentle girl and life has been a fight, but out of this, and becoming a mother, came love."

The motherly love she discovered now fuels her mission in Cambodia, where she lives, to maintain three shelters for rescued sex slaves where their dignity is rebuilt through nurturing and education.

"It takes five minutes to rescue a girl and then the hard work starts," she says.

"First give them love until they feel it and they feel safe. Prove to them they can trust, and then start building life skills."

Bill Livermore, the US head of the Somaly Mam Foundation, says a key to ending trafficking is empowering women.

"Access to education, law and the economy is a must. If you take 50 per cent of the population out of those areas, countries do not thrive. Cambodia is very poor".

Livermore also advocates embarrassing governments who tolerate the sex slavery scourge "because governments won't change unless they are embarrassed to change".

He says the rehabilitation success rate in Cambodia soared after survivors were encouraged to rescue other girls.

"It went up from 65 per cent to 90 per cent because they were able to bond with the prostitutes and that's the kind of skill that a PhD from Harvard will never give you," he says.

The foundation was created in the US in 2007 and has a combination of corporate and private funding - not a cent comes from the United Nations or any government body.

Mam's high international profile helps, although old enemies remain. There have been threats on her life and she has a driver and a full-time bodyguard.

"If they kill me, there will be many more to take my place," she says.

SEX SLAVERY: THE FACTS

• One in 40 Cambodian girls is sold into sexual slavery
• Human trafficking is the second-largest organised crime in the world, even bigger than the drugs trade
• 2-4 million women and girls will be sold into prostitution worldwide over the next 12 months
• Over a million will be small children
• Some girls will be sold for as little as $US10 and will be as young as five
• Profits from sexual slavery are estimated at up to $US12 billion annually

Sources: US State Department, UNICEF, UN Office of Drugs and Crime
The Road of Lost Innocence, by Somaly Mam, is published by Virago Press.
For more info go to www.somaly.org and www.projectfutures.com

Child abuse victim tells of ruined life

Saturday February 28, 2009
Source: NZPA

A 12-year-old Cambodian girl has not been told that images of her being sexually abused were found on the computer of a Christchurch man whose home was raided in December 2007.

Staff at the foster home where she now lives say that telling her about the images would only add to her shame, embarrassment and insecurity five years after she was rescued from child prostitution.

She had been abused by a Canadian offender who travelled to her village north of Phnom Penh. He has since been caught and dealt with, but the photographs he took as he carried out the abuse are apparently still in circulation.

When the Christchurch man was sentenced today, he went to jail for one year nine months on a series of charges, Christchurch District Court Judge Colin Doherty got the approval of the crown and police for the release of the Cambodian girl's victim impact report to the NZPA reporter.

It was a rare case where child pornography investigators had been able to identify and trace one of the children in the images, he said.

The released version of the report has the names of the girl and her village blocked out, as well as the name of the detective who made the connection, who was working undercover for the International Justice Mission while he was on leave from the New Zealand Police.

In January 2003, the girl was one of more than 50 children in the village between five and 12 years old who were "sold on a daily basis to Western paedophiles for sexual exploitation", the report stated.

"The girl, then aged seven, worked in the brothels near her home for a year before she was rescued. During this time she was expected to perform sexual acts with the `guests' who visited every day. In return, her parents received small amounts of money. There were many times she was photographed by guests."

One guest was the Canadian whose crimes were described as brutal, violent, and degrading in the report. His young victims were verbally abused and repeatedly forced to perform oral sex while he videoed and photographed them.

He was arrested in 2004 and became the first Canadian to be convicted using extra-territorial legislation covering offences against children overseas.

The girl was rescued in 2003 and lived in a shelter before she moved two years later to another organisation, Hagar International, that provided long term care and rehabilitation.

"Following the rescue operation, those involved in debriefing (the girl) stated that they had never participated in a case involving such savagery against children so young," the report said.

The girl still finds it distressing to talk about the abuse. She described her time in the village as "a big, black hole and sometimes I am scared I will fall back into it". She experiences flashbacks to that time.

The report describes her as a quiet girl with few friends. Through her art work she has described feeling "broken-hearted and hopeless".

"Below the surface she is a hurt little girl afraid of the memories that still haunt her," the report says.

In court today, Judge Doherty described the report as "chilling".

Cambodian Girls Driven to Prostitution

Cambodian sex workers sit on the side walk along a street in Phnom Penh on Dec. 18, 2008. (Photo: AFP)

2009-01-27
RFA

Economic hardship is pushing young Cambodian girls into the sex trade while legislation drives the trade underground.

PHNOM PENH—The girl from Prey Veng province has worked as a prostitute in the Cambodian capital for five months. Hard times, she said, have brought her here to earn money for her widowed mother and three younger siblings.

“I am unhappy with myself, but I pity my mother. No girl wants to do this horrible work,” the 15-year-old, who asked not to be named, said in an interview as she looked for business near the Suriya Supermarket.

“Sometimes, I get only one client in two or three days. Some clients ask me to have sex without using a condom, but I refuse. I say that if you sleep with me without using condom, I’d rather not take your money.”

Rising living costs are forcing more Cambodian girls under 18 into prostitution in urban areas such as Phnom Penh to support their families in the countryside.

The girls, spotted easily from around 8 p.m. as they scout urban streets and parks for customers, say they lack the education to find other work.

A dangerous trade

Several Cambodian girls who agreed to be interviewed said they engage in sex work despite its dangers because they cannot afford to quit.

“Clients take me to guesthouses. I get U.S. $10 per night. They gang-rape me and beat me,” another girl, 17, from Svay Rieng province, said.

In February 2008, the Cambodian government began enforcing the new “Law on the Suppression of Human-Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation” after years of U.S. pressure to crack down on sex trafficking.

Human rights groups, however, say the law and its enforcement have made life harder for the women they aim to help.

Prostitutes caught in police raids are made to pay fines of up to U.S. $200 for their release, the 17-year-old girl said.

“They take us to district police headquarters and take our money. If we don’t have the money, we will be kept in custody for two or three days. So we have to run for our lives when we see police approaching us.”

“Police arrest us in the hope that the brothel owners will pay, but if we don’t have anyone to pay for our release we will be sent to one of the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It’s o.k. to live at the NGOs, but then our families have nothing to eat,” she said.

“If [the NGOs] want to help me, they should also help my family. Otherwise I can’t quit.”

Increasing poverty

Lim Mony, program manager for women’s issues at the nonprofit group ADHOC, the Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association, said the number of girls and women involved in sex work is increasing because of higher living costs and the lure of modern luxuries.

“Voluntary sex work by girls on the streets is difficult to define. Many of these girls first were lured and tricked into being sex workers by traffickers. Then, because of that, they began voluntarily selling their bodies. Other women have been voluntarily engaged in prostitution from the start,” she said.

According to Article 35 of Cambodia’s law on “Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation,” the prostitution of children is punishable with a jail sentence of two to five years and a fine of four to 10 million riel (U.S. $1,000 to $2,500).

But Ean Pheara, an assistant at the Phnom Penh-based People Improvement Organization, said impoverished and uneducated children remain among the most vulnerable workers in the sex industry.

This year, he said, the People Improvement Organization—which provides education and vocational training—taught 240 children the skills they will need to avoid being trafficked.

Heng Sithon, deputy director-general of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs General Directorate for Social Development, agreed that anti-trafficking efforts must focus on Cambodia’s youth.

Sithon, whose work with the ministry provides education to rural children and their parents on how to protect themselves from trafficking, said more children and women are subject to trafficking “partly due to the migration of rural women looking for work who then are tricked into working in the sex trade.”

More awareness needed

ADHOC, along with the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO), says that despite public awareness campaigns, law enforcement against prostitution and human trafficking remains ineffective.

“Really what [they] should be looking at is, if someone gets into a situation where they are forced [into prostitution] or where they are being severely exploited, how can they remove themselves from that situation and how can they best get the help that they need,” Elaine Pearson, deputy director for Asia at Human Rights Watch, said.

“The basic effect of [enforcing the law] has been to drive the industry further underground. It certainly doesn’t mean that people have stopped selling sex altogether in Cambodia,” Pearson said.

“It’s become more difficult to monitor the conditions inside brothels, and it has made it more difficult for outreach workers ... to provide health services, to provide condoms to sex workers, and to provide education services which would actually improve the health and safety in that industry.”

In its most recent report on human rights around the world for the preceding year, the U.S. State Department noted that while the Cambodian Constitution prohibits prostitution, “there is no specific legislation against working as a prostitute.”

“Trafficking in women for the purpose of prostitution was a serious problem, despite laws against procuring and kidnapping for purposes of sexual exploitation. There were reports that police abused prostitutes,” the report said.

“Despite sporadic crackdowns on brothel operators in Phnom Penh, prostitution and related trafficking persisted. Estimates of the number of working prostitutes ranged from 14,725 to 18,250. Sex tourism was a problem, fueled by pervasive poverty and the perception of impunity.”

Original reporting by Seang Sophon for RFA’s Khmer service. Service director: Sos Kem. Translated by Sothea Thai. Written in English for the Web by Joshua Lipes.

With fictional child, a fight for millions

Friday, April 11, 2008
By DANIELLE FURFARO, Staff writer
Times Union (Albany, New York)

When Guy Jacobson found himself standing among a gaggle of young Cambodian girls, all aggressively trying to sell him sex, the purpose of his life changed.

The New York City attorney and investment banker, who was on sabbatical and traveling the world, knew he couldn't simply go back to his job and pretend nothing had happened. He had to take a stand.

So Jacobson began a film project to highlight the plight of those girls, who he would learn were among more than 2 million children working in the sex trade across the globe.

That film is "Holly," a powerful fictional tale of an expat American (Ron Livingston) who tries to save one Cambodian girl from the clutches of sexual assault at the hands of tourists. The film also stars Chris Penn in one of his final performances before his 2006 death.

Tonight and Saturday, Jacobson will answer audience questions after 6:35 p.m. screenings of the film at Spectrum Theatres in Albany. This week, he spoke by phone with the Times Union.

Q: What got you interested in making this film?

A: I was on sabbatical backpacking around the world for two years. About six years ago, I was walking down the street in Cambodia. All of the sudden, I was surrounded by girls who were very aggressively soliciting me for prostitution. One of the little girls said, "I yum yum very good. If not, my mamma boxing me," meaning she'll get beat up if she doesn't get any business. I started paying more attention to this issue, and realized it is much more prevalent. I was horrified to find out this is not an isolated thing, but a global epidemic affecting over 2 million kids, some as young as a year old. This is happening from Albany to New York City, to every city in every country in the world.

Q: Do you have a history of activism on other issues?

A: I've been involved in activism on a variety of issues all my life. The thing is, you have to, I believe, take a stand even when it's not your people who are affected. If someone wants to discriminate against bald lawyers from New York City, I'll object, but that's not the only time you should call foul. When you see this kind of horrible crime against humanity, you have to decide if you are going to take a stand or not.

Q: Why did you decide to make a movie, especially a fiction film, about this issue?

A: There's not anyone who doesn't know that there's underage prostitution. If they say they do, they are either very naive or lying. But I didn't know the extent, how many kids are affected and their ages. I thought if I don't know, let me assume that other people don't know. Mass media has a power to raise awareness that other forms may not. So, I thought, "Let me make an honest film from the girl's point of view." This girl represents millions of others. It honestly deals with this global epidemic. It will get a lot of people touched by it and encourage them to get involved.

Q: How do you think this film can actually make a difference in the lives of these children?

A: We are using this film as a tool in conjunction with anti-sexual assault organizations. We brought a platform to allow them to do their work better. In Albany, we are working with the New York Coalition Against Sexual Assault. The best thing that can be done to decrease the problem is to go after the demand. I don't believe you can go to someone and tell them, "You know, this is wrong." They already know what they are doing is wrong. We created practical action items based on law and economics. We launched a global campaign called Red Light Children that works on what laws need to be passed that are not on the books, how to qualify current laws and how to enforce law and allocate resources.

Danielle Furfaro can be reached at 454-5097 or by e-mail at dfurfaro@timesunion.com.

Writer's talk
Guy Jacobson, writer and producer of "Holly," will speak at Spectrum Theatres.
When: After the 6:35 p.m. showings tonight and Saturday
Where: Spectrum 8 Theatres, 290 Delaware Ave., Albany
Information: 449-8995 or http://www.spectrum8.com

One Cambodian woman picked up by Malaysian police during brothel raid

34 foreign women picked up during vice-operation

2008/01/31
V. SHUMAN
New Straits Times (Malaysia)

SUBANG JAYA: Thirty-four foreign women were picked up during a vice-operation at a budget hotel in Bandar Puchong Utama early yesterday.

Federal police anti-vice, gaming and secret society division (D7) principal assistant director SAC II Rodwan Mohd Yusof said the women were found hiding in several rooms on the top floor of the four-storey shoplot.

“The raiding party took several hours to round up the women, aged between 19 and 25. There are secret passages leading to the rooms where the women were hiding.”

The women comprised 16 Chinese nationals, 12 Vietnamese, four Thai and an Indonesian and a Cambodian.

Checks showed they entered the country last November on work permits.

Two hotel employees, both in their 20s, were also detained after police found 15 boxes of firecrackers inside the premises. Police are looking for the hotel owner.

Poipet street kids: far worse off than expected [-This happens in various degree all over Hun Sen's Cambodia, not just Poipet alone]

By Tracey Shelton
Phnom Penh Post, Issue 17 / 01, January 11 - 23, 2008

Poipet - A new survey on street kids living in this bustling, border town shocked social workers who say they didn't expect to see so many children living in deplorable conditions and so few attending school.

Yann Grandin, an advisor with the NGO Goutte d'Eau (GE) which conducted the survey of 210 children living on both the Thai and Cambodian side of the border, said the information gathered was in line with information they had about children he had worked with, but previously the results were considered to be the worst case scenario. It was the high percentages of child victims that came as a surprise, said Grandin, who has worked in Poipet for three years.

"I had not expected that almost the entire target group would have to face such hazardous living conditions," he said.

Thirty percent of the children interviewed said they regularly slept on the streets. The most common reasons they gave were fear of returning home, lack of earnings to turn over to their parents, domestic violence or simply that they preferred to stay on the street with siblings or friends.

The dusty town of Poipet, home to an estimated 70,000 people, has seen incredible growth since the opening of its first casino in 1999. Back then the population was just 5,000.

Thousands of Thais cross the border daily to gamble and the industry is thriving with nine casinos. Imports, both legal and illegal, are carted across the border by hundreds of cart pullers in an unending stream. Popular markets on both sides of the border attract shoppers from around the region.

The border crossing is also becoming more popular for tourists as roads to Siem Reap slowly improve. All this activity gives poor provincial families the impression that Poipet's bustling streets may offer them jobs.

But most of the population lives in poverty, and people often are caught up in the cycle of illegal immigration and deportation as they try for work in Thailand.

"This extremely unstable scenario makes the families concentrate all their efforts on daily survival, with no expectations or plans for the future," Grandin said. "Therefore, the children are part of the daily survival plan, having to work or beg to support the family and making it impossible to go to school."

Of those street kids who had homes, 89 percent lived in one-room plastic shacks. The sanitary conditions in the homes were inadequate, particularly in the rainy season.

The survey revealed that 75 percent of those interviewed had either dropped out or never attended school. Of those who had attended, fewer than 20 percent had progressed beyond grade 3.

Most of the children were under age 15. Half reported they worked all day everyday, most commonly scavenging and begging. Many worked as street sellers or cart pullers, transporting the flow of Thai imports across the border. Only a few children described theft or smuggling as their main form of income.

Daily wages ranged from 20 to 200 baht, or about 50 cents to $6.

Most of the girls earned a living by carrying umbrellas to shelter tourists from sun or rain while waiting at immigration. That job was of particular concern to social workers who say that kind of close contact with wealthy adults can lead to prostitution.

"Umbrella girls have admitted to our social workers that they sometimes have sexual relations for money," Grandin said.

"Two months ago we had two girls who disappeared for a few days from one of our two daycare centers. Parents believed that they were staying on the Thai side."

"Both of them came back after a few days, saying that they managed to escape from a brothel where they were forced to work as waitresses."

Grandin said he also received information that some umbrella girls were forced to work as prostitutes in the Thai market.

Only 20 percent of those interviewed were natives of Poipet. The rest were from a variety of poverty stricken families who moved there to find work.

Bangkok survey

Well beyond the border the story is similar for the estimated 1,000 Khmer children begging and selling in the streets of Bangkok.

A survey of these street workers conducted in Bangkok last year by Friends International challenged previous assumptions of child trafficking rings when 80 percent of those interviewed said they were bought to Thailand by a parent or relative.

In an interview at the GE center in Phnom Penh, 15-year-old Panha (not his real name) described his life as a beggar in Poipet before he was scooped up by GE, and brought to Phnom Penh to attend a special school for the handicapped.

He said he was very young when his parents took him to Thailand. Crippled by polio, he worked everyday begging and selling flowers in Bangkok until he was arrested by police and deported alone to Poipet about a year ago.

Social workers believe his mother was a child trafficker. He described many other Khmer children being brought to Thailand by his mother to sell and beg along with him. Each night they would turn over all their earnings to his mother.

Workers from the Poipet Transit Center, a government run assistance center for women and children deported across the Thai border, said that five to ten trucks arrive at Poipet border crossing every day carrying Khmer deportees, many of them children arrested for begging alone on the street.

Glue sniffing

The Poipet survey completed last month found 26 of the 210 children interviewed admitted to taking drugs. But those who conducted the survey said that may not be an accurate portrayal of the drug use problem.

Panha said he picked up glue sniffing while he existed on money from begging around the border casinos. He joined a drug rehabilitation program at GE which later brought him to Phnom Penh.

"Many children denied consuming drugs although they have been seen by GE social workers taking drugs many times before," said Beatrice Muller, a Swiss volunteer who coordinated the survey.

However when asked if they knew of any drugs used on the streets of Poipet, most of the children admitted they were familiar particularly with glue sniffing and the methamphetamine known locally as yama. More than half admitted their friends or relatives use drugs regularly.

Grandin said as a result of the survey GE will extend its drug awareness program in Poipet.

He said the biggest challenge in Poipet is dealing with such a significant number of poor and extremely unstable families in one place, which makes stabilizing the children's situation very difficult.

GE plans to repeat the survey each year to assist itself and other NGOs working in the area.

Burmese Junta's sponsored child prostitution

Burmese girls prepare for work at a massage parlour in the Chinese border town of Jiegao — part of the regional sex trade. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Child prostitutes available at $100 a night: the human cost of junta's repression

Military officials profiting from sex industry as sleazy trade flourishes amid poverty and misrule, say international campaigners

Tuesday October 30, 2007
Kevin Doyle in Rangoon
The Guardian (UK)

This is a side of life the Burmese military junta might prefer you did not see: girls who appear to be 13 and 14 years old paraded in front of customers at a nightclub where a beauty contest thinly veils child prostitution. Tottering in stiletto heels and miniskirts, young teenage girls criss-crossed the dance-floor as part of a nightly "modelling" show at the Asia Entertainment City nightclub on a recent evening in Rangoon.

Some girls stared at the floor while others tugged self-consciously on short hemlines, stretching the flimsy material a few centimetres longer as they catwalked awkwardly to the accompaniment of blasting hip-hop music.

Watching these young entertainers of the "Cherry-Sexy Girls" model groups were a few male customers, and a far larger crowd of Burmese sex workers, mostly in their late teens and early 20s, who sat at low tables in the darkness of the club.

Escorting several girls to a nearby table of young men, a waiter said the show was not so much modelling as marketing. "All the models are available," the waiter said, adding that the youngest girls ask $100 (£48.50) to spend a night with a customer, while the older girls and young women in the audience could be bargained down for a lot less.

Prostitution, particularly involving children, is a serious crime in military-ruled Burma, but girls taken from the club would have no problem with the authorities, the waiter assured the company, but did not explain why not.

It would seem that prostitution is one of the few things the Burmese military, fresh from its recent crushing of pro-democracy demonstrations by Buddhist monks, is still willing to tolerate.

Information on the Burmese sex trade is extremely limited, as NGOs and other organisations can not conduct proper research within the country, said Patchareeboon Sakulpitakphon at the Bangkok offices of the international organisation Ecpat, whose acronym stands for End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes. As a result of the restrictions, what is known is limited to a "basic picture based on what victims have said, and information that leaks out," Ms Patchareeboon wrote in an email. But, she added, the information available indicates that "[child] sex tourism is emerging in Burma as well as the development of the sex industry".

Rights abuses

Burma is already a big source country for people trafficked to the regional sex trade. "The junta's gross economic mismanagement, human rights abuses and its policy of using forced labour are the top causal factors for Burma's significant trafficking problem," the US state department noted in its 2007 trafficking report.

Disastrous economic policies pursued by the military have hobbled this resource-rich nation and hundreds of thousands have left the country to seek their fortunes elsewhere. With an estimated annual income of just $220 a head among Burma's 52 million people, fleeing the country to work elsewhere is all too common. For many, their effort to escape leads them into the hands of human traffickers and the sex trade in Thailand, China, Malaysia, Macau and elsewhere, according to the state department.

On a recent night in Rangoon, a boisterous group of sex workers trawled a hotel bar for customers. Lin Lin, 22, and Thin Thin, 24 - names commonly used by sex workers in Burma - said they did not normally work in hotel bars, but the 10pm curfew in the wake of the pro-democracy protests had shut down the late-night clubs and forced them to new venues to find customers.

With a mother, father and young brothers and sisters to support, Lin said that prostitution was not such a difficult choice. "Sometimes I can earn $40 from one customer," she explained, speaking in good English.

This was just her night job, she said, adding that she was in her second year at university, studying to become "an advocate of the law".

Thin Thin said she was a hairdresser during the day, but sleeping with men, particularly foreign tourists, paid far more than either could earn by legitimate work.

With one of the most serious HIV epidemics in Southeast Asia - an estimated 360,000 Burmese people were living with HIV at the end of 2005, according to the UN - Thin Thin said she took no chances, and pulled several condoms from the pocket of her faded jeans to demonstrate.

According to the UN's programme on HIV/Aids, and based on available statistics, one in three of Burma's sex workers were infected with HIV in 2005. However, the ministry of health's expenditure on HIV was estimated that year to be around $137,000, or less than half of $0.01 a head, the UN said.

Because of the junta's policies, the country also received a fraction of the international aid given to its neighbours. "Overall, overseas development assistance per capita in 2004 for Myanmar [Burma] was US$2.4, compared with $22 in Vietnam, $35 in Cambodia, and $47 in Lao People's Democratic Republic."

Now the outlook for ordinary Burmese looks decidedly gloomier in the face of the military's crackdown. The US and EU have promised more sanctions against the junta and Japan has said it will cut humanitarian aid to the country.

New revenues

Several people spoken to in Rangoon said further sanctions would have little impact on the military elite, who have lived comfortably for decades and now have new sources of revenues from contracts with countries such as China, France, India, and Thailand to extract natural resources.

Ms Patchareeboon said that tougher sanctions "will have a direct impact on children who are already vulnerable, increasing their risk significantly".

The Burmese regime has, at least, joined the Coordinated Mekong Ministerial Initiative Against Trafficking, she said, and the Burmese media have reported on the arrests of traffickers and the stiff jail sentences they receive.

So what is shielding the trade in young girls that takes place behind the flimsy facade of "modelling" shows in Rangoon from the military regime's wrath?

The answer is as simple as it is obvious, Ms Patchareeboon said: money.

"I am sure that [the military] has officials making profit from the growing sex industry and trafficking of Burmese citizens abroad," she said. "Corruption and the institutionalisation of the sex industry is common."

Asian Investor: Cambodia, a borderline failed state, does not protect the most vulnerable in its society

ADM tackles distressed situation in Cambodia

22 October 2007
By Simon Osborne
AsianInvestor.net, a subsidiary of Haymarket (Hong Kong)

Hedgies Appleby, Botsford and Firth aim to clean up drugs and child prostitution in Sihanoukville.

1,000 street kids are being fed, educated and helped by Hong Kong special situations fund managers ADM Capital, whose philanthropic fund ADM Foundation is ploughing money into worthy causes in Asia.

Cambodia, a borderline failed state, does not protect the most vulnerable in its society. Children in erstwhile seaside resort Sihanoukville, particularly those subject to dodgy parenting and chronic poverty, frequently descend to a life of drug abuse and child prostitution.

A new facility for local kids is being opened this week by the three ADM principals. It has been built for Sihanoukville foundation M’Lop Tabang and it includes classrooms, sports facilities, a canteen and a health clinic. advertisement

As well as this project, ADM takes an interest in the animal kingdom, by virtue of Rob Appleby’s period in academia as a marine biologist, and it contributes to programmes that seek to keep sharks from the cooking pot. (ADM’s corporate insignia is a shark.)

On dry land in Hong Kong, the ADM Foundation has commissioned a study into Hong Kong’s feculent air, and found that contrary to popular spin-doctoring, all the foul pollution does not blow in from across the PRC border.

“A great deal of it comes from the vehicles in Hong Kong, especially the ships in Hong Kong waters burning bunker fuel, which is incredibly dirty and a major pollutant,” Rob Appleby tells AsianInvestor.

In Asia, as well as the ADM Foundation, there is the Rice charity, which is run by a number of figures from the alternative investment industry. Charity among hedge fund managers is perhaps best known in Europe, with donations from Christopher Hohn’s Children’s Fund making him one of the world’s most generous benefactors. He donated $230 million during the last year and over $1 billion in total.

ADM Capital, founded by Chris Botsford, Denys Firth with Robert Appleby, is one of Asia’s best known distressed and special situations funds managing assets of over $1 billion. It won Asian Investor’s award for Best Distressed Fund in 2007 for its triptych of Maculus Funds.

Court Sentences Man To 15 Years In Jail For Pimping Young Girls

2007-08-10
AP

PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA: A Cambodian court has sentenced a local man to 15 years in prison for arranging for four local girls between the ages of 12 and 14 to have sex with foreigners, a court official said Thursday (August 9th).

Sao Meach, a Phnom Penh Municipal Court judge, convicted Thach Mey, 36, on sexual procuring charges during a trial Wednesday (August 8th), said Sok Kalyan, a prosecutor.

Thach Mey was arrested and charged in February for his role as a middleman making arrangements for foreigners to have sex with the four ethnic Vietnamese girls. The crimes occurred in 2005 and 2006, the prosecutor said.

Sok Kalyan said Thach Mey, who is also ethnic Vietnamese, told the court that he made US$20 each time a girl was sent to have sex with a foreigner.

A tip-off from a child rights advocate group led to the arrest of Thach Mey at his home on the outskirts of the capital Phnom Penh, the prosecutor said, adding that the judge also ordered the convicted man to pay a total of US$2,000 in compensation to the four girls.

Cambodian authorities have stepped up efforts in recent years to crack down on sex offenders trying to exploit children in Cambodia. Ethnic Vietnamese are often exploited in the Cambodian sex trade, partly because they are discriminated against as a minority.

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.

Update: Children from sex ring 'have a future'

Click on the photo to view Dateline video
Inside a sexual slavery ring in Cambodia - New developments in the hidden camera investigation exposing the trafficking of young children (Photo: Dateline NBC)

New developments in the hidden camera investigation exposing a child sexual slavery ring in Cambodia

TRANSCRIPT

Aug 8, 2007
By Chris Hansen
Correspondent
Dateline NBC (USA)

This story aired Aug. 8, Dateline NBC. Contains adult subject matter.

Phnom Penh - The moment we stepped outside our hotel in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, we were greeted with this offer.

Driver: Many, many, many girls.

Dateline: Many girls?

Driver: Yes.

Dateline: How young?

Driver: Young, maybe, uh,... 12.

Twelve year olds for sale? Sounds shocking, but when we arrived in this village called Svay Pak, we met a young pimp selling even younger girls.

Po: New girls, too much for you.

How young?

Po: Eight, eight.

Along with a human rights investigator, we followed the pimp through the village alleys into a room filled with kids.

Po: New girls, new girls.

Some so young they could be in kindergarten.

At one brothel after another, there were dozens of children -- all for sale.

This girl told us she's nine.

This one ten. Both said they knew how to perform oral sex.

And they gave us a price in U.S. Dollars.

Girl: One girl, 30.

Dateline: One girl 30, and two girls?

Girl: Sixty.

We also found foreign tourists visiting Svay Pak, but most weren't eager to tell us why.

Dateline: So what do you do down here chief?

Visitor: Um, I have a friend down, here to eat.

Dateline: Uh-huh.

Visitor: Uh.

Dateline: You come down to Svay Pak to eat?

Visitor: Um, no it's nice, just a nice area.

This American doctor did admit on hidden camera he came for sex -- not with the very young girls, but with teenagers.

Jerry A: I mean, 15, 16 and older. Maybe a 14-year-old might sneak in if you can't tell the age, but you know I don't take the little, the really little ones.

We were in Cambodia with Gary Haugen, a former federal prosecutor who runs a human rights group called the International Justice Mission.

Gary Haugen: This is the kind of brutal ugliness that is sort of hard to open your eyes to. But once you do, I think as a human being, you’ve got to take responsibility for it.

Haugen and his team devised a plan to rescue the children in Svay Pak and put the adults exploiting them behind bars. With pressure from the U.S. government, they persuaded the Cambodian police to take action.

We went undercover inside a brothel with the human rights investigators.

Robert: This is Lam and Viet, and Dao?

When the police raided...

(girl screams)

Dateline: It's okay. Be good girl. It's okay. It's okay.

Thirty-seven girls were rescued that day. Many were under the age of 10.

A dozen suspects were arrested. Four were convicted and given prison sentences ranging from 5 to 15 years.

Our report has had a far-reaching impact, not only in Cambodia, but a continent away in Vancouver, Canada.

In January 2004, police were investigating a complaint that a man named Donald Bakker had beat up a prostitute in this park and videotaped the crime.

Ron Bieg: The whole entire incident had been taped.

Chris Hansen: Videotaped?

Ron Bieg: Yes.

Even more disturbing, Vancouver police detective Ron Bieg told us that authorities found videotapes Bakker shot of himself on a trip in Asia of having sex with very young girls.

Chris Hansen: And we're talking about seven, eight, nine year old kids?

Bieg: Yes … We were blown away by it.

These are images of Donald Bakker's child victims. Canadian authorities wanted to prosecute Bakker for those overseas sex crimes, but they didn't know who the victims were or where the crimes took place -- until Bieg tuned in to our report on Cambodia. He couldn't believe his eyes when he began to look closely at the video.

Ron Bieg: We see rooms that look eerily similar to the rooms in Bakker's videotape.

Chris Hansen: Some of the children looked to be--

Ron Bieg: Similar.

Chris Hansen: Similar. That's a pretty good break.

Ron Bieg: It was a godsend.

Bieg explained to us how he compared images from our broadcast with Bakker's tapes.

Chris Hansen: So you were able to match, for instance, this piece of furniture here to a piece seen in the tape confiscated from Bakker.

Ron Bieg: Exactly.

And an even closer look at our tapes reveals other details that matched: this window, these posters on the wall...

Chris Hansen: It turns out that some of the girls seen on Bakker's video performing sex acts on him were seen being rescued in our story.

Ron Bieg: Yes. Four of them. That was the break that we needed.

Donald Bakker pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting seven girls in Cambodia and three adult prostitutes in Vancouver.

He was sentenced to seven years in prison.

And he was not the only individual to face justice after our original story.

Possibly because of all the attention, Cambodia has begun to crack down on foreign sex offenders.

Investigator: Hey, Terry.

Like Terry Smith.

Last year he was running a bar in a beachfront town in southern Cambodia.

Bob Mosier of the International Justice Mission said his group heard that Smith was selling young girls for sex and was allegedly also raping them himself.

Bob Mosier: He would show these children pornographic videos. And when, after watching the videos, he would have these children perform these sexual acts on him. As training.

Mosier sent in undercover investigators as customers.

Smith apparently told the girls to dance for the customers, first with their clothes on and then, shockingly, with their tops off.

The human rights group took the evidence to the Cambodian authorities.

This police officer arrested Smith and his girlfriend and says he found tapes Smith made of himself in several Asian countries.

Cambodian police official [translation]: I believe that he didn't violate only these girls here. I believe he violated many other girls.

It also turned out that Smith was a convicted sex offender in the United States and was wanted in Oregon.

The Cambodians agreed to turn him over to U.S. authorities.

Last October, U.S. Marshals escorted Terry Smith home to the U.S. to finally face those charges back in Oregon.

Last month, Smith was sentenced to 22 years in prison.

Since we first started reporting on this issue four years ago, the changes in Cambodia, in many ways prompted by human rights advocates like Gary Haugen, have been profound.

Gary Haugen: The difference is dramatic. And it should be a sign of hope for other countries that struggle with the problem of sex trafficking.

He's especially proud of what's happened with some of the girls his group has helped rescue.

Gary Haugen: Just a few weeks ago I was able to see for the first time some of those youngest girls that we rescued and they talked to me about how one wanted to become a lawyer. And one wanted to become a translator. And one wanted to go into computers. And this is a transformation that one can appreciate only if you've ever seen the undercover video of what was being done to these children inside these brothels. They have a future.

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."

Mini Charity Marathon for Kids in Cambodia

Runners gearing up to race to raise money

Thursday, June 14, 2007
The Seoul Times (South Korea)

If you haven't witnessed it yourself then you would have heard the story of a child with his or hands stretched out begging for money, pleading for help, longing for a bit of hope.

A common sight for tourists traveling in Asia and around the world.

The plight of children in poor countries is not something everyone has witnessed first hand. But for those who have, it's something they never forget.

In Cambodia, where half of the population is under 15, the story is no different.

Child prostitution, homelessness, poverty, a paedophile's playground, human trafficking are just some of the horrors faced everyday.

And something two well traveled women saw for themselves and never forgot.

Andrea Kvasnica and Emma Stringer got the chance to help those children they had seen being exploited, neglected and forgotten during a marathon of a fundraising stint at the weekend.

Andrea Kvansnica and Emma Stringer with co-worker Mr. Cho never forgot what they saw in Cambodia.

What started out as being a fun 10km run between friends turned into a mini-marathon of English teachers in Daegu raising 2.4million Won ($2,700 Canadian dollars) for children of Cambodia.

Along side the river on the morning of Saturday, June 9th, with a back drop of mountains, and below the roaring traffic overhead, 75 people ran, walked, cycled and rollerbladed all with a common cause. To support children of poverty.

"It was just supposed to be a small run with 10 friends, but more people heard about it and it just escalated from there," says Emma, originally from Leicester, England.

The two pals have lived in South Korea for three years and as keen athletes, running about five times a week, they wanted to do another long distance run having completed a half marathon in April.

"The way it works here is that as the season goes on so the distances get longer, but we only wanted to do a 10km so decided to organize our own," says Andrea, from Ottawa, Canada.

With the help and support of other friends they were able to organize the 10km and 5km mini-marathon in Daegu and from their experiences in the impoverished Southeast Asian country decided the children they had seen stuck in a plight of hopelessness would benefit from their hard work.

The two friends, who met in South Korea while working at a Hagwon in Daegu, traveled to Cambodia in October 2005 with the intention of staying for seven days.

But having experienced the plight of children and families there were forced to cut their holiday short. Something they never forgot.

"We were planning to be there for seven days, but everywhere we went it was like people were breathing devastation," recalls Andrea, 27.

Hearing stories from tuktuk drivers who had lost their family to genocide, murder and poverty and seeing first hand the immense problem of child exploitation by paeodophiles they were shocked by how it left them feeling. Were they also taking advantage of the people by being tourists? Were they feeding the corruption of the poor?

"It was really depressing and we felt really bad because we are mega rich compared to them. We were trying to have a vacation and we felt so guilty because we were rich and they weren't," adds Emma, 26.

Andrea says "To go and visit was really hard because every day you are reminded of how dire the situation is. It's in your face all the time. Any time anyone asks me where's the worst place I have been to, Cambodia always pops into my head. That was humans in their worse situation."

Since their trip the pair have learnt more about the history and politics of the country and discovered the charity Children of Cambodia Fund who they chose to donate the money from the mini marathon to. The money will be used to help rescue children living on the dumps and tips of litter and rubbish everywhere because they have no families, no homes and no money.

The organization is trying to combat the problem with child prostitution by setting up orphanages and projects to get the children off the streets.

Cambodia is one of the poorest countries in Asia with 85 percent of the population of 12.5 million people living in rural areas. There is a high infant mortality rate and the average life expectancy is 57 years old. During the notorious regime of Pol Pot in the 1970s around 1.5 million people lost their lives.

"Everywhere has poor places, we know, but it was a massive difference in Cambodia," says Emma.

Andrea adds: "The difference is that in other countries you can see there is some wealth and they can feed themselves and provide houses, but in Cambodia you just don't see it. Everyone is just suffering and the thing is there's no hope. They just don't have the means to move on. Their generation is stumped."

Since starting to organize the mini marathon six weeks ago, Andrea and Emma have realized they are not alone in their experience and know they will not be the last.

"A lot of people told us they had been or were about to go. Cambodia touches a lot of people's hearts from what they have heard or seen," adds Andrea.

The money raised far exceeded the two women's expectations and the support they say was amazing.

"We just want to say thank you to everyone who helped us and we hope it will be of some benefit to the children in Cambodia," Andrea says.

Pleasure and pain in Phnom Penh

The Khmer Arts Academy at Prek Ho, half an hour outside of Phnem Penh. (Photo: Courtesy Of Khmer Dance Academy, Phnom Penh)

Khmer Arts Academy dancers pose after a performance. (Photo: Bradley Winterton)

Cambodia's capital offers beauties and horrors in roughly equal measure

Wednesday, Jun 06, 2007
By Bradley Winterton
Contributing Reporter
Taipei Times (Taiwan)

When you travel from Vietnam into Cambodia, you cross one of Asia's most significant divides. Behind you lies the pan-Chinese world. Vietnam may today use the French-imposed Western alphabet but its culture essentially comes from China, and you see Chinese characters everywhere in Vietnamese temple inscriptions. Cambodia, by contrast, once lay under India's influence. Its script is Indian-derived (as is Thai's), and the Lunar New Year, universally observed in Vietnam as Tet, passes almost unnoticed in the Cambodian countryside. More importantly, Chinese-style industriousness, so evident in Ho Chi Minh City, appears remote indeed from the Cambodian national psyche.

Driving along the straight, tree-lined road from the Vietnamese border at Bavet towards Phnom Penh, the landscape is uniformly flat and brown, at least in the dry season. There are few cars, just motorbikes, the occasional truck, and local buses with passengers sitting on the roof. There's no sign of the light-industry factories visible on the Vietnamese side of the border, and pigs and calves cross the road at leisure in the still, sunny weather.

Soon you reach the Mekong. Young boys are washing down small horses, some submerged up to their nostrils. The bus, however, goes across on a modern ferry. Then you're churning your way along a muddy track, necessitated by the construction of a new highway. Six hours after leaving Ho Chi Minh City you finally reach Phnom Penh.

All hotels in Phnom Penh display signs prohibiting the admission of under-age girls and boys into the rooms, except in the company of a parent. "That's OK," goes a local joke. "The mother comes along too to collect the cash." But the reality isn't funny. Child prostitution is merely the latest plague to afflict a country so badly mauled over the last 30 years that some commentators believe it'll soon disappear altogether, divided up between Vietnam and Thailand.

As it is, Phnom Penh offers beauties and horrors in roughly equal measure.

At the center stands the truly magnificent Royal Palace, something all visitors should make sure they see. But one block away, overlooking the confluence of the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers, there's a prominent pavilion which could also be splendid, but isn't. Coils of plastic hose-piping are stacked in one corner, some ancient recliners are chained together, and two rickety desks are wired to some dodgy-looking electric cable. Children play soccer with an old slipper, somebody urinates into a flowerbed, and vendors pick their teeth under tacky umbrellas waiting for customers to gain merit by releasing caged swallows. The whole area has a gummy air, and you sit on the balustrade at your peril.

Why the banks of the Mekong should present this almost derelict aspect when nearby there are side-streets giving off an air of relaxed luxury under tropical skies is initially unclear. The reason becomes apparent, however, as soon as you encounter the Cambodian middle classes.

They greet each other with the most ceremonious of hand gestures, then proceed to their seats to watch ancient dance dramas of insufferable tedium. Their off-spring, I was told, have little problem gaining admission to college, while the poor have to be brilliant indeed if they don't have money to back up their applications.

A large number of splendid Phnom Penh villas are advertised everywhere, starting at a monthly rental of some US$1,000. Expatriate embassy staff, someone who worked for a rental agency told me, earn as much as US$5,000 a month, and most NGO staff get around US$3,000 (though volunteers as little as US$250). By contrast, the usual monthly wage for Cambodians working in factories is US$40, he said. (When the UN was in Cambodia, its soldiers received allowances of US$145 a day).

At Prek Ho, half an hour outside Phnom Penh, stands the roofed but otherwise outdoors performance venue of the Khmer Arts Academy. Angkor-style statues pose in the declining afternoon light, dancers get sewn into their costumes in the searing heat, and right next door is the villa where Gary Glitter lived during his brief Cambodian sojourn. It's now up for rent and you can look over it anytime. There are billiard tables, a smallish swimming pool, and a fine view over a muddy river. The asking monthly rent is US$1,500 a month, I was told.

Back in town, a waiter showed me his English textbook. First published in 1941, it contained a detailed history of the clerihew ("invented by Edward Clerihew Bentley, 1875 to 1956") and a selection of the author's favorite poems — My Love's Like a Red, Red Rose and What is this life, so full of care. The waiter knew several of these poems by heart, he said, and planned to learn more.

You can, if you want, book yourself a city tour, taking in the Royal Palace, Wat Phnom, Tuol Sleng, Choeuuk Eik, the Independence Monument, and a sunset cruise on the Mekong. As I'd been advised not go to Choeung Eik, the infamous pile of human skulls 15km from Phnom Penh, and only to visit the Khmer Rouge torture-chamber of Tuol Sleng, now the Museum of Genocidal Crime, if I had a strong stomach, I avoided the tour altogether.

Instead I went to Sovanna Phum, a theater presenting a popular mix of traditional dance items, including a shadow-puppet show with added dance numbers. Housed in a wooden auditorium with makeshift benches, it was great fun — simultaneously charismatic and audience-friendly. Sovanna Phum performs every weekend for mainly tourist audiences, but is nonetheless highly recommended.

Many people choose to stay along Sisowath Quay, overlooking the broad but treeless Mekong. There you'll soon discover the Foreign Correspondents' Club (363 Sisowath Quay; www.fcccambodia.com), no longer a club at all but an exceptionally pleasant up-market bar and restaurant. The ceiling fans all work, there's draught beer, pizzas (US$5 to $7.50), Fajita Barbequed Chicken (US$6.50), and ice cream at US$1.80 a scoop. At street level is the same management's Cafe Alfresco.

Excellent Khmer food is available at Frizz (335 Sisowath Quay; www.frizz-restaurant.com) — dinner is about US$8 a head. A comfortable place to stay at around US$20 is the California Guesthouse (317 Sisowath Quay, www.cafecaliforniaphnompenh.com), pleasant and efficient, but often fully-booked. The Riverside Hotel (1 Sisowath Quay) is unprepossessing to say the least, with a reception desk out of the ark and slatternly assistants. Only Myanmar, I thought, was worse than this.

If your tastes run to the luxurious, sample the Phnom Penh Hotel (53, Monivong Boulevard, Sangkat Srah Chok, Khan Daun Penh; www.phnompenhhotel.com). It's one of those places where the staff greet you in English round every corner. Rooms are from US$140 upwards (Presidential Suite US$1,500), though the front desk quickly informed me there was "a 50 percent discount, operational at all levels." The French, Chinese and American restaurants are sumptuous indeed, and along the passage there's a casino for guests to play games with money that, only meters away, naked children fight for in the dust.

I stayed at three hotels in Phnom Penh. The first was Manor House (8B, Street 266; e-mail: info@manorhousecambodia.com), a boutique guesthouse located in an affluent area popular with NGO workers. The nearest restaurant offered French haute cuisine and priced its delights in US dollars. The nearby streets were leafy, and the houses comfortable and dignified. The motorbike-taxi hadn't wanted to take me there because he wasn't sure he'd get a commission, a fear that proved justified. The room, at US$30 a night, was exceptionally comfortable, though the Western breakfast was rather bland.

The second hotel I sampled was the Renakse (40, Samdach Sothearos Boulevard; e-mail: renaske-htl@camnet.com.kh), a rundown French colonial building directly opposite the Royal Palace. "Our rooms are US$40," announced a sharp-tongued assistant, "but if you stay the price will be US35." In the Renakse everything creaks — the doors, the windows, the beds. Lugubrious and echoing, it has atmosphere (of a sort) without being able to claim any discernable charm.

The best hotel I found, the Golden Bridge (7CD, Street 278, Sangkat Beoung Keng Kang 1, Khan Chamkamon; www.goldenbridgehtl.com), was also the cheapest. The secret was that it was Chinese-owned and Chinese-run. It cost a mere US$13 — one hi-tech Japanese guest had been tapping away on his computer there for two months. The street also boasts some good but inexpensive restaurants — try the EU Food at 11 — and an Internet coffeeshop. The Lucky Supermarket nearby shows you, under one roof, how Phnom Penh's rich really live.

"Cambodia's amazing!" a young British businessman had told me in a Ho Chi Minh City cafe. "I saw a railway that only had one train a week, and the rest of the time people work their way along the line in a wicker contraption on wheels." And as I got ready to leave I thought that perhaps I wasn't giving Cambodia a chance. What about Angkor, Battanbang, and all the villages where the Cambodian riel rather than the US dollar is the unit of currency? Shouldn't I take a look at these as well? I concluded, however, that the world's a big place and you can't see everything. More than that — understanding that you can't see it all is one of the secrets of happiness. Besides, I missed the films of Almodovar and Ho Chi Minh City's Chinese circuses and Catholic splendors, and could, in truth, hardly wait to get back to Vietnam.

The two most shocking books I know on Cambodia are William Shawcross's Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (Chatto, 1979) and Amit Gilboa's Off the Rails in Phnom Penh; Into the Dark Heart of Guns, Girls, and Ganja (Asia Books, 1998). Both tell similar stories, of the hideous exploitation of an innocent, but also strangely passive and acquiescent, people.

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GETTING THERE

EVA Airlines flies from Taipei to Phnom Penh on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday for NT$13,000 (round trip, including tax; price valid till June 15). Contact Champion Travel Service on (02) 2561-6250

The one-way coach fare from Saigon to Phnom Penh is US$13 with the Mekong Express Limousine Bus company