Paying a high price for cheap sex

Prostitutes outside a brothel in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Photograph: Rob Elliott/AFP/Getty Images

MAGAN' WORLD: Manchán Magan’s tales of a travel addict

Saturday, November 27, 2010
IrishTimes.com

HOW MUCH for a really good hooker in Cambodia these days? For a young one, just down from her remote mountain village.

As a travel supplement aimed at helping travellers get the best from their holidays it would be remiss of us not to cover this important tourism growth area. After all, 22 per cent of foreign visitors to Cambodia in 2000 were there for sex; no doubt some may have been Irish Times readers. So, in the interests of catering to readers of all tastes, let’s seek out the best value for yam-yam and bam-bam.

It might help first to take a quick glance at international sex trafficking statistics, as a large proportion of Cambodian sex workers are trafficked in from Vietnam and northern Thailand. The pretty little girl you buy is likely to have been either kidnapped by neighbours or sold by desperate relatives for a few hundred euro.

She will probably have been held in the brothel you found her in, or in some squat belonging to the pimp from whom you bought her, but one needn’t think of it as imprisonment.

She is, in theory, free to leave at any time, once she has paid back the expenses incurred in bringing her there. These debts aren’t as terribly crippling as you might imagine – a large proportion will have been cleared in the first few months, when she was first sold as a virgin for top dollar to a few lucky foreigners, after that her value quickly plummets, so that within a few months you could pick her up for less than €50 if you know how to bargain. Or even as low as €10 if you wait until she is strung out on heroin, and possibly infected with HIV.

By then the brothel has little use for her, and would be glad to sell her freedom to you for a nominal fee to cover any remaining charges for room and board, or any abortions she may have had to undergo due to “carelessness”.

It’s odd that although one may go to Cambodia seeking sex, one finds instead a last vestige of slavery, not the brutish, bewhiskered 19th century type involving scurrilous men in knee-length breeches and boots, but something more subtle and innocuous. The United Nations estimates that between 700,000 and 4 million people are cajoled from their homes and sold into slavery worldwide each year. Some 80 per cent are women, girls and young boys trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation. They are lured with false promises of low-skilled jobs in waitressing, modelling or domestic help, at ever younger ages: the average age of trafficked prostitutes in some Asian brothels is 14.

There’s unlikely to be a famous Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass-type figure leading an heroic revolution of enslaved sex workers to liberty, because such is the debased status of women in many Asian societies that some will have voluntarily agreed to their enslavement to help feed a hungry family or provide medicine for a sick relative. Once the money has been earned, in theory they are free to return home, but in practise a village community is unlikely to allow them forget their act of generosity. They will be stigmatised, unable to marry. Their sacrifice is for life – although that might not in fact be very long: many die of Aids by their 20s, or are so severely afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder that they drink or drug themselves to an early grave.

The leading causes of death among trafficked women are homicide, suicide, drug/alcohol related problems and HIV. In fact, the homicide rate among trafficked women is 17 per cent higher then the average.

But, I’ve drifted off-topic. To get back to finding a really good prostitute in Cambodia. First off, I am told it’s best to say you are going on a golfing holiday.

The Evil Behind the Smiles

Sina Vann (Photo: Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times)

January 1, 2009
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia

Western men who visit red-light districts in poor countries often find themselves surrounded by coquettish teenage girls laughingly tugging them toward the brothels. The men assume that the girls are there voluntarily, and in some cases they are right.

But anyone inclined to take the girls’ smiles at face value should talk to Sina Vann, who was once one of those smiling girls.

Sina is Vietnamese but was kidnapped at the age of 13 and taken to Cambodia, where she was drugged. She said she woke up naked and bloody on a bed with a white man — she doesn’t know his nationality — who had purchased her virginity.

After that, she was locked on the upper floors of a nice hotel and offered to Western men and wealthy Cambodians. She said she was beaten ferociously to force her to smile and act seductive.

“My first phrase in Khmer,” the Cambodian language, “was, ‘I want to sleep with you,’ ” she said. “My first phrase in English was” — well, it’s unprintable.

Sina mostly followed instructions and smiled alluringly at men because she would have been beaten if men didn’t choose her. But sometimes she was in such pain that she resisted, and then she said she would be dragged down to a torture chamber in the basement.

“Many of the brothels have these torture chambers,” she said. “They are underground because then the girls’ screams are muffled.”

As in many brothels, the torture of choice was electric shocks. Sina would be tied down, doused in water and then prodded with wires running from the 220-volt wall outlet. The jolt causes intense pain, sometimes evacuation of the bladder and bowel — and even unconsciousness.

Shocks fit well into the brothel business model because they cause agonizing pain and terrify the girls without damaging their looks or undermining their market value.

After the beatings and shocks, Sina said she would be locked naked in a wooden coffin full of biting ants. The coffin was dark, suffocating and so tight that she could not move her hands up to her face to brush off the ants. Her tears washed the ants out of her eyes.

She was locked in the coffin for a day or two at a time, and she said this happened many, many times.

Finally, Sina was freed in a police raid, and found herself blinded by the first daylight she had seen in years. The raid was organized by Somaly Mam, a Cambodian woman who herself had been sold into the brothels but managed to escape, educate herself and now heads a foundation fighting forced prostitution.

After being freed, Sina began studying and eventually became one of Somaly’s trusted lieutenants. They now work together, in defiance of death threats from brothel owners, to free other girls. To get at Somaly, the brothel owners kidnapped and brutalized her 14-year-old daughter. And six months ago, the daughter of another anti-trafficking activist (my interpreter when I interviewed Sina) went missing.

I had heard about torture chambers under the brothels but had never seen one, so a few days ago Sina took me to the red-light district here where she once was imprisoned. A brothel had been torn down, revealing a warren of dungeons underneath.

“I was in a room just like those,” she said, pointing. “There must be many girls who died in those rooms.” She grew distressed and added: “I’m cold and afraid. Tonight I won’t sleep.”

“Photograph quickly,” she added, and pointed to brothels lining the street. “It’s not safe to stay here long.”

Sina and Somaly sustain themselves with a wicked sense of humor. They tease each other mercilessly, with Sina, who is single, mock-scolding Somaly: “At least I had plenty of men until you had to come along and rescue me!”

Sex trafficking is truly the 21st century’s version of slavery. One of the differences from 19th-century slavery is that many of these modern slaves will die of AIDS by their late 20s.

Whenever I report on sex trafficking, I come away less depressed by the atrocities than inspired by the courage of modern abolitionists like Somaly and Sina. They are risking their lives to help others still locked up in the brothels, and they have the credibility and experience to lead this fight. In my next column, I’ll introduce a girl that Sina is now helping to recover from mind-boggling torture in a brothel — and Sina’s own story gives hope to the girl in a way that an army of psychologists couldn’t.

I hope that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will recognize slavery as unfinished business on the foreign policy agenda. The abolitionist cause simply hasn’t been completed as long as 14-year-old girls are being jolted with electric shocks — right now, as you read this — to make them smile before oblivious tourists.

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)