The Road of Lost Innocence (15 page)

At Siem Reap, there’s even a brothel with Korean, Romanian, and especially Moldovan women. The Asian clientele will pay a great deal for that kind of exoticism. It’s a global industry, and for some reason the world puts up with it.

The advantage of this network of offices is that AFESIP can now act as a mediator between Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, to help them pool their efforts to protect these women, and to help these women return to their homes. Most important, we can give the authorities information so they can fight the traffickers.

In the years since we first set up AFESIP in Cambodia, we have helped more than 3,400 victims of prostitution get back on their feet. In Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam we have helped another 1,000 or so. All of them have to go back to normal life at some point, and they have to be equipped to look after themselves.

Reintegration can be a long process. It takes a year and a half to train a woman to take the test for the government’s hairdressing certificate. If she has been badly damaged, it may take months for her to rebuild herself before she is even ready to begin. Some girls can become independent after ten months. For others who have suffered deeper trauma, it takes a minimum of two years.

When their training is over, we find every girl a job in an environment that is safe and humane, or we buy her the basics to set up an independent life—a sewing machine or a pig. We also visit her regularly, at least once a month for the first three months and repeatedly after that, for at least three years. That’s the minimum time for assuring ourselves that our efforts have succeeded.

Some of the girls are like part of our family. They invite us to their weddings. After ten years, they still bring their children for a visit, every year.

We can do all of this only because governments and organizations give us money, but we also need the donors’ support in much more important ways. To explain this, we always ask our benefactors to come and visit AFESIP. A few years ago, the Spanish secretary of state for foreign affairs, Mr. Cortés, came to see us with a government delegation, and they visited the sites. Mr. Cortés listened through an interpreter while a few of the girls told their stories. He came away transformed. He told me that he had heard me explain the work several times in Spain and that he had read the reports, but what he had heard here directly from the lips of the victims surpassed understanding. He was overwhelmed.

Sometimes it’s hard to convince the donors to visit. They stay in their air-conditioned offices, push their paperwork around, and simply don’t have the time. I try to tell them that their human presence and moral support are as important as their financial aid to the girls, who need to be recognized as full fellow human beings.

We have a great deal of support from many people around the world, and for that we are very grateful. But we sometimes have the impression that, for some benefactors, giving money is a way of getting rid of the problem—they don’t want to hear any more about it. It goes without saying that we can’t do this work alone. It’s too big for us. We want our action to be part of a whole chain of action, because it is not enough to look after some of the victims: we want human trafficking to end.

.14.

The Victims

Since we started AFESIP, the brothels have grown larger and more violent. We find women chained to sewers. Girls come to us beaten half to death. They are so young. Increasingly we see that the
meebons
have addicted them to drugs so they won’t ever try to escape. When I was young we were terrorized with snakes and heavy fists, but these girls suffer a more brutal sort of torture. They have marks that are worse than anything I have ever endured.

One day a girl named Srey Mom arrived at the shelter in Phnom Penh. She was bleeding and black and blue all over. I knew we should take her to the hospital, because I thought she might die from the wounds, but she begged us not to take her there—she said the pimps would go there to look for her. She pleaded, “If I die, let me die here.”

We looked after her. When she got better, we started to talk. She was fifteen. She had been sold to a brothel run by a well-known pimp who caters mainly to the military police. This man is known to have killed several girls. Srey Mom was locked up there for four months, beaten, chained, raped without respite.

The house, which was in Tuol Kok, was built on stilts above a marsh, like so many Cambodian houses. The sewage ran directly into the water. One evening, Srey Mom made a hole in the floor big enough to slip through and she waded through the watery filth. She went to the police and told them everything. The police wrote down everything she said. They proposed to take her to a shelter on a motorbike. She gladly accepted. Then they took her back to the brothel from where she had just escaped.

The pimps thrashed her, and she thought they would kill her for sure. She made it out again, through the same hole, which was hidden. In the morning, having asked some people the way, she arrived at the AFESIP shelter, which wasn’t far off. She didn’t want to leave our shelter because she was certain the pimps and their friends the police would be patrolling the area. She didn’t even trust the hospital—she knew that anyone could sell her for just a few dollars.

Srey Mom said one girl in her brothel was kept chained up. She said another girl had been tied up and burned because she refused clients and had tried to escape. Srey was certain she was destined for the same fate—a fate her grandmother had sealed when she sold her into this life.

A while back, I met a mother who would go to a brothel to get the money her ten-year-old daughter earned for her. When I reproached her for this, she retorted, “She’s my daughter. I carried her for nine months; I suffered to give birth to her. I’ll do what I like. She’s not yours.”

“I have a daughter that I carried too,” I objected. “I suffered as well in giving birth. But if I haven’t got anything with which to feed my child, I’m the one who’ll go out and prostitute myself, not her.”

“Well, I have a husband who beats me. As soon as there’s any money in the house, he drinks, then he beats me up and rapes me. He hits the children. And my daughter is in the brothel so that, thanks to her, there’s a little money. And maybe she’ll meet a man who’ll marry her.”

Another time we were talking to a man who had raped his own daughter, a mere child. We asked him why.

“Her mother is beautiful and she attracts all the cocks in the village. So to hurt her, I raped her daughter, who’s pretty too.”

“But this daughter is also yours!”

“No, she’s her mother’s. It’s her mother who was pregnant. This child is nothing to me. I didn’t carry her in my womb, did I?”

These are the kind of answers we get when we inquire.

Often, it must be said, parents don’t know where their daughter works or exactly what she does. I think some parents truly believe that when they sell their daughters to traders, these men and women will find them domestic work as maids in the big city. But most of them do know their children are going into prostitution. To avoid paying commissions, they take their daughters to the brothels themselves. They know they are entering their daughter into a prostitution network that fans all over Cambodia, that trucks girls to Thailand, to Laos, to Singapore, even as far as Canada. But these parents do it anyway. They care only about themselves.

Sokhon was the first child we had at AFESIP who died of AIDS. Her parents died when she was seven years old, and her older sister sold her into domestic service in Phnom Penh. The wife beat her and the husband raped her, and one morning when she was about eight she left the house where she was working and she walked as far as she could.

Sokhon ended up in the gardens in front of the Royal Palace, where a
motodup
driver started talking to her. He told her he would help her, then took her to a brothel in Tuol Pak, where she was sold, and raped, and tortured.

When we rescued her she was twelve. She had TB, along with AIDS, and was so close to death that her pimp just dumped her at the hospital. The hospital called us, because if they were going to treat her, someone was going to have to pay. I went to the hospital and found the money to pay for her care. She had every kind of mark on her body, and she was so thin she seemed made of rope. She looked like me, and her situation felt exactly like my own had once been. Everyone was frightened to touch her, but I took her in my arms.

I suppose some man paid a lot of money to have sex with Sokhon so he could purify himself of the AIDS infection. The belief that you can eliminate AIDS if you have sex with a virgin child is an abomination and responsible for enormous, terrible suffering.

Sokhon got better for a little while. She used to love her blue and white school uniform, but she knew she was going to die. That affected me enormously, and I spent a lot of time with her. She used to ask me whether there was a God and why he allowed such things to happen to a little girl who had never done anything wrong.

The first thing she asked me was to find and look after her little brother—that was what she was most concerned about. We found him and took him to a Buddhist pagoda; that was when I began asking a group of
bonzes
to look after the younger brothers of our girls and bring them up at the temple, since we can’t house boys in our shelters.

Sokhon was very disturbed. One night, when she was already very sick, she asked me to sleep next to her. In the middle of the night, while I was sleeping, she cut my foot with a knife. She said she wanted to mix our blood—she rubbed her bleeding arm on me. She knew it could endanger me, and I think that she did it so she wouldn’t be alone in her suffering.

Kolap was six years old when her mother sold her. When they got to the brothel, Kolap thought her job was only going to be washing up, but she pleaded with her mother not to leave her. She hugged her mother by the neck, and her mother slapped her and pushed her away. When Kolap grabbed her ankles, her mother kicked her. She walked away with fifty dollars, and Kolap’s virginity was sold.

They scrubbed her down and plastered her with lightening cream, in order to make her a more appetizing color. When she resisted, they beat her for several days in succession. After her first week, they sewed her up again, without an anesthetic, and sold her to another brothel. She went from one brothel to another until she was ten, when we rescued her. Her life during those years was truly a journey through hell.

About a year after she came to us, Kolap asked me if I would take her to see her mother in Kandal. Before that she had always refused contact. I took her to her home village to find her mother. The woman actually started to cry when she saw her.

Kolap said, “Don’t cry. I’ve come to ask you, why did you sell me? Why did you hit me when I kissed you? Why did you kick me when I tried to hold on to you? You had fifty dollars in your hands.”

“I didn’t sell you,” stammered the woman. “I didn’t know it was a brothel.”

“How can you say that?”

“We had nothing to eat.”

“You’re lying. You’ve managed to live pretty well till now.”

Kolap’s little brother intervened to say he feared she would sell their younger sister too, only the child was handicapped and nobody wanted to buy her.

“You haven’t changed. But you’re no longer my mother. That’s my mother,” said Kolap, and pointed at me. “She didn’t give birth to me, but she has given me all the rest.”

We left. Kolap didn’t want to stay for another minute in that house of sorrows. She was eight years old, with the body of a child, but her spirit was weighed down by an adult suffering.

Kolap is fourteen now, and she lives in our children’s center in Thlok Chhrov. She’s tall and she’s at the top of her class in secondary school. She has never spoken of her mother again. She only says that as soon as she leaves us, she will bring her brother and sister to live with her and put them through school.

Sometimes parents take us to court to get their daughters back, with an eye to selling them on again. There’s a profit to be made in it. But our legal position is strong—our charter authorizes us to shelter and represent such children. A mother who sells her daughter disqualifies herself as a guardian.

From time to time I am engulfed by rage at what I see around me. Recently there was the case of one young girl called Kaseng. Her parents were out one evening, and she was wandering in the streets when she was captured by a group of six or seven drunken men in their fifties. She was eight years old. They took her to a house and raped her one by one. Since she was too narrow, they took a knife and cut her vagina. Someone brought her to us. I took the child to the hospital to get her sewn up and then to the police to make a report. She began to recover. Her mother, who was very poor, said that ever since the child had been born she had brought nothing but bad luck, and she refused to take her back.

When the trial of Kaseng’s abusers came up, an AFESIP staff member was sent to observe the proceedings. The rapists had paid off the judge. They claimed that she was provocatively dressed and that they’d paid her. In any case, they said, she was young and would have time to remake her life. The judge determined that it was impossible to send men of such venerable age to prison, and they were set free, laughing.

This child was a victim in every way—of the men, of the courts, of her family. We could have appealed the case, but she didn’t want to. She pleaded with me not to do it. “I don’t want to see them or hear what they’re saying about me,” she begged. “I never want to go to court again.”

Blind with anger, I lashed out and told everything to a close adviser of the prime minister, a man who had helped me in other circumstances. I asked him to tell me how such a miscarriage of justice could be possible in a country that claims to be civilized. How can we allow our justice system to remain so corrupted by organized crime and by ordinary bribery that a crime as vile as this one goes unpunished?

My friend looked into it and referred the matter back to the court. We’re still waiting to find out if the child can get some kind of compensation. But this can’t work for every case—I can’t telephone people in high places every time we lose in court, because sometimes it happens several times a month.

Even if we do make a scandal, the political authorities can only try to force the judicial machine into action. Then things get blocked up and nothing happens. The results are rarely satisfactory. We have laws in Cambodia, but everyone ignores them. The law of money prevails. With money you can buy a judge, a policeman—whatever you want. There are moments when I want to throw in the towel and stop doing all this. It feels too big for me to fight—the pimps, the corruption, the judges who aren’t even for sale because they were bought long ago.

Corruption is like gangrene at the heart of the Cambodian legal system. All too often, justice is for sale. In the beginning, even when AFESIP managed to pressure the police into conducting a raid on a brothel, the pimps were often freed within days.

Since the start of AFESIP, we’ve brought about two thousand cases before the courts. We’ve only won about 5 percent of them, and most of those victories are recent. We know our way around the system now, and I think the judges are more careful these days: they know that AFESIP doesn’t give up easily. Still, it’s rare for the criminals to spend more than six months in prison, and most of them continue to be freed after just a few days in police custody.

Maybe it was different in Cambodia before Pol Pot. Even today, you do find good people in the countryside—villagers who care for one another and are always ready to share their meal with a stranger. But I was born after the great dislocations that ripped my country apart, and as soon as I opened my eyes on the world I saw only violence and corruption. Where are the supposedly admirable traditions of the Khmer? Where is their Buddhist morality?

I’m a Buddhist—just an ordinary Buddhist. I go to the temple sometimes. I give rice to feed the elderly at the village temple in Thlok Chhrov. But the men who torture girls also go to the temples. Are they Buddhists?

One day I put this question to the priest who heads the temple I frequent. He said, “Somaly, after thirty years of war, we even have monks who go to brothels and rape children. And there are others who are good and don’t know why they’re good.”