The Road of Lost Innocence (14 page)

Another six-year-old whom we rescued recently is called Moteta. After being alerted about her by another prostitute, one of our informers—whom we call peer educators—we found Moteta, beaten black and blue, in a cage in a Tuol Kok brothel. She was sold to the brothel by her mother, and almost immediately after, the
meebon
’s business began going bad. The
meebon
called a fortune-teller, and the fortune-teller said Moteta had brought an evil spirit. To get rid of it they would have to hurt her, to beat it out. They had already sold her virginity, of course, but they put Moteta in a cage and beat her.

With children this young, you don’t ask questions. Moteta calls me “Grandmother,” and I tell her, “Don’t be frightened, I’ll protect you.” I promise her that nobody will ever hurt her again. She’s so used to working all the time that she’s always trying to wash everyone’s clothes and clean the house in the Thlok Chhrov center. She was in the brothel for so long that she called the
meebon
her mother. She’s been with us for eighteen months; she’s now seven years old.

Our oldest resident in Thlok Chhrov is Ma Li—she’s nineteen, but she’s lived with us ever since she was rescued, four years ago, and she doesn’t feel ready to leave yet. She has her school certificate, but she wants to stay and teach weaving, and she’s in charge of all the little girls now.

Setting up the AFESIP children’s center in Thlok Chhrov is the best thing I have ever done. Most of the girls who live there are between twelve and fifteen years old, and they are so sweet to one another. The older girls call the littlest ones “younger sister,” and when new girls come in they help them as much as they can. We have a nurse and we look after them. They go to the village school in crisp school uniforms. They can talk to a psychologist, but some of these girls don’t want to talk. Weaving is another kind of therapy, a way of clearing your mind and making something beautiful.

They are good girls and look after the elderly in the village. They’re always very respectful of adults and they’re always first in the class at school. At first the villagers rejected them for what they’d done, because they were dirty. They called them whores. But now they admire them and protect them from strangers. They tell me, “Somaly, you bring up your girls so beautifully.”

I tell the children I love them; I say they are good. I tell them, “It’s up to you to show that, no matter what has happened to you, you are still clever and good and strong.”

I know the people who paid money to hurt these children. I know the clients. Some of them are tourists, but most are Cambodians. They are
tuk-tuk
drivers, cops, shopkeepers—ordinary men. The only difference in social class is the order in which they use the girls. The richest, the government officials and big businessmen, go first. In the end, when a girl costs only five thousand riel—just over one U.S. dollar—it’s the poor’s turn. It’s hard to say which is worse.

To me, few people are lower than the men who use prostitutes. They pay to rape women, teenagers, and little girls. They use violence—they hit, slap, and bite, like in the porn videos that are on sale everywhere. It excites them to use power and to see pain. Although some clients pretend to believe that they are somehow doing the girls a favor, the reality is violence and rape. I spent a lot of time thinking about why, in Cambodia, people felt justified in treating women and children this way.

How do you become somebody who can be so careless about other people? Cambodians have been traumatized by the years of war and suffering, and it has made many people completely self-centered, especially in the cities. If there’s an accident on the road, they won’t stop and help. The idea is, if you stop, someone may accuse you of having caused the accident, and you’ll be stuck with the bill. And it’s true—people do that.

To men, women are like servants. That’s the way it has always been in Cambodia. 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.

I wanted to try to begin to change this mentality. In 1999, Emma Bonino managed to get us funds for a campaign to educate men. We went to the Ministry of Defense to explain why this was essential, and we received the authorization to go to police stations and military camps and give lectures. The first time I did it, everyone said, “What? You’re going to talk to them about sex? Aren’t you embarrassed and ashamed?” I was definitely embarrassed, but I didn’t think anyone else would do it.

I took Mr. Chheng, a male social worker from AFESIP, with me. We started off by explaining how to protect yourself from contracting AIDS. The men were interested because the epidemic was becoming widespread, and they were scared. We explained everything, starting from the very basics. With the help of a banana, we even showed them how to put on condoms. This was the moment to say things loud and clear, to get them talking. By asking them questions, we arrived at the problem of their relationship with their wives.

A lot of Cambodian men say they go to brothels because their wives don’t like making love. They talk about this openly. Cambodian women are taught to submit, but the idea of female pleasure in our culture is foreign. The men say their wives’ passivity disgusts them. No one is happy in this situation. Tradition says the wife must stay quiet, unmoving, while the husband gets on with his business.

One man said his wife actually told him to go to prostitutes. He never saw her naked and never even saw her breasts when she breast-fed their children. If he tried to take off his clothes, she said, “If you want to do like in those films, go see the whores.” He burst out laughing—“Oh those young Vietnamese girls, just freshly arrived—when they get undressed, what a marvel! They’re plump, they have white skin, like young piglets!”

The AFESIP lecturers confronted these subjects simply and directly. We talked about mutual pleasure, and pain. We showed them a video of a little girl who recounted how she had been raped—exactly what had happened to her, and who had done it. Sometimes one or two of the girls from our shelter would come to talk about what had been done to them. The men in the audience would often break down and cry. Many of them had been clients of prostitutes just like these girls, but somehow it had never occurred to them to think about how the girls were being treated.

In the first month we received four hundred letters from men who had attended our lectures. In the two years that we did this, we reached thousands of men, most of them soldiers and policemen—men who needed to think about these things. We taught them about what the brothels are really like and how they work. It was also useful because we made a few friends in police stations, even though most of them were junior police officers.

It took enormous amounts of organization and energy rallying the public to come to our events, touring with the education team, and maintaining the cars on our terrible roads. And in 2000, after Emma Bonino resigned from her job with the European Union, our funding from ECHO stopped. We decided to wait for better days to start the program up again.

At that time we were suddenly swamped by a huge arrival of girls from two rescue operations. Almost all of them asked to stay on at the shelter. It was a bad time to be caught short of funds. We called a meeting of all AFESIP Cambodia personnel to work out what needed to be done. In the end we all had to pool our salaries and everything we had left over from essential expenses in order to feed the girls.

AFESIP’s financial problems always come at the end of the year. However many girls we predict will come, there are always more. It’s impossible to refuse them shelter or to evict them. I could receive funding for five hundred girls—we would still need more.

.13.

AFESIP

The year 2000 was a difficult, painful time for our family. At around the same time as AFESIP lost the European funding for our educational campaign, I had a miscarriage. I felt horribly guilty that I had not been more careful and rested as the doctors said I should. Also, Phanna’s husband left her. He took off with another woman, with all of Phanna’s savings. Phanna was still a volunteer with us, teaching sewing classes for free, but she had a part-time job with PADEK, also teaching sewing.

AFESIP took shape slowly, in fits and starts; it was never a planned progression. We grew as the need arose. We set up basic classes in reading and writing Khmer. We expanded our training programs to teach cooking, weaving, and hair-dressing—skills that can quickly translate into jobs. We began teaching every one of our residents small-business skills, things like how to keep accounts and run a shop. Whatever they end up doing, it’ll be important that they learn to keep their own accounts.

My father began coming to our center more often. He had moved to Phnom Penh to be with Mother. She was still the cook and caretaker of our shelter, and Father volunteered to teach the girls to read and write.

It amused me to overhear him teaching girls the
chbap srey.
He would assemble them in a circle under the shade of a tree. After class he would tell them that the good parts of the old code are the need for silence and privacy. But it doesn’t mean you should not defend yourself. That, he said, you are permitted to do.

Father never spoke to the girls directly about prostitution, but he told them, “What you have learned, from experience, is worth much more than gold. If you have a house it may burn down. Any kind of possession can be lost, but your experience is yours forever. Keep it and find a way to use it.”

We had begun receiving funding from UNICEF, from the Dutch network SKN, from the Spanish government and the agency Manos Unidas. Our Tom Dy Center grew larger. The sex business in Cambodia was becoming more and more professional, and it was reaching out to a new market.

The temples of Angkor were drawing tourists. Every night of the year, thousands of foreigners rented hotel rooms in the town of Siem Reap, nearby. They were Japanese, German, American, Australian—and some of them wanted to sleep with young girls and children. We began finding so many girls imprisoned in brothels in Siem Reap that in 2001 we opened a shelter there too. Until we intervened, the police had never done anything about it, because they had never been told to.

Most of the clients of Cambodian prostitutes are locals, but some are foreigners. It’s a very profitable business, the sale of sex. The traffickers earn a lot of money, especially if the girl is young. In Siem Reap, an ordinary girl, not a virgin, might bring in about fifteen dollars for about five days of work. Four girls will make you almost $360 a month, and cost you nothing but a bit of rice and a few guns. Since the annual income of more than a third of the population is less than $360 a year, with profits like these it’s clear that you can bribe whomever you want.

And it’s not just Cambodia, by any means. Every day fresh girls are trucked from Cambodia across the Thai border. Cambodia is a destination country, a transit zone, a place of export; Cambodian girls go to Thailand, Vietnamese girls come to Cambodia. It’s an industry whose product is young human flesh. With fake passports, the girls are sent to Taiwan, Malaysia, Canada. Mafias traffic women around the world. It’s a huge global business, as lucrative as drugs, and Southeast Asia is one of its epicenters.

In 2002, I was in France, accepting an award from the town of Nantes, when I received a phone call. A group of armed policemen had come to our AFESIP shelter in Phnom Penh. We had recently taken in fourteen young Vietnamese girls after a brothel raid. The girls had been brought to Cambodia from Vietnam, and they had no passports. The police arrested the girls for “immigration irregularities” and took them away.

Of course, what really must have happened was that the pimps paid a judge a lot of money to get the girls back. Young Vietnamese girls are a prize in Cambodia for their white, fresh skin. By the time we got a court order to release them, most of the girls had already disappeared, and we never saw them again.

If I had been there, if I had had a gun on me, I don’t know what I might have done. I felt real violence within me. There is no law, no police, no justice to protect little worms like us. If you’re strong, or if you have powerful protectors, you’re left alone. If not, forget it.

After that happened, we set up an AFESIP office in Vietnam and began talking to the Vietnamese and Cambodian authorities about setting up a safe way to get these girls home. We proposed that the Cambodian police could release the girls into the care of AFESIP, at least until the Vietnamese authorities could identify them. That would keep the girls safe. We offered to help the police by identifying the people who created the problem—the traffickers. We also suggested that AFESIP could build a training center in Vietnam, like the Tom Dy Center in Phnom Penh.

The authorities agreed, and we made new, separate arrangements for the Vietnamese girls we found. We rented another house as a short-term shelter where they could stay. Some of them spent only three months with us waiting for their papers; others stayed much longer. We asked an ethnic Vietnamese woman from Cambodia to give them literacy classes and a Vietnamese-speaking former prostitute to give them counseling.
^*1

We also set up a new organization, AFESIP Vietnam, and opened a shelter in Ho Chi Minh City. It works just as we do in Phnom Penh. Some girls have nowhere to go: they are homeless or have violent families. Often they have step-fathers who try to take advantage of them; almost always, there is rejection by their family or community. These days there are traders in almost every province—people who make a commission from the brothels when they bring in a new girl. It is better for our girls to learn a skill and stay out of harm’s way.

In 2001, I became pregnant again, and the doctor said the baby was a boy. Ning and Adana were over the moon about it. Ning was ten and Adana six, and both were ecstatic about having a baby brother. I tried to take better care of myself. I tried to travel less along the bumpy roads between provincial villages and stay in Phnom Penh a little more.

Nikolai was born in April 2002. The girls were adorable. They stayed with me in the hospital room in Bangkok that night, along with their new brother, and every time he whimpered they raced over to his cot to tell him, “Hush, little brother,” all night long.

By this time, AFESIP’s operation in Cambodia had become much more sophisticated. We had set up teams of social workers, many of them former prostitutes, to go out every day, distributing condoms, telling girls how to get to our shelter, and advising them on how to calm clients who are drunk or violent. They also collected information on where the brothels were. We printed flyers with our phone number. We created and expanded an AFESIP clinic where women could come for free medical treatment.

We offered small sums of money to peer educators. These are often former prostitutes who alert us when a girl is very sick or when a minor child arrives in the brothels from the countryside. Nowadays pimps change their “personnel” every two or three months in order to attract customers with the appeal of novelty. Then they trade the girls on, to brothels in the countryside, or in Thailand.

We hired a psychologist to talk with the girls, because so many of them are depressed and suicidal. We sent teams out at night to the parks and open areas where some of the worst kinds of prostitution take place. The “orange women” are girls who sell oranges in the public gardens. For the price of an orange, the client also fondles the girl. For twenty-five cents he can have sex with her. Often a crowd of men will gang-rape an orange girl, and it’s not uncommon to find a dead body in the morning.

These prostitutes don’t have the money to pay for medical care, but they have our telephone number. They call us when they’re ill, and our
tuk-tuk
driver brings them to our clinic. Here they can receive treatment and rest for fifteen days or so, if they are able. We make use of the time to explain that there are ways out of their situation, that their lives aren’t over. When they understand this, hope can return to them. They may begin to believe that they are not alone, that we can help. One day, they will come to us, but until then, they help us by letting us know about children and young girls who are being held against their will.

We cannot rescue every prostitute in every brothel. We try to focus on the worst cases, the captives, the children. When we hear about these things, we send investigators to the neighborhood. One of our full-time investigators is Srena, the young cop I met when I first moved back to Phnom Penh. They pose as clients. They talk to the girls in the brothels and take down their statements. If the girls say they have been sold, we make up a dossier and bring it to the government office of trafficking for evaluation, so that they can decide what needs to be done and verify all the details.

The local police are called in, but we try to withhold the exact location of the brothel until the last possible minute. AFESIP usually goes on the raid to observe the proceedings. We shelter the girls at the AFESIP center while a case can be prepared against the brothels.

I talk with every woman who comes into our center. I don’t judge her, and she knows that. I sit beside her and explain that if you’ve been a prostitute, it doesn’t mean your life is over. I talk about the women we employ, many of whom are former prostitutes too. I show these girls my clothes, and say, “You can learn to make this.” I tell them, “Don’t trust me, because you mustn’t trust people. Decide for yourself.”

In 2003, we opened an AFESIP garment workshop, and I take the women there. They know that in Cambodia a garment factory is often a brutal place, crowded and poorly ventilated. Many women are so ill treated and exploited there that they may even choose to become prostitutes voluntarily, though initially they don’t usually realize what that choice means. Our AFESIP Fair Fashion workshop isn’t like that. It’s a decent environment, where every employee is treated humanely, and a girl knows that every woman who works there has shared her experience.

She can see that it’s possible to get out of prostitution and make your way to a decent life that is clean. Almost all the women who come to us have some kind of illness or another. Sometimes it’s just that they’ve been starved and beaten, but after ten or fifteen unprotected sex acts every day for weeks or years, you catch diseases. Many of them have tuberculosis or HIV, and they usually agree to stay with AFESIP, if only to rest for a few days.

If they leave, these women know they can come back. There’s a wall around our shelter in Phnom Penh, but that’s to keep the pimps out, not to keep the girls in. And if they stay with us, we give them a completely new environment. At the Tom Dy Center, a paralegal whom we work with gives each woman advice and explains her rights. These women usually have no idea about this—after all, there is nothing in daily life in Cambodia to indicate that they have any rights. The paralegal urges them to lodge a complaint with the police. This can be a very important step toward rebuilding themselves. These girls need to feel they are not bad, not guilty for what they have done.

If they want to talk, we have a Khmer psychologist on staff, and this therapy can help to free them of the burden of their oppression. But talking is not an easy or common thing in Cambodia. People tend to be very restrained, and tradition demands you remain silent about misfortune.

In 2003 we opened an AFESIP office in Thailand, where the prostitution and trafficking industry was even larger than in Cambodia. We began looking through the centers where the Thai authorities kept illegal immigrants. Many girls there were from Cambodia and Vietnam and had been taken across the border by force to become prostitutes. The centers were not safe for them, and we began helping them get back home. We also began participating in rescue operations in Thailand.

In 2006 we set up another office in Laos, with a shelter and training center in the Sisattanak district. A few years ago a survey by the International Labour Organization found that almost one in ten women and girls from Sisattanak had left home to go to Thailand. One-third of them were younger than twenty-five. These girls leave home with a trader, often a woman who tells them they will be hired as domestic servants. They become bodies on sale in the big glassed-in bars in Bangkok, where the world’s tourists pick a girl by her number, or they service locals in other much dirtier and more violent places on the side of the road.

AFESIP’s shelter in Laos gives them medical care and vocational training, so they can return to their villages or start a new life on their own. We teach the women to cultivate mulberry trees and to produce and market silk. There are so many girls that we’ll soon need another shelter in Savannakhet Province. Eventually we need to start a shelter in Burma too, though it’s difficult to get the authorities to agree; we see huge numbers of Burmese girls.