'If she doesn't have Aids already, she will get it'
Dan McDougall
December 12, 2004
The string of flickering lightbulbs above my head is swaying gently in the
evening breeze, struggling to illuminate the neat row of giggling Cambodian
schoolgirls lined up in front of me like fragile porcelain dolls. Behind my
table, somewhere in the darkened recesses of the ramshackle brothel, a
home-made generator wheezes like a bronchial geriatric as it repeatedly cuts
out, leaving only the distant sound of barking dogs and my own heartbeat as I
prepare to be relieved of my wallet.
Sipping a local Angkor beer to fight off the intolerable humidity, I peer
through the sodium gloom at one of the youngsters and offer her a sympathetic
smile. She resolutely ignores me, making a theatrical show of turning away and
yawning. Her name is Ayla, and I am told by my translator that she is only 13
years old, a fact confirmed by her tiny frame and the garish make-up she has
been forced to apply to her face.
Her indifference to my presence is understandable - she is clearly resigned to
her evening’s fate. Behind her, in the darkness, three local Khmer men, their
weeks’ wages clutched tightly in their fists, are negotiating a price for her
services with a local pimp, or papasan, his earrings and garish leather
trousers apparently singling him out as a man to be reckoned with in this dank
and stifling corner of south-east Asia.
Beside Ayla sit half a dozen other young girls, dressed in stilettos and PVC
skirts, all shifting awkwardly on cheap plastic chairs. Behind them another
three girls, only slightly older, are tottering unsteadily to and from the bar
in high-heels, serving beers to the largely local clientele. It is early,
barely 7pm, the beginning of their long Friday-night shift.
It is an undeniably foreboding road that takes you away from the twisting banks
of the Mekong river at dusk, and into the squalor and chaos of Svay Pak, a
shanty town on the impoverished fringes of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh.
Since a recent joint police and military clampdown on prostitution earlier this
year, a purge prompted largely by international pressure, this corner of one of
the most afflicted societies on earth has quickly become off-limits for western
sex tourists - who once callously feted the suburb on the internet as a
"Disneyland for paedophiles", and descended on the area’s notorious red-light
district in their droves for over a decade.
According to government officials in Phnom Penh, the pimps have been driven
out, the brothels razed to the ground and Svay Pak - as Indochina’s epicentre
of child prostitution - no longer exists. Yet only a few days after arriving in
the Cambodian capital, following a conversation with a German aid worker at the
bar of my hotel, I am told I will still find evidence of child prostitution
here - it’s just that westerners are no longer as welcome as they once were.
And so, two hours later, I find myself in a ramshackle backroom bar in Svay
Pak. Across the pot-holed street from my table, in a separate brothel, a
wailing chanteuse is singing a barely recognisable version of a western ballad.
I grimace, but there is high-pitched laughter from the giggling girls. Celine
Dion, it would seem, has a loyal following in Cambodia.
As I look up, the pimp I had seen earlier is engaged in a frantic conversation
with my translator, a local English student I had agreed to pay in US dollars
to help me uncover evidence of young girls being held captive in brothels. My
instructions to him were simple: I was looking to find proof of young girls,
more specifically virgins, being sold on the black market.
Within moments all is calm again, and we are being purposefully led out of the
bar and into a nearby alleyway. I look down at my feet and see we are wading
through a foul stew of sewage. Then we pass through another narrow corridor
into a wooden hut on stilts, where the smell of burning charcoal and body odour
is overwhelming. It is crammed full of girls aged between eight and 14.
Startling me in the darkness with his broken English, the pimp turns to me and
shouts, "You want virgin? These girls very good, which one do you want, you can
take!"
"How much?" I ask.
"Nine-year-old is 200, no operation. If you want older girl, 11, not virgin,
50."
I look around the stifling plywood cubicle, just big enough for the filthy
mattress on the floor, and I turn to leave, shaking my head.
"Okay, I do good price, good price," he shouts after me. "How much you want to
pay - very young?"
I head back through the alleyway and back into the brothel. Ayla has
disappeared.
It is no secret that there is sex for sale all over Phnom Penh: in nightclubs,
pool halls and karaoke bars - even in the cluster of hairdressing shops near
the art-deco central market, where graphic sex menus are produced to accompany
such simple everyday occurrences as a haircut. For most western sex tourists
there is simply no need to make the 30-minute trek north to Svay Pak, along a
congested highway, weaving through a jumble of pot-holes, rusting bicycles,
roadside fires, rabid dogs and potential muggers. But for some, the round-trip
is still worth the journey - it offers something special: young girls, and some
that are simply children. Here, as in the back streets of Saigon, or if you dig
deeper, in Bangkok’s red-light tourist traps around the Patpong market, there
is such a high demand for young virgins that an increasing number of pimps are
paying doctors to sew back the girls’ hymens so that they can sell them again.
It’s supposedly a simple operation, for which they can demand fees of 100.
It is undeniable too that sex tourism is rapidly becoming a global issue.
Today, incredibly young children are doomed to work in brothels around the
world because they are a safer option, the customers assuming that children are
less likely to be infected with HIV/Aids.
According to Unicef, 97 countries have identified cases of chronic commercial
sexual exploitation of children; the organisation currently puts the number of
children recruited or coerced into the sex trade every year at 1.2 million, and
rising. At a conference in Tokyo earlier this year, Kul Gautam, Unicef’s deputy
director, described it as simply the "largest slave trade in history".
To members of socially minded western think-tanks, the plight of millions of
girls across the Third World is a frank and sobering reminder of the dark side
of globalisation, which has turned youngsters in economic backwaters into the
ultimate commodity. It’s a market that takes advantage of impoverished women
and children from Brazil to the former Soviet bloc, where criminal gangs feed
the international demand for sex workers - most of whom are held against their
will after being kidnapped or sold.
In Asia the trafficking of women and children has mushroomed more than anywhere
else on the planet, across a broad belt of poverty from Bangladesh and Sri
Lanka to the Philippines, Burma and Thailand. Many of these young victims,
recruited and often kidnapped from remote rural areas, are ultimately destined
for brothels in Asia’s biggest and most prosperous cities.
Yet in the midst of this vast human tragedy, Cambodia seems uniquely afflicted.
Ravaged by the Khmer Rouge and devastated in Pol Pot’s killing fields, the
country and its population remain traumatised and impoverished. Thirty years of
civil war have left a fractured nation with a weak institutional infrastructure
and confused notions of right and wrong.
Perhaps more realistically, it comes down to economics. Doctors here earn the
equivalent of £20 a month; police officers and teachers no more than
£13 a month. Fighting for survival, increasing numbers of desperate
families in rural areas are being forced to sell their children to agents who
tour poor villages like door-to-door salesman, looking for girls to buy. Many
families are tricked into believing their children will get work in hotels or
cafés in the big city; the girls will then be forced to work in brothels,
unpaid, day and night, often for years. Some are fed methamphetamine (speed) to
keep them awake. The reluctant are coerced by rape, and sometimes by electric
shocks. Escape is prevented, usually by an armed guard. The girls’ only rewards
are food, medical treatment, to keep them working, and make-up, to lure more
customers.
Unicef concluded that 35% of Cambodia’s estimated 75,000 prostitutes are under
16. The trend is fuelled by a growing demand for virgins, who, according to a
widely held belief in Cambodia, bring good luck and long life to the men who
deflower them, as well as eliminating the danger of contracting HIV. But sex
workers are forbidden to insist that clients use condoms; not surprisingly,
half of them are believed to be HIV-positive.
Cambodia is also the hub of a people-trafficking racket that has tentacles
stretching across south-east Asia and links with several Asian mafias. Many of
the country’s underage prostitutes are from Vietnam, while Cambodia supplies
girls to countries in the region, as well as to Japan and Europe. Poverty,
corruption and lack of education have effectively created the perfect
environment for the trade to flourish.
But the plight of Cambodia’s children hasn’t had a low profile. Mary Robinson,
the former United Nations high commissioner for human rights, criticised the
exploitation of children when she went to Indochina last year. Lord Puttnam,
who produced The Killing Fields, the 1984 film about the civil war, also
highlighted the problem while visiting the country three months ago in his new
role as president of Unicef UK. Western aid workers, however, report that there
is no political will to crack down.
The reality in Cambodia is that the trade operates with virtual impunity,
thanks to high-level political protection and the connivance of corrupt police
and judges. With much of the lucrative industry controlled by senior police and
military officers, successful prosecutions are rare. Evidence is mysteriously
lost, brothels are tipped off before raids and pimps slip out of their
handcuffs on the way to court. Only three foreigners have been convicted of
paedophile offences over the years, one of whom, a former British headmaster
named John Keeler, threw a chair across the court, shouting that he had been
promised an acquittal after paying the judge £2,000.
Most offenders manage to buy their way out of trouble. According to Pierre
Legros, the director of AFESIP, a French charity that rescues child
prostitutes, the situation is getting worse. "It’s anarchy, total anarchy," he
says. "If the police did their job properly, they could arrest 50 paedophiles a
day. As it is, a perpetrator gets to court and all the evidence has been burnt.
Of those who are jailed, most are released after a few months."
In one incident last year, 14 Vietnamese girls aged from ten to 13 were removed
from the Svay Pak brothels after an undercover investigation by AFESIP. When
the matter came before a judge, he ordered the girls to be arrested and
deported as illegal immigrants. One of the brothel owners, meanwhile, was
handcuffed and put in a police car. By the time the car arrived at the police
station, she had vanished.
More positively, there are six charities working in Cambodia to rescue child
prostitutes. At their rehabilitation centres, girls can take classes in
literacy, sewing, hairdressing and cookery - skills that will enable them to
find work. Not surprisingly, they come out of prostitution "totally
traumatised, with no self-esteem", says Legros. "They arrive at the centre ill
from malnutrition, shaking from methamphetamine withdrawal, with sexually
transmitted diseases, pregnant or HIV-positive. Some have been beaten with
metal chains. The demand for young children is mostly driven by Japanese,
Korean, Chinese and western tourists. And they pay more, in coveted US dollars,
for the services of the doomed children."
Campaigners say there is much the travel industry could - and should - do in
countries of departure, such as placing information inserts in air-ticket
folders, publicity at airports and showing in-flight videos highlighting the
issue of child-sex tourism. All these have been tried, but sporadically - and
even half-heartedly.
Now, though, sex tourists and paedophiles are moving on. While Cambodia remains
very much on the map for paedophiles, Thailand, the Philippines and, to some
extent, Sri Lanka are slowly losing their appeal for the sex tourists, who are
always looking for new destinations. According to Carron Somerset, campaign
officer for Ecpat UK (End Child Prostitution and Trafficking), "They are
getting bored with regular haunts, so they look for others - because they are
‘tourists’."
Indeed, on one website, a contributor salivates that he "can’t wait for North
Korea to open up" and wonders what the girls will be like. And still the pain
goes on.
Back in Phnom Penh, one charity worker tells me of an eight-year-old girl he
encountered last month. Her name was Lo, and she was sold into the sex trade in
January this year after being raped by her stepfather and nine other men. She
was hit across the face and given electric shocks when she refused to have sex
with clients. When she grew sleepy after working long hours, the pimp thrust
chillies in her eyes.
I tell him about Ayla, and ask him what her chance of survival will be. He
shakes his head. "Either way she will lose," he says. "If she doesn’t have Aids
already, she will get it. In the meantime, she is forced to have sex with up to
eight men a night and live on the scraps her pimp feeds her. She and thousands
of others here are leading lives beyond our comprehension."
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11-17-2004
Commodification
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11-15-2004
Child
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11-14-2004
Fight
child prostitution by curbing demand - Groups
11-11-2004
Cambodia's
child sex shame
11-3-2004
Children
in chains: Part III
10-22-2004
Children
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10-21-2004
Children
in chains: Part I
10-20-2004
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