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http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2013/12/world/cambodia-child-sex-trade/
The women who sold their daughters into sex slavery CNN.com
A neighborhood in Cambodia is a global hotspot for the child sex trade. The people selling the children? Too often,
their parents. CNN Freedom Project and Mira Sorvino, award-winning actress and human rights activist,
investigate.
By Tim Hume, Lisa Cohen and Mira Sorvino
Photography by Jeremie Montessuis for CNN
Phnom Penh, Cambodia (CNN)
When a poor family in Cambodia fell afoul of loan sharks, the mother asked her youngest daughter to take a job.
But not just any job.
The girl, Kieu, was taken to a hospital and examined by a doctor, who issued her a "certificate of virginity." She
was then delivered to a hotel, where a man raped her for two days.
Kieu was 12 years old.
"I did not know what the job was," says Kieu, now 14 and living in a safehouse. She says she returned home from
the experience "very heartbroken." But her ordeal was not over.
After the sale of her virginity, her mother had Kieu taken to a brothel where, she says, "they held me like I was in
prison."
She was kept there for three days, raped by three to six men a day. When she returned home, her mother sent her
away for stints in two other brothels, including one 400 kilometers away on the Thai border. When she learned her
mother was planning to sell her again, this time for a six-month stretch, she realized she needed to flee her home.
"Selling my daughter was heartbreaking, but what can I say?" says Kieu's mother, Neoung, in an interview with a
CNN crew that travelled to Phnom Penh to hear her story.
Like other local mothers CNN spoke to, she blames poverty for her decision to sell her daughter, saying a financial
crisis drove her into the clutches of the traffickers who make their livelihoods preying on Cambodian children.
"It was because of the debt, that's why I had to sell her," she says. "I don't know what to do now, because we
cannot move back to the past."
It is this aspect of Cambodia's appalling child sex trade that Don Brewster, a 59-year-old American resident of the
neighborhood, finds most difficult to countenance.
"I can't imagine what it feels like to have your mother sell you, to have your mother waiting in the car while she gets
money for you to be raped," he says. "It's not that she was stolen from her mother -- her mother gave the keys to
the people to rape her."
Brewster, a former pastor, moved from California to Cambodia with wife Bridget in 2009, after a harrowing
investigative mission trip to the neighborhood where Kieu grew up -- Svay Pak, the epicenter of child trafficking in
the Southeast Asian nation.
"Svay Pak is known around the world as a place where pedophiles come to get little girls," says Brewster, whose
organization, Agape International Missions (AIM), has girls as young as four in its care, rescued from traffickers
and undergoing rehabilitation in its safehouses.
In recent decades, he says, this impoverished fishing village where a daughter's virginity is too often seen as a
valuable asset for the family has become a notorious child sex hotspot.
"When we came here three years ago and began to live here, 100% of the kids between 8 and 12 were being
trafficked," says Brewster. The local sex industry sweeps up both children from the neighborhood -- sold, like Kieu,
by their parents as well as children trafficked in from the countryside, or across the border from Vietnam. "We
didn't believe it until we saw vanload after vanload of kids."
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Svay Pak, an impoverished neighborhood on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, is the epicenter of Cambodia's child sex
trade. Many of its residents are undocumented Vietnamese migrants, living in a community of ramshackle
houseboats connected by rickety walkways.
It's a precarious existence. The river is fickle, the tarp-covered houseboats fragile. Most families here scrape by on
less than a dollar a day, leaving no safety net for when things go wrong such as when Kieu's father fell seriously
ill with tuberculosis, too sick to maintain the nets that contained their livelihood. The family fell behind on
repayments of a debt.
In desperation, Kieu's mother, Neoung, sold her virginity to a Cambodian man of "maybe more than 50," who had
three children of his own, Kieu says. The transaction netted the family only $500, more than the $200 they had
initially borrowed but a lot less than the thousands of dollars they now owed a loan shark.
So Neoung sent her daughter to a brothel to earn more.
"They told me when the client is there, I have to wear short shorts and a skimpy top," says Kieu. "But I didn't want
to wear them and then I got blamed." Her clients were Thai and Cambodian men, who, she says, knew she was
very young.
[+] Click to enlarge
Don Brewster, a former pastor from California, is the founder and director of Agape International Missions, an
organization dedicated to rescuing and rehabilitating the victims of child trafficking in Cambodia and smashing the
networks that exploit them. He moved to Cambodia with his wife in 2009 after a harrowing investigative mission
trip to the neighborhood.
"When they sleep with me, they feel very happy," she says. "But for me, I feel very bad."
The men who abuse the children of Svay Pak fit a number of profiles. They include pedophile sex tourists, who
Toha listens to her mother explain how she came to sell her to sex traffickers. She no longer lives with her family,
opting instead to live in a residence for trafficking survivors run by Brewster's organization -- but still provides her
family some financial support from her new job.
Not far away from Sephak's family home, connected to the shore via a haphazard walkway of planks that dip
beneath the water with each footfall, is the houseboat where Toha grew up.
The second of eight children, none of whom attend school, Toha was sold for sex by her mother when she was 14.
The transaction followed the same routine: medical certificate, hotel, rape.
About two weeks after she returned to Svay Pak, she says, the man who had bought her virginity began calling,
requesting to see her again. Her mother urged her to go. The pressure drove her to despair.
"I went to the bathroom and cut my arms. I cut my wrists because I wanted to kill myself," Toha says. A friend broke
down the door to the bathroom and came to her aid.
A new future
Not long after her suicide attempt, Toha was sent to a brothel in southern Cambodia. She endured more than 20
days there, before she managed to get access to a phone, and called a friend. She told the friend to contact
Brewster's group, who arranged for a raid on the establishment.
Although children can be found in many brothels across Cambodia -- a 2009 survey of 80 Cambodian commercial
sex premises found three-quarters offering children for sex raids to free them are infrequent.
The country's child protection infrastructure is weak, with government institutions riven with corruption. Cambodia's
anti-trafficking law does not even permit police to conduct undercover surveillance on suspected traffickers.
General Pol Phie They, the head of Cambodia's anti-trafficking taskforce set up in 2007 to address the issue, says
this puts his unit at a disadvantage against traffickers.
"We are still limited in prosecuting these violations because first, we lack the expertise and second, we lack the
technical equipment," he says. "Sometimes, we see a violation but we can't collect the evidence we need to
prosecute the offender."
He admits that police corruption in his country, ranked 160 of 175 countries on Transparency International's
Corruption Perceptions Index, is hampering efforts to tackle the trade in Svay Pak. "Police in that area probably do
have connections with the brothel owners," he concedes.
[+] Click to enlarge
Toha's nightmare is now over. She earns
a steady income, weaving bracelets that
are sold in American stores, while she
studies for her future. Her dream is to
become a social worker, helping other
girls who have been through the same
ordeal.
Brewster believes that corruption was to
blame for nearly thwarting Toha's
rescue. In October 2012, after Toha's
call for help, AIM formulated plans with
another organization to rescue the teen,
and involved police.
"We get a warrant to shut the place
down," recalls Brewster. "Fifteen minutes later, Toha calls and says, 'I don't know what happened, the police just
came with the owner and took us to a new place. I'm locked inside and don't know where I am.'"
Fortunately the rescue team were able to establish Toha's new location, and she and other victims were freed and
the brothel managers arrested although not before the owners fled to Vietnam.
Toha's testimony against the brothel managers, however, resulted in their prosecutions.
Last month, at the Phnom Penh Municipal Courthouse, husband and wife Heng Vy and Nguyeng Thi Hong were
found guilty of procuring prostitution and sentenced to three years in jail. Both were ordered to pay $1,250 to the
court, $5,000 to Toha, and smaller sums to three other victims.
Brewster was in court to watch the sentencing; a small victory in the context of Cambodia's child trafficking
problem, but a victory nonetheless.
"Toha's an amazingly brave girl," he says on the courthouse steps, shortly after the brothel managers were led
down to the cells.
"Getting a telephone when she's trapped in a brothel to call for help, to saying she would be a witness in front of
the police. She stood up and now people are going to pay the price and girls will be protected. What it will do is
bring more Tohas, more girls who are willing to speak, places shut down, bad guys put away."
Like the other victims, Toha now lives in an AIM safehouse, attending school and supporting herself by weaving
bracelets, which are sold in stores in the West as a way of providing a livelihood to formerly trafficked children.
In the eyes of the community, having a job has helped restore to the girls some of the dignity that was stripped from
them by having been sold into trafficking, says Brewster.
It has also given them independence from their families -- and with that, the opportunity to build for themselves a
better reality than the one that was thrust on them. Now Sephak has plans to become a teacher, Kieu a
hairdresser.
For her part, Toha still has contact with her mother even providing financial support to the family through her
earnings but has become self-reliant. She wants to be a social worker, she says, helping girls who have endured
the same hell she has.
"(Toha)'s earning a good living and she has a dream beyond that, you know, to become a counselor and to be able
to help other girls," says Brewster. "You see the transformation that's happened to her."
For more, visit CNN's Freedom Project blog
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