Grasshopper
02-04-2005, 03:14 PM
http://www.soapboxjams.com/china/archive/000070.html
January 17, 2004
Girls for Sale
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
OIPET, Cambodia
One thinks of slavery as an evil confined to musty sepia photographs. But there are 21st-century versions of slaves as well, girls like Srey Neth.
I met Srey Neth, a lovely, giggly wisp of a teenager, here in the wild smuggling town of Poipet in northwestern Cambodia. Girls here are bought and sold, but there is an important difference compared with the 19th century: many of these modern slaves will be dead of AIDS by their 20's.
Some 700,000 people are trafficked around the world each year, many of them just girls. They form part of what I believe will be the paramount moral challenge we will face in this century: to address the brutality that is the lot of so many women in the developing world. Yet it's an issue that gets little attention and that most American women's groups have done shamefully little to address.
Poipet, 220 miles on bouncy roads from Phnom Penh, is a dusty collection of dirt alleys lined with brothels, where teenage girls clutch at any man walking by. It has a reputation as one of the wildest places in Cambodia, an anything-goes town ruled by drugs, gangs, gambling and prostitution.
The only way to have access to the girls is to appear to be a customer. So I put out the word that I wanted to meet young girls and stayed at the seedy $8-a-night Phnom Pich Guest House and a woman who is a pimp soon brought Srey Neth to my room.
Srey Neth claimed to be 18 but looked several years younger. She insisted at first (through my Khmer interpreter) that she was free and not controlled by the guesthouse. But soon she told her real story: a female cousin had arranged her sale and taken her to the guesthouse. Now she was sharing a room with three other prostitutes, and they were all pimped to guests.
"I can walk around in Poipet, but only with a close relative of the owner," she said. "They keep me under close watch.They do not let me go out alone. They're afraid I would run away."
Why not try to escape at night?
"They would get me back, and something bad would happen. Maybe a beating. I heard that when a group of girls tried to escape, they locked them in the rooms and beat them up."
"What about the police?" I asked. "Couldn't you call out to the police for help?"
"The police wouldn't help me because they get bribes from the brothel owners," Srey Neth said, adding that senior police officials had come to the guesthouse for sex with her.
I asked Srey Neth how much it would cost to buy her freedom. She named an amount equivalent to $150.
"Do you really want to leave?" I asked. "Are you sure you wouldn't come back to this?"
She had been watching TV and listlessly answering my questions. Now she turned abruptly and snorted. "This is a hell," she said sharply, speaking with passion for the first time. "You think I want to do this?"
Another girl, Srey Mom, grabbed at me as I walked down the street. She wouldn't let go, tugging me toward the inner depths of her brothel but she looked so young and pitiable that I couldn't help thinking that she really wanted me to tug her away.
So I did. I paid the owner $8 to spring her for the evening and then took her away for an interview.
The owner let Srey Mom go out unsupervised, it turned out, partly because she had been a prostitute for several years and was trusted to return and partly because her dark complexion meant that she was of little value anyway. The brothel sold her to men for just $2.50, compared with the $10 commanded by the lighter-skinned Srey Neth.
I asked Srey Mom what her freedom would cost. Payment of about $70 in debts to her brothel owner, she said. Two girls in her brothel had been freed after they found boyfriends who paid their debts, she said, and she spoke of her longing to see her sisters and the rest of her family in her village on the other side of Cambodia.
"Do you really want to leave the brothel?" I asked.
"I love myself," she answered simply. "I do not want to let my life be destroyed by what I'm doing now."
That's when I made a firm decision I'd been toying with for some time: I would try to buy freedom for these two girls and return them to their families. I'll tell you in my column on Wednesday what happens next.
http://www.soapboxjams.com/china/archive/000070.html
Bargaining for Freedom
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: January 21, 2004
OIPET, Cambodia Srey Neth and Srey Mom were stunned when I proposed buying their freedom from their brothel owners.
"It's unbelievable," Srey Mom said, smiling with an incandescence that seemed to light the street. "There's no problem with taking pictures and telling my story. I want to tell it. But I'm a little afraid that if my mother sees it, she'll be heartbroken."
After I decided to buy the two teenage prostitutes, as recounted in my column on Saturday, I swore them to secrecy for fear that the brothel owners would spirit them away, rather than let them tell their stories. But the first purchase, of Srey Neth, went smoothly.
[For an explanation on how I chose Srey Neth and Srey Mom read my post in the Kristof Reponds forum.]
I woke up her brothel's owner at dawn, handed over $150, brushed off demands for "interest on the debt" and got a receipt for "$150 for buying a girl's freedom." Then Srey Neth and I fled before the brothel's owner was even out of bed.
But at Srey Mom's brothel, her owner announced that the debt was not $70, as the girl had thought, but $400.
"Where are the books?" I asked. A ledger was produced, and it purported to show that Srey Mom owed the equivalent of $337. But it also revealed that the girls were virtually A.T.M.'s for the brothels, generating large sums of cash that the girls were cheated out of. After some grumpy negotiation, the owner accepted $203 as the price for Srey Mom's freedom. But then Srey Mom told me that she had pawned her cellphone and needed $55 to get it back.
"Forget about your cellphone," I said. "We've got to get out of here."
Srey Mom started crying. I told her that she had to choose her cellphone or her freedom, and she ran back to her tiny room in the brothel and locked the door.
In my last column, I described the sex trafficking in places like Cambodia as a modern form of slavery, and I believe that. But the scene that unfolded next underscored the moral complexity of a world in which some girls are ambivalent about being rescued and not all brothel owners are monsters. Some brothel owners use beatings and locked rooms to enslave their girls, but most use debts and ostensible kindness to manipulate them and the girls are often so naοve, so stigmatized by everyone else and so broken in spirit that this works.
With Srey Mom sobbing in her room and refusing to be freed without her cellphone, the other prostitutes her closest friends began pleading with her to be reasonable. So did the brothel's owner.
"Grab this chance while you can," the owner begged Srey Mom. But the girl would not give in. After half an hour of hysterics about the cellphone, I felt so manipulated that I almost walked out. But I finally caved.
"O.K., O.K., I'll get back your cellphone," I told her through the door. The tears stopped.
"My jewelry, too?" she asked plaintively. "I also pawned some jewelry."
So we went to get back the phone and the jewelry which were, I think, never the real concern. Srey Mom later explained that her resistance had nothing to do with wanting the telephone and everything to do with last-minute cold feet about whether her family and village would accept her if she returned. The possibility of rejection by her mother was almost as frightening as the idea of finishing her life in the brothel.
On our return with the phone and jewelry, the family of the brothel's owner lighted joss sticks for Srey Mom and prayed for her at a Buddhist altar in the foyer of the brothel. The owner (called "Mother" by the girls) warned Srey Mom against returning to prostitution.
Finally, Srey Mom said goodbye to "Mother," the owner who had enslaved her, cheated her and perhaps even helped infect her with the AIDS virus yet who had also been kind to her when she was homesick, and who had never forced her to have sex when she was ill. It was a farewell of infinite complexity, yet real tenderness.
So now I have purchased the freedom of two human beings so I can return them to their villages. But will emancipation help them? Will their families and villages accept them? Or will they, like some other girls rescued from sexual servitude, find freedom so unsettling that they slink back to slavery in the brothels? We'll see.
http://www.oggham.com/cambodia/archives/sex_workers/000756.html
Stopping the Traffickers
January 31, 2004
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The New York Times
When I was in Cambodia recently, writing about two teenage prostitutes whose freedom I had purchased, Srey Neth and Srey Mom, readers started sending me frantic e-mail along the lines of: I'll wire you some money if you'll free one for me, too.
But buying sex slaves and freeing them is not a long-term solution. It helps individuals but risks creating incentives for other girls to be kidnapped into servitude. As my experience showed, the underworld these women inhabit is complex and layered, and rescuing them involves more than just opening a door.
Yet even if perfect solutions are elusive, progress is possible. I felt that on this trip.
I traveled to Cambodia because I had been shocked by what I had seen there in the 1990's. I've covered wars, but nothing shook me more than interviews with 13-year-old girls who had been sold by their parents or kidnapped by neighbors.
These days the girls are 17 rather than 13, fewer are beaten or physically imprisoned, and Cambodia's success in fighting AIDS with condoms means that sexual slavery is not necessarily a death sentence.
The progress in Cambodia is mirrored by strides elsewhere, from South Korea to Romania and the Dominican Republic. And most of the credit goes to the Bush administration, particularly its State Department's trafficking office, which is shaming and threatening countries into confronting traffickers.
President Bush's policies toward women have often been callous - cutting off, for example, funds for safe childbirth programs in Africa because of ideological disputes with sponsoring groups. But on trafficking, this administration has led the way.
Sex trafficking has become a hot issue among conservative evangelical Christians, and they have successfully pushed Mr. Bush to embrace the issue. He gave a landmark speech to the U.N. in September, and Colin Powell is moving the issue forward in a commendably bipartisan way. The new director of the trafficking office, John Miller, has bludgeoned foreign governments, telling them to curb trafficking or face sanctions.
When I was in Cambodia, that pressure translated into a brothel owner's being sent to prison for 20 years for peddling girls aged 10 and 12. Other brothel owners decided that it wasn't worth the risk and cleared out their youngest girls.
Conservative Christian leaders have called on Mr. Bush to do more, and to appoint Mr. Miller as an ambassador. But the real mystery is why most Democrats, liberals and feminist groups have been complacent on trafficking.
Senator Paul Wellstone helped direct the fight against trafficking, but since his death, leadership on the issue has passed overwhelmingly into Republican hands. Likewise, most mainstream women's groups, like the National Organization for Women and the Feminist Majority Foundation, have been shamefully lackadaisical about an issue that should be near the top of any feminist agenda.
"I'm critical of my sister feminists," says Donna Hughes, a professor of women's studies at the University of Rhode Island and an expert on trafficking. "To me, the two biggest threats to women today are Islamic fundamentalism and the trafficking and normalization of prostitution. Mainstream feminists really have not been responding to these issues or active on them the way they should be."
With bipartisan support, child prostitution can be addressed through a combination of tactics: (1) pressure on foreign governments to crack down on brothels with underage girls or those held against their will, (2) promotion of condoms to keep prostitutes alive and (3) above all, literacy and job programs to raise the status of girls and women.
In addition, we could cripple the economics of sex trafficking in Asia by focusing on the men who buy the virginity of girls. The $500 or $1,000 payments these men make for young virgins are central to the profitability of the brothels and are responsible for bringing in the youngest girls.
In Cambodia, there was one teenager, Jen, a shy, sweet farm girl, whose freedom I had intended to purchase. But later, I couldn't find Jen, so she's presumably still in Poipet, slowly dying. To Americans, Cambodian sex slaves must seem like aliens on another planet, but talk to them and you realize that girls like Jen are people just like us. They are not a hopeless cause, and it's worth trying harder to save them.
http://iht.com/articles/2005/01/19/opinion/edkristof.html
Leaving the brothel behind
Nicholas D. Kristof The New York Times
Thursday, January 20, 2005
BATTAMBANG, Cambodia A year ago, a pimp handed me a quivering teenage girl. Her name was Srey Neth, and she was one of the hundreds of thousands of teenagers who are enslaved by the sex trafficking industry worldwide.
Then I did something dreadfully unjournalistic: I bought her.
I purchased Srey Neth for $150 and another teenager, Srey Mom, for $203, receiving receipts from the brothel owners. As readers may remember, I then freed the girls and took them back to their villages.
Now I've come back to find out how they coped with freedom.
At first, it turns out, everything went well for Srey Neth. My plan was for her to start a shop in her village, near Battambang. She invested $100 I had given her to build a shack and stock it with food and clothing. For a few months, business boomed.
The problem was her family. Srey Neth's parents and older brothers and sisters had a hard time understanding why they should go hungry when their sister had a store full of food. And her little nephews and nieces, running around the yard, helped themselves when she wasn't looking.
"Srey Neth got mad," her mother recalled. "She said we had to stay away, or everything would be gone. She said she had to have money to buy new things."
But in a Cambodian village, nobody listens to an uneducated teenage girl. Indeed, the low status of girls is the underlying reason why so many daughters are sold to the brothels. So by May, Srey Neth's shop was empty, and she had no money to restock it.
"It was our fault," her father told me, looking ashamed. "It was not Srey Neth's fault."
Srey Neth worried about her father, who was coughing up blood from tuberculosis. She also worried about her older brother, who could not afford to get married, and about the family debts, which could cost her family its land.
It was that kind of concern for her family that had led her, at the suggestion of a female cousin, to sell herself to the brothel in late 2003 and send the proceeds home.
This time, she thought about looking for work as a dishwasher in neighboring Thailand for $1.50 a day. A trafficker said he could smuggle her into Thailand and get her a dishwashing job, but only if she promised him $100.
About 700,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year, and that's often how they end up in the sex industry: They assume debts and then, when they cannot quickly repay the money, gangs force them into brothels - where they are stuck until they are dying of AIDS.
Fortunately, I'd arranged for American Assistance for Cambodia (www.cambodiaschools.com), an aid group, to keep track of Srey Neth. It offered her something less risky: a move to Phnom Penh to learn to be a beautician. So, with money sent to the group by New York Times readers a year ago, Srey Neth started in the beauty school.
That's where I met her again. She was beaming, and she proudly told how she has learned to give manicures and haircuts. She placed third in her class in applying makeup, and she's even studying English. She bubbles with happiness in the way a teenager should.
"I'm happy with Srey Neth," said the beauty school's owner, Sapor Rendall. "She studies hard."
Rendall added that there was only one problem with Srey Neth: "She doesn't want to do massage. I've talked to her about it many times, but she's very reluctant."
Massages are routine in beauty shops in Cambodia and are not sexual, but for Srey Neth, they scream danger. I'm delighted.
Srey Neth cut my hair - I was her first paying customer - and she is excitedly talking about starting her own beauty shop so she can support her family again. She says she'll call it Nick and Bernie's, after me and Bernard Krisher, the chairman of American Assistance for Cambodia.
Today Srey Neth steers clear of the boys trying to flirt with her - she's still deeply distrustful of boys and men - but she has learned to laugh again. She is a happy, giggly, self-confident reminder that we should never give up on the slaves of the 21st century. I couldn't be more proud of her.
That's the good news. In my next column, I'll tell you about Srey Mom.
http://www.iht.com/articles/126496.html
Back to the Brothel
New York Times
1/22/05
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Poipet, Cambodia After I purchased Srey Mom from her brothel for $203 a year ago and brought her back to her village, the joy was overwhelming. Her parents and siblings had assumed she was dead, and they shrieked and hugged and cried.
I had doubts about the other sex slave I had purchased, Srey Neth, whom I wrote about on Wednesday - and who in fact is thriving and is now preparing to become a hairdresser. But I was pretty sure that Srey Mom would make it.
So I'm devastated to say that a year later, I found Srey Mom back here in the wild town of Poipet, in her old brothel. She's devastated, too - when she spotted me, she ran away to her room in the back of the brothel until she could compose herself.
"I never lie to people, but I lied to you," she said forlornly. "I said I would not come back, and I did. I didn't want to return, but I did."
Yet, sadly, such an experience is common. Aid groups find it unnerving that they liberate teenagers from the bleak back rooms of a brothel, take them to a nice shelter - and then at night the kids sometimes climb over the walls and run back to the brothel.
It would be a tidier world if slaves always sought freedom. But prostitutes often are shattered and stigmatized, and sometimes they feel that the only place they can hold their head high is in the brothel.
Srey Mom, too, has zero self-esteem, but in her case no one in her village knew her background, and she was clear of debts. The central problem, as best I can piece together the situation, is that she was addicted to methamphetamines, and that craving destroyed her will power, sending her fleeing back to the brothel so that she could get her drugs.
Over the last year, an aid group looking after Srey Mom, American Assistance for Cambodia, gave her several more chances, once bringing her to Phnom Penh to enroll in school to become a hair dresser. But each time, Srey Mom fled back to drugs and the brothel.
"Ninety-five percent of the girls take drugs," Srey Mom told me. Some girls inject morphine, but brothel owners worry that needle holes make girls look unsightly, so methamphetamine pills are most common.
Some brothel owners welcome addiction, because it makes the girls dependent upon them. But Srey Mom said that is not true of her brothel owner, Heok Tem, whom she calls "Mother."
"Mother doesn't want us to use drugs," Srey Mom said. She has an eerily close relationship with Mrs. Heok Tem, and these days that emotional bond keeps her in the brothel as much as do her debts. Mrs. Heok Tem seems to feel genuine affection for Srey Mom and truly helped in the effort to get Srey Mom to start a new life, but she also cheats Srey Mom ruthlessly - I examined the brothel's account books - and rakes in cash by pimping the girl, which exposes her to AIDS.
"It's wrong," Mrs. Heok Tem admitted. But for now, she says, she needs the money.
Srey Mom still says her dream is to start life over in her village. "I want to go away," she said. "I don't want to stay here long. I'm not happy here. ... I will just look after my younger sisters. I'm already bad, and I don't want them to become bad like me."
I don't believe it will ever happen. I hate to write anyone off, but I'm afraid that Srey Mom will remain in the brothel until she is dying of AIDS (36 percent of girls in local brothels have H.I.V., and eventually it catches up with almost all of them). I finally dared tell her my fear. I described some young women I had just seen, gaunt and groaning, dying of AIDS in Poipet, and I told her I feared she would end up the same way.
"I'm afraid of that, too," she replied, her voice breaking. "This is an unhappy life. I don't want to do this."
Maybe that's what I find saddest about Srey Mom: She is a wonderful, good-hearted girl who gives money to beggars, who offers Buddhist prayers for redemption - but who is already so broken that she seems unable to escape a world that she hates and knows is killing her.
President Bush declared in his inaugural address this week that "no one deserves to be a slave" and that advancing freedom is "the calling of our time." I can't think of a better place to start than the hundreds of thousands of girls trafficked each year, for this 21st-century version of slavery has not only grown in recent years but is also especially diabolical - it poisons its victims, like Srey Mom, so that eventually chains are often redundant.
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/01/31/opinion/edkristof.html
Lock up the pimps
Nicholas D. Kristof The New York Times
Tuesday, February 1, 2005
POIPET, Cambodia
Optimism and sex trafficking don't usually go together.
Yet despite the widespread belief that sex slavery is intractable and inevitable, it isn't. Look, prostitution itself will probably always be around, but we could largely stop the buying and selling of the teenagers who are routinely held in bondage in brothels from Calcutta to Belize.
If this is an optimistic column, one reason is that I had originally planned to use this space differently. I had thought I would find and write about whoever had replaced Srey Neth, the teenager I had purchased for $150 and then freed a year ago.
So I climbed to the top floor of the Phnom Pich Guesthouse (past the sign asking guests not to bring in their machine guns or hand grenades) and found the room that used to be Srey Neth's world. But now the entire floor is empty.
It turned out that the police had raided the guesthouse right after my columns a year ago and arrested Srey Neth's pimp. So now the local sex traffickers are more careful about peddling virgins.
There's a lesson there. In the long run the best way to address the problem is to educate girls and raise their status in society. But a law-enforcement model - sending traffickers to prison - is also very effective in reducing the worst forms of sex slavery.
"It's pretty doable," said Gary Haugen, who runs International Justice Mission, a Washington-based organization that does terrific work in battling sex trafficking. "You don't have to arrest everybody. You just have to get enough that it sends a ripple effect and changes the calculations."
He added wryly that his aim is to "drive traffickers of virgin village girls to fence stolen radios instead."
With that aim in mind, the West should pressure nations like Cambodia to adopt a two-part strategy. First, such nations must crack down on the worst forms of flesh-peddling. (A UN report estimated that in Asia alone, "one million children are involved in the sex trade under conditions that are indistinguishable from slavery.")
Two girls, age 4 and 6, were being quietly offered for sale in Poipet last month. That kind of child abuse can be defeated, as has been shown in the Cambodian hamlet of Svay Pak, which specialized in pedophilia. When I first visited it, 6-year-olds were served up for $3 a session, but after foreign pressure, those brothels are now shuttered.
Second, they must crack down on corrupt police officers who protect the slave traders. Here in Poipet, local people whispered to me that one brothel kept terrified young virgin girls locked up in the back, awaiting sale. So I marched in the brothel's back entrance and looked around.
As it happened, this brothel was undergoing an expansion, which will make it the biggest in town, and the back rooms were all undergoing renovation and empty. But then the owner rushed in - and introduced himself as a senior police official.
I asked him if he imprisoned young girls in his brothel, and he replied: "That's impossible, because I work in the police criminal division, and so I clearly know the law."
Getting countries like Cambodia to confront the sale of children is easier than one may think. I'm generally very suspicious of economic sanctions, but the U.S. State Department's office on trafficking has used the threat of sanctions very effectively to get foreign governments to take steps against trafficking (like the closing of the pedophilia brothels at Svay Pak). But it shouldn't be just one lonely office in the State Department demanding crackdowns. Where's everybody else?
On a reporting trip to Cambodia in 1996, I met a 15-year-old Cambodian girl who had been kidnapped off the street and imprisoned in a brothel. Her mother finally tracked her down, and they had a loving reunion in the brothel. But the pimp had paid good money for the girl and refused to give her up. The police protected the brothel, so the mother had to leave without her daughter.
That girl, now probably dead of AIDS, haunts me still. It was partly shame at not having intervened then that led me to breach journalistic custom last year and buy the freedom of the two sex slaves I wrote about. The solution, though, isn't to buy individual girls - that only makes trafficking more profitable - but to put traffickers behind bars.
Nearly a decade after I interviewed that girl, this scourge is poisoning more young lives than ever. I'm optimistic that we have the tools to wipe out this modern slavery - but do we have the will?
January 17, 2004
Girls for Sale
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
OIPET, Cambodia
One thinks of slavery as an evil confined to musty sepia photographs. But there are 21st-century versions of slaves as well, girls like Srey Neth.
I met Srey Neth, a lovely, giggly wisp of a teenager, here in the wild smuggling town of Poipet in northwestern Cambodia. Girls here are bought and sold, but there is an important difference compared with the 19th century: many of these modern slaves will be dead of AIDS by their 20's.
Some 700,000 people are trafficked around the world each year, many of them just girls. They form part of what I believe will be the paramount moral challenge we will face in this century: to address the brutality that is the lot of so many women in the developing world. Yet it's an issue that gets little attention and that most American women's groups have done shamefully little to address.
Poipet, 220 miles on bouncy roads from Phnom Penh, is a dusty collection of dirt alleys lined with brothels, where teenage girls clutch at any man walking by. It has a reputation as one of the wildest places in Cambodia, an anything-goes town ruled by drugs, gangs, gambling and prostitution.
The only way to have access to the girls is to appear to be a customer. So I put out the word that I wanted to meet young girls and stayed at the seedy $8-a-night Phnom Pich Guest House and a woman who is a pimp soon brought Srey Neth to my room.
Srey Neth claimed to be 18 but looked several years younger. She insisted at first (through my Khmer interpreter) that she was free and not controlled by the guesthouse. But soon she told her real story: a female cousin had arranged her sale and taken her to the guesthouse. Now she was sharing a room with three other prostitutes, and they were all pimped to guests.
"I can walk around in Poipet, but only with a close relative of the owner," she said. "They keep me under close watch.They do not let me go out alone. They're afraid I would run away."
Why not try to escape at night?
"They would get me back, and something bad would happen. Maybe a beating. I heard that when a group of girls tried to escape, they locked them in the rooms and beat them up."
"What about the police?" I asked. "Couldn't you call out to the police for help?"
"The police wouldn't help me because they get bribes from the brothel owners," Srey Neth said, adding that senior police officials had come to the guesthouse for sex with her.
I asked Srey Neth how much it would cost to buy her freedom. She named an amount equivalent to $150.
"Do you really want to leave?" I asked. "Are you sure you wouldn't come back to this?"
She had been watching TV and listlessly answering my questions. Now she turned abruptly and snorted. "This is a hell," she said sharply, speaking with passion for the first time. "You think I want to do this?"
Another girl, Srey Mom, grabbed at me as I walked down the street. She wouldn't let go, tugging me toward the inner depths of her brothel but she looked so young and pitiable that I couldn't help thinking that she really wanted me to tug her away.
So I did. I paid the owner $8 to spring her for the evening and then took her away for an interview.
The owner let Srey Mom go out unsupervised, it turned out, partly because she had been a prostitute for several years and was trusted to return and partly because her dark complexion meant that she was of little value anyway. The brothel sold her to men for just $2.50, compared with the $10 commanded by the lighter-skinned Srey Neth.
I asked Srey Mom what her freedom would cost. Payment of about $70 in debts to her brothel owner, she said. Two girls in her brothel had been freed after they found boyfriends who paid their debts, she said, and she spoke of her longing to see her sisters and the rest of her family in her village on the other side of Cambodia.
"Do you really want to leave the brothel?" I asked.
"I love myself," she answered simply. "I do not want to let my life be destroyed by what I'm doing now."
That's when I made a firm decision I'd been toying with for some time: I would try to buy freedom for these two girls and return them to their families. I'll tell you in my column on Wednesday what happens next.
http://www.soapboxjams.com/china/archive/000070.html
Bargaining for Freedom
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: January 21, 2004
OIPET, Cambodia Srey Neth and Srey Mom were stunned when I proposed buying their freedom from their brothel owners.
"It's unbelievable," Srey Mom said, smiling with an incandescence that seemed to light the street. "There's no problem with taking pictures and telling my story. I want to tell it. But I'm a little afraid that if my mother sees it, she'll be heartbroken."
After I decided to buy the two teenage prostitutes, as recounted in my column on Saturday, I swore them to secrecy for fear that the brothel owners would spirit them away, rather than let them tell their stories. But the first purchase, of Srey Neth, went smoothly.
[For an explanation on how I chose Srey Neth and Srey Mom read my post in the Kristof Reponds forum.]
I woke up her brothel's owner at dawn, handed over $150, brushed off demands for "interest on the debt" and got a receipt for "$150 for buying a girl's freedom." Then Srey Neth and I fled before the brothel's owner was even out of bed.
But at Srey Mom's brothel, her owner announced that the debt was not $70, as the girl had thought, but $400.
"Where are the books?" I asked. A ledger was produced, and it purported to show that Srey Mom owed the equivalent of $337. But it also revealed that the girls were virtually A.T.M.'s for the brothels, generating large sums of cash that the girls were cheated out of. After some grumpy negotiation, the owner accepted $203 as the price for Srey Mom's freedom. But then Srey Mom told me that she had pawned her cellphone and needed $55 to get it back.
"Forget about your cellphone," I said. "We've got to get out of here."
Srey Mom started crying. I told her that she had to choose her cellphone or her freedom, and she ran back to her tiny room in the brothel and locked the door.
In my last column, I described the sex trafficking in places like Cambodia as a modern form of slavery, and I believe that. But the scene that unfolded next underscored the moral complexity of a world in which some girls are ambivalent about being rescued and not all brothel owners are monsters. Some brothel owners use beatings and locked rooms to enslave their girls, but most use debts and ostensible kindness to manipulate them and the girls are often so naοve, so stigmatized by everyone else and so broken in spirit that this works.
With Srey Mom sobbing in her room and refusing to be freed without her cellphone, the other prostitutes her closest friends began pleading with her to be reasonable. So did the brothel's owner.
"Grab this chance while you can," the owner begged Srey Mom. But the girl would not give in. After half an hour of hysterics about the cellphone, I felt so manipulated that I almost walked out. But I finally caved.
"O.K., O.K., I'll get back your cellphone," I told her through the door. The tears stopped.
"My jewelry, too?" she asked plaintively. "I also pawned some jewelry."
So we went to get back the phone and the jewelry which were, I think, never the real concern. Srey Mom later explained that her resistance had nothing to do with wanting the telephone and everything to do with last-minute cold feet about whether her family and village would accept her if she returned. The possibility of rejection by her mother was almost as frightening as the idea of finishing her life in the brothel.
On our return with the phone and jewelry, the family of the brothel's owner lighted joss sticks for Srey Mom and prayed for her at a Buddhist altar in the foyer of the brothel. The owner (called "Mother" by the girls) warned Srey Mom against returning to prostitution.
Finally, Srey Mom said goodbye to "Mother," the owner who had enslaved her, cheated her and perhaps even helped infect her with the AIDS virus yet who had also been kind to her when she was homesick, and who had never forced her to have sex when she was ill. It was a farewell of infinite complexity, yet real tenderness.
So now I have purchased the freedom of two human beings so I can return them to their villages. But will emancipation help them? Will their families and villages accept them? Or will they, like some other girls rescued from sexual servitude, find freedom so unsettling that they slink back to slavery in the brothels? We'll see.
http://www.oggham.com/cambodia/archives/sex_workers/000756.html
Stopping the Traffickers
January 31, 2004
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The New York Times
When I was in Cambodia recently, writing about two teenage prostitutes whose freedom I had purchased, Srey Neth and Srey Mom, readers started sending me frantic e-mail along the lines of: I'll wire you some money if you'll free one for me, too.
But buying sex slaves and freeing them is not a long-term solution. It helps individuals but risks creating incentives for other girls to be kidnapped into servitude. As my experience showed, the underworld these women inhabit is complex and layered, and rescuing them involves more than just opening a door.
Yet even if perfect solutions are elusive, progress is possible. I felt that on this trip.
I traveled to Cambodia because I had been shocked by what I had seen there in the 1990's. I've covered wars, but nothing shook me more than interviews with 13-year-old girls who had been sold by their parents or kidnapped by neighbors.
These days the girls are 17 rather than 13, fewer are beaten or physically imprisoned, and Cambodia's success in fighting AIDS with condoms means that sexual slavery is not necessarily a death sentence.
The progress in Cambodia is mirrored by strides elsewhere, from South Korea to Romania and the Dominican Republic. And most of the credit goes to the Bush administration, particularly its State Department's trafficking office, which is shaming and threatening countries into confronting traffickers.
President Bush's policies toward women have often been callous - cutting off, for example, funds for safe childbirth programs in Africa because of ideological disputes with sponsoring groups. But on trafficking, this administration has led the way.
Sex trafficking has become a hot issue among conservative evangelical Christians, and they have successfully pushed Mr. Bush to embrace the issue. He gave a landmark speech to the U.N. in September, and Colin Powell is moving the issue forward in a commendably bipartisan way. The new director of the trafficking office, John Miller, has bludgeoned foreign governments, telling them to curb trafficking or face sanctions.
When I was in Cambodia, that pressure translated into a brothel owner's being sent to prison for 20 years for peddling girls aged 10 and 12. Other brothel owners decided that it wasn't worth the risk and cleared out their youngest girls.
Conservative Christian leaders have called on Mr. Bush to do more, and to appoint Mr. Miller as an ambassador. But the real mystery is why most Democrats, liberals and feminist groups have been complacent on trafficking.
Senator Paul Wellstone helped direct the fight against trafficking, but since his death, leadership on the issue has passed overwhelmingly into Republican hands. Likewise, most mainstream women's groups, like the National Organization for Women and the Feminist Majority Foundation, have been shamefully lackadaisical about an issue that should be near the top of any feminist agenda.
"I'm critical of my sister feminists," says Donna Hughes, a professor of women's studies at the University of Rhode Island and an expert on trafficking. "To me, the two biggest threats to women today are Islamic fundamentalism and the trafficking and normalization of prostitution. Mainstream feminists really have not been responding to these issues or active on them the way they should be."
With bipartisan support, child prostitution can be addressed through a combination of tactics: (1) pressure on foreign governments to crack down on brothels with underage girls or those held against their will, (2) promotion of condoms to keep prostitutes alive and (3) above all, literacy and job programs to raise the status of girls and women.
In addition, we could cripple the economics of sex trafficking in Asia by focusing on the men who buy the virginity of girls. The $500 or $1,000 payments these men make for young virgins are central to the profitability of the brothels and are responsible for bringing in the youngest girls.
In Cambodia, there was one teenager, Jen, a shy, sweet farm girl, whose freedom I had intended to purchase. But later, I couldn't find Jen, so she's presumably still in Poipet, slowly dying. To Americans, Cambodian sex slaves must seem like aliens on another planet, but talk to them and you realize that girls like Jen are people just like us. They are not a hopeless cause, and it's worth trying harder to save them.
http://iht.com/articles/2005/01/19/opinion/edkristof.html
Leaving the brothel behind
Nicholas D. Kristof The New York Times
Thursday, January 20, 2005
BATTAMBANG, Cambodia A year ago, a pimp handed me a quivering teenage girl. Her name was Srey Neth, and she was one of the hundreds of thousands of teenagers who are enslaved by the sex trafficking industry worldwide.
Then I did something dreadfully unjournalistic: I bought her.
I purchased Srey Neth for $150 and another teenager, Srey Mom, for $203, receiving receipts from the brothel owners. As readers may remember, I then freed the girls and took them back to their villages.
Now I've come back to find out how they coped with freedom.
At first, it turns out, everything went well for Srey Neth. My plan was for her to start a shop in her village, near Battambang. She invested $100 I had given her to build a shack and stock it with food and clothing. For a few months, business boomed.
The problem was her family. Srey Neth's parents and older brothers and sisters had a hard time understanding why they should go hungry when their sister had a store full of food. And her little nephews and nieces, running around the yard, helped themselves when she wasn't looking.
"Srey Neth got mad," her mother recalled. "She said we had to stay away, or everything would be gone. She said she had to have money to buy new things."
But in a Cambodian village, nobody listens to an uneducated teenage girl. Indeed, the low status of girls is the underlying reason why so many daughters are sold to the brothels. So by May, Srey Neth's shop was empty, and she had no money to restock it.
"It was our fault," her father told me, looking ashamed. "It was not Srey Neth's fault."
Srey Neth worried about her father, who was coughing up blood from tuberculosis. She also worried about her older brother, who could not afford to get married, and about the family debts, which could cost her family its land.
It was that kind of concern for her family that had led her, at the suggestion of a female cousin, to sell herself to the brothel in late 2003 and send the proceeds home.
This time, she thought about looking for work as a dishwasher in neighboring Thailand for $1.50 a day. A trafficker said he could smuggle her into Thailand and get her a dishwashing job, but only if she promised him $100.
About 700,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year, and that's often how they end up in the sex industry: They assume debts and then, when they cannot quickly repay the money, gangs force them into brothels - where they are stuck until they are dying of AIDS.
Fortunately, I'd arranged for American Assistance for Cambodia (www.cambodiaschools.com), an aid group, to keep track of Srey Neth. It offered her something less risky: a move to Phnom Penh to learn to be a beautician. So, with money sent to the group by New York Times readers a year ago, Srey Neth started in the beauty school.
That's where I met her again. She was beaming, and she proudly told how she has learned to give manicures and haircuts. She placed third in her class in applying makeup, and she's even studying English. She bubbles with happiness in the way a teenager should.
"I'm happy with Srey Neth," said the beauty school's owner, Sapor Rendall. "She studies hard."
Rendall added that there was only one problem with Srey Neth: "She doesn't want to do massage. I've talked to her about it many times, but she's very reluctant."
Massages are routine in beauty shops in Cambodia and are not sexual, but for Srey Neth, they scream danger. I'm delighted.
Srey Neth cut my hair - I was her first paying customer - and she is excitedly talking about starting her own beauty shop so she can support her family again. She says she'll call it Nick and Bernie's, after me and Bernard Krisher, the chairman of American Assistance for Cambodia.
Today Srey Neth steers clear of the boys trying to flirt with her - she's still deeply distrustful of boys and men - but she has learned to laugh again. She is a happy, giggly, self-confident reminder that we should never give up on the slaves of the 21st century. I couldn't be more proud of her.
That's the good news. In my next column, I'll tell you about Srey Mom.
http://www.iht.com/articles/126496.html
Back to the Brothel
New York Times
1/22/05
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Poipet, Cambodia After I purchased Srey Mom from her brothel for $203 a year ago and brought her back to her village, the joy was overwhelming. Her parents and siblings had assumed she was dead, and they shrieked and hugged and cried.
I had doubts about the other sex slave I had purchased, Srey Neth, whom I wrote about on Wednesday - and who in fact is thriving and is now preparing to become a hairdresser. But I was pretty sure that Srey Mom would make it.
So I'm devastated to say that a year later, I found Srey Mom back here in the wild town of Poipet, in her old brothel. She's devastated, too - when she spotted me, she ran away to her room in the back of the brothel until she could compose herself.
"I never lie to people, but I lied to you," she said forlornly. "I said I would not come back, and I did. I didn't want to return, but I did."
Yet, sadly, such an experience is common. Aid groups find it unnerving that they liberate teenagers from the bleak back rooms of a brothel, take them to a nice shelter - and then at night the kids sometimes climb over the walls and run back to the brothel.
It would be a tidier world if slaves always sought freedom. But prostitutes often are shattered and stigmatized, and sometimes they feel that the only place they can hold their head high is in the brothel.
Srey Mom, too, has zero self-esteem, but in her case no one in her village knew her background, and she was clear of debts. The central problem, as best I can piece together the situation, is that she was addicted to methamphetamines, and that craving destroyed her will power, sending her fleeing back to the brothel so that she could get her drugs.
Over the last year, an aid group looking after Srey Mom, American Assistance for Cambodia, gave her several more chances, once bringing her to Phnom Penh to enroll in school to become a hair dresser. But each time, Srey Mom fled back to drugs and the brothel.
"Ninety-five percent of the girls take drugs," Srey Mom told me. Some girls inject morphine, but brothel owners worry that needle holes make girls look unsightly, so methamphetamine pills are most common.
Some brothel owners welcome addiction, because it makes the girls dependent upon them. But Srey Mom said that is not true of her brothel owner, Heok Tem, whom she calls "Mother."
"Mother doesn't want us to use drugs," Srey Mom said. She has an eerily close relationship with Mrs. Heok Tem, and these days that emotional bond keeps her in the brothel as much as do her debts. Mrs. Heok Tem seems to feel genuine affection for Srey Mom and truly helped in the effort to get Srey Mom to start a new life, but she also cheats Srey Mom ruthlessly - I examined the brothel's account books - and rakes in cash by pimping the girl, which exposes her to AIDS.
"It's wrong," Mrs. Heok Tem admitted. But for now, she says, she needs the money.
Srey Mom still says her dream is to start life over in her village. "I want to go away," she said. "I don't want to stay here long. I'm not happy here. ... I will just look after my younger sisters. I'm already bad, and I don't want them to become bad like me."
I don't believe it will ever happen. I hate to write anyone off, but I'm afraid that Srey Mom will remain in the brothel until she is dying of AIDS (36 percent of girls in local brothels have H.I.V., and eventually it catches up with almost all of them). I finally dared tell her my fear. I described some young women I had just seen, gaunt and groaning, dying of AIDS in Poipet, and I told her I feared she would end up the same way.
"I'm afraid of that, too," she replied, her voice breaking. "This is an unhappy life. I don't want to do this."
Maybe that's what I find saddest about Srey Mom: She is a wonderful, good-hearted girl who gives money to beggars, who offers Buddhist prayers for redemption - but who is already so broken that she seems unable to escape a world that she hates and knows is killing her.
President Bush declared in his inaugural address this week that "no one deserves to be a slave" and that advancing freedom is "the calling of our time." I can't think of a better place to start than the hundreds of thousands of girls trafficked each year, for this 21st-century version of slavery has not only grown in recent years but is also especially diabolical - it poisons its victims, like Srey Mom, so that eventually chains are often redundant.
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/01/31/opinion/edkristof.html
Lock up the pimps
Nicholas D. Kristof The New York Times
Tuesday, February 1, 2005
POIPET, Cambodia
Optimism and sex trafficking don't usually go together.
Yet despite the widespread belief that sex slavery is intractable and inevitable, it isn't. Look, prostitution itself will probably always be around, but we could largely stop the buying and selling of the teenagers who are routinely held in bondage in brothels from Calcutta to Belize.
If this is an optimistic column, one reason is that I had originally planned to use this space differently. I had thought I would find and write about whoever had replaced Srey Neth, the teenager I had purchased for $150 and then freed a year ago.
So I climbed to the top floor of the Phnom Pich Guesthouse (past the sign asking guests not to bring in their machine guns or hand grenades) and found the room that used to be Srey Neth's world. But now the entire floor is empty.
It turned out that the police had raided the guesthouse right after my columns a year ago and arrested Srey Neth's pimp. So now the local sex traffickers are more careful about peddling virgins.
There's a lesson there. In the long run the best way to address the problem is to educate girls and raise their status in society. But a law-enforcement model - sending traffickers to prison - is also very effective in reducing the worst forms of sex slavery.
"It's pretty doable," said Gary Haugen, who runs International Justice Mission, a Washington-based organization that does terrific work in battling sex trafficking. "You don't have to arrest everybody. You just have to get enough that it sends a ripple effect and changes the calculations."
He added wryly that his aim is to "drive traffickers of virgin village girls to fence stolen radios instead."
With that aim in mind, the West should pressure nations like Cambodia to adopt a two-part strategy. First, such nations must crack down on the worst forms of flesh-peddling. (A UN report estimated that in Asia alone, "one million children are involved in the sex trade under conditions that are indistinguishable from slavery.")
Two girls, age 4 and 6, were being quietly offered for sale in Poipet last month. That kind of child abuse can be defeated, as has been shown in the Cambodian hamlet of Svay Pak, which specialized in pedophilia. When I first visited it, 6-year-olds were served up for $3 a session, but after foreign pressure, those brothels are now shuttered.
Second, they must crack down on corrupt police officers who protect the slave traders. Here in Poipet, local people whispered to me that one brothel kept terrified young virgin girls locked up in the back, awaiting sale. So I marched in the brothel's back entrance and looked around.
As it happened, this brothel was undergoing an expansion, which will make it the biggest in town, and the back rooms were all undergoing renovation and empty. But then the owner rushed in - and introduced himself as a senior police official.
I asked him if he imprisoned young girls in his brothel, and he replied: "That's impossible, because I work in the police criminal division, and so I clearly know the law."
Getting countries like Cambodia to confront the sale of children is easier than one may think. I'm generally very suspicious of economic sanctions, but the U.S. State Department's office on trafficking has used the threat of sanctions very effectively to get foreign governments to take steps against trafficking (like the closing of the pedophilia brothels at Svay Pak). But it shouldn't be just one lonely office in the State Department demanding crackdowns. Where's everybody else?
On a reporting trip to Cambodia in 1996, I met a 15-year-old Cambodian girl who had been kidnapped off the street and imprisoned in a brothel. Her mother finally tracked her down, and they had a loving reunion in the brothel. But the pimp had paid good money for the girl and refused to give her up. The police protected the brothel, so the mother had to leave without her daughter.
That girl, now probably dead of AIDS, haunts me still. It was partly shame at not having intervened then that led me to breach journalistic custom last year and buy the freedom of the two sex slaves I wrote about. The solution, though, isn't to buy individual girls - that only makes trafficking more profitable - but to put traffickers behind bars.
Nearly a decade after I interviewed that girl, this scourge is poisoning more young lives than ever. I'm optimistic that we have the tools to wipe out this modern slavery - but do we have the will?