by Ashley Judd
Pol Pot was a meticulous killer who wanted everyone inventoried, so the interrogators at Tuol Sleng kept detailed records. The walls of the museum are covered with stunning photographs of each murdered person, like a perverse high school yearbook. Visitors, most of them Cambodians who had lost family in the genocide, were holding one another, sobbing openly as they stared at the exhibits. I cried with them, totally overwhelmed. Some of the photographs seemed to speak. They were taken the instant mothers were separated from children, as vicious tricks were played, promises of amnesty made, and then torture and murder committed. There was one child who especially disturbed me; sometimes a face is archetypal, and in it I see other faces. This little boy reminded me of Dario. I was shattered. It was a haunting, deeply disturbing experience.
Later that day we visited a clinic, clean though very modestly outfitted, run by one of PSI’s partners. I sat with a woman stricken with AIDS, wasting away on her deathbed. When I asked about her family, all she could whisper was “Pol Pot,” indicating they had all been murdered.
I was beginning to grasp the intergenerational nature of trauma, how the whole population of Cambodia was scarred. Survivors were haunted; children carried their parents’ grief and guilt. A Cambodian doctor I met had survived the Pol Pot regime by pretending to be an illiterate peasant. He worked in a forced labor camp, and for four years, one wrong word, one allusion, one careless gesture, would have betrayed his true identity and led to his execution. He carried on his grueling charade even though it meant watching others die when he knew he could help them. The doctor’s desperate strategy worked, and he survived. He was now the head of Cambodia’s malaria prevention program.
To me, his story illustrated both the tragedy and the resiliency of the Cambodian people. It was one of many I would hear. The minister of commerce was twenty when Pol Pot came into power. He lost seventy-two relatives to the genocide—his entire extended family from every living generation. He told me they were so desperate for help from America, they would use rocks to spell out S-O-S on the ground, hoping that when the surveillance planes flew over, the pilots would see their message and rescue them. But the Americans had destroyed Cambodia with bombs, then abandoned the country to murderers.
Incrementally, we are making amends. I visited an American–run free hospital for the poor in Phnom Penh called Center of Hope. And USAID has been funding crucial medical projects through NGOs like PSI and its local partners. The years of war, genocide, and mass migration had turned Cambodia into one of the world’s poorest countries and a nation of orphans and widows. In 2004, women headed a quarter of households, and most earned less than a dollar a day. Many women, devoid of alternatives, succumbed to prostituted sex work to survive or were lured to the city in search of factory jobs only to be tricked, forced, coerced, and outright kidnapped into brothels, from which there is usually no escape. Desperate parents sometimes knowingly turned their young daughters over to brothels to help work off their debts, to raise money to feed other mouths at home. Some were sold outright to traffickers for international sex slavery.
Our guide into Phnom Penh’s netherworld of prostitution and trafficking was the great Mu Sochua, then Cambodia’s minister of women’s and veterans’ affairs and one of the most inspirational people I have met. She is a tiny, delicate woman with high cheekbones and a quiet, implacable resolve. Sochua was a student in 1972 when she was able to flee Cambodia and the war, but her parents were killed in the genocide. After eighteen years of exile in Europe and the United States, where she earned degrees in social work and psychology, Sochua returned to help rebuild her shattered country. She founded Khemara—one of PSI’s partners—the first ever homegrown NGO in Cambodia run by women, for women; their mission is to provide comprehensive health, education, and vocational training programs. She went into politics, and as soon as she was appointed minister, she launched a national campaign for gender equality. Politics reinforced her commitment to social justice; I have never met another official who chooses to walk dangerous public parks after dark in order to witness sexual exploitation firsthand, to continue to steel an outrage she forges into a passion for democracy.
The Khmer culture has traditionally been patriarchal, with women expected to obey their fathers, husbands, and elders without question. “Society always treated young boys and men as kings,” Sochua explained. Women had few rights to begin with. But after years of war, the social constraints that moderated the exploitation of girls and women fell apart. Although prostitution had always been present, the industry grew explosively after Pol Pot’s regime. Cambodian men flocked to the brothels, and men were paying for sex with younger and younger prostituted women, even children, believing that sex with young children increased their virility. Some even believed that raping a young virgin would cure AIDS and other diseases, a myth that helped create a sickening market for girls ten and younger. “Genocide took the soul of my country,” Sochua said. “Men no longer have limits, and the rule of law has broken down.” According to numerous human rights reports, the Cambodian police were more likely to be demanding bribes and abusing prostituted people than enforcing the law.
This morning, Mu Sochua guided us into Svay Pak, the most lawless and depraved brothel district in Cambodia; she later told me that she and her associate had grimly and purposefully conspired to take me, “a bright light, to the darkest place.” About six miles outside of the capital, we entered an affluent-looking neighborhood of smoothly stuccoed villas painted in pastel colors and perched on stilts. I was about to comment on them, making up something positive in my mind about this domestic expression of relative economic prosperity, when Mu Sochua, in a voice thick with disgust, told us that these houses belonged to pimps and traffickers. The money that built them came from sexual pain and humiliation.
The nice little houses soon gave way to a congested warren of muddy alleys and storefront brothels hidden behind sliding metal grates. I will never forget peering into a gap between houses that afforded a harrowing glimpse of very young children and women in a courtyard. There was a small outdoor fire smoking. They were hanging wash on a line. We heard tinny music playing from a cheap boom box.
“That is Vietnamese music,” Sochua told me. “They have been smuggled here from Vietnam for sex.”
I thought: Slaves? This is what slaves look like? They aren’t shackled? They light fires? They do wash? They listen to music from their homeland? This was but the beginning of a series of revelations that would bend my mind and break my heart.
The next bizarre thing for me to grasp was that I could visit slaves, sit intimately with them, hearing details of their realities through open dialogue and sharing, yet when I left they would still be slaves. As public health advocates, we could be tolerated by pimps and madams, who, while not exactly friendly, would accept our presence and medical assistance. The women, girls, and boys had been vilely raped and abused the night before I arrived, and after I left, it would be mere hours before the humiliation and emotional torture began again.
Next was that the expression of stupendous grief and pain from captive people would not move their captors to set them free. The outpouring of anguish I witnessed meant nothing to those who caused and (so it seemed to me) could end it.
The distress was stunning, and I was so emotionally flooded that I shut down a few times. What I had chosen to face simply exceeded my capacity to process, and eventually I would have to develop an effective and safe method for coping in order to endure in this world of human rights atrocities. I look at photographs from that day, and certain moments are crystal clear, hyperlucid, while others make me feel slack, lethargic, fuzzy, much as I did in the moments I became overwhelmed. Eventually, as I learned how to stay present in the brothels, everything would be seared into me: pieces of dirty, floral-printed cotton hanging between filthy mattresses; squares of linoleum meeting the wall; a person’s few possessions crumpled in a bucket; the madam relaxing on the landing, watching a black-and-white TV; the eyes of
men as they lined up to buy prostituted sex and their eyes as they emerged from paid sex acts.
In a small round room, I met a group of about seventeen sex slaves. They had dressed up for me, as clean as they could be in their circumstances, equal parts excited and shy to have a guest. Mu Sochua offered a few words of introduction, describing me as an American woman, a Hollywood actor, who had traveled from America to meet them. I instinctively sat down and held the hands on either side of me. Then, I must have asked each person to tell me about him- or herself, perhaps inquiring what they wanted me to know about them, because by the end of our time together, I had scooted on my bottom around the circle, reaching out to each person as intimately as I could. I ended up hugging and even cradling each one as they explained how they became a sex slave and what their life was like. I didn’t know what else to do. Thank God my faith teaches me that listening is the beginning of empathy and, when followed by action, is a powerful prayer.
The most unforgettable story from that day was told to me by a transgender sex slave who had a frightening scar crisscrossing her face. She told me how, when she realized growing up that she was different from other boys, her family shunned her and she fled to Phnom Penh. She burrowed her head into my chest, sobbing violently, as she told me how she was broken in as a slave by a man who pinned her down and raped her while a dog mauled her face. She had contracted HIV. (In fact, most everyone in the room was HIV-positive, which was why Khemera had been permitted access to them.)
I have a beautiful photograph of her that makes me cry as hard as any ugly story I’ve heard, any image of despair I’ve seen. It is taken from behind me, showing a close-up of her face nestled in the crook of my shoulder. Her face is slick with tears, her mouth is open in a wide smile, her eyes are looking directly into the lens. She seems radiant, luminous, joyous—I believe it’s because someone listened; someone touched her for the purpose of love rather than harm. I wonder how long this moment of relief lasted for her?
The next thing I remember, I was holding hands with my transgendered friend, surrounded by sex slaves, walking with Mu Sochua out into the sunlight and through the streets of Svay Pak. As we walked, Sochua told me approvingly how radical and magical and defiant this act was, for the local pimps, madams, traffickers, and clients, who were no doubt watching, to see a government minister and a Hollywood star, their heads held high, taking up with human beings they thought they owned.
As I write this in 2010, the grief is as fresh as it was that day, knowing the majority of those I met in that small round room are still sex slaves. Their stories are known to Human Rights Watch, and posted on their website. I read and reread them, wrapping my mind around a reality that should be impossible.
Another iconic story from that day is one I would hear over and over again worldwide, differing only in small details. Later that day, we drove back to Phnom Penh and sat in a small, dirty community center that nonetheless carried a strong message of empowerment and resilience. It was a place where vulnerable, abused women could begin to form female alliances. I watched a session in which prostitutes practiced verbal skills through role-playing. They were learning how to introduce the necessity of a condom with their clients and teaching one another strategies to reduce both resistance and violence.
Each woman in this group, save one, came from impoverished families and worked in prostitution because she had little or no education and no opportunities. (“Prostitution occurs in the absence of choices,” Ruchira Gupta, who became a hero to me in India, would teach me.) All of these women sent money home. Some prostituted women were aware of the risks they were running in the midst of an AIDS epidemic, but one told me, “I may be dead in a few years from contracting HIV/AIDS, but I don’t have food for tomorrow.” I have since had others say to me, “My life is so miserable, I don’t want to use a condom. I want to die.”
Another of the peer educators told me her story in detail: Poor and rural, struggling to survive, she contemplated a typical migration to an urban area in search of work in a garment factory, where conditions were often harsh. A seemingly kind friend said, “Oh, I can get you a job at the factory where I work.” After traveling to the capital, she discovered to her horror that her friend had sold her to a man who locked her for a week in a hotel room, where he abused her obscenely. He threatened to have her gang-raped if she resisted and beat her if she was anything less than fully compliant. At the end of the week, he sold her to a brothel, where she was ordered to work to pay him back what he had spent on her. In addition, she was told she had to pay her room and board at the brothel. She had been a virgin. I despairingly puzzled over the economics of this strange math, before I could accept that modern indentured servitude is terribly common.
She was such a gentle young woman; it was hard to reconcile her manner with the brutality she had just recounted. My soft-spoken friend explained how now she was ruined and unable ever to return home. She came to the center to learn vocational skills that might someday allow her to earn enough money on which to live; they offered hairdressing, sewing, and beading training, as well as access to medical information and other services. As a peer educator who helps identify and sensitize other slaves and prostitutes to the health risks that are inherent in sexual exploitation, PSI paid her a small sum, which allowed her to accept fewer clients to eke out her living.
The name of Sochua’s campaign for gender equality was Neary Rattanak, meaning “Women Are Precious Gems.” She told me that she had turned an old Khmer saying, “Men are like gold, women are like white cloth,” into a motto: “Men are like gold, women are like precious gems.” The redemptive message was that unlike white cloth, a gem is a thing of permanent strength and value, and if it is soiled, it can be polished and made to shine even more brightly.
I lost touch with Mu Sochua for a time, but I never forgot her. I kept a news article about her my mother had given me in my bedside drawer for years, a fierce tableau of courage and an exhortation for me never to forget that day or the reality of the modern slave trade, in which more people are trapped than at the height of the slave trade in the nineteenth century. Trafficking in human beings is a $12 billion business, more lucrative than the illegal drug and arms trade, and it is a major factor in the continuing AIDS pandemic.
I was unsurprised when Mu Sochua was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. And in 2008, with the help of international pressure, she was finally able to persuade her government to enact its first antitrafficking law and to shut down the notorious brothels in Svay Pak. Unfortunately, most of the pimps and traffickers simply moved to other locations and went further underground. United with scholars and activists worldwide, I have intensified my antislavery efforts, realizing that as long as there is a demand for prostituted sex, people will find a way to sell girls and women. “Demand abolition” is essential.
From a public health perspective, condom distribution and education programs in Cambodian red-light districts had been effective, and most new cases of HIV/AIDS were no longer originating in the brothels. Now HIV was more often spread from husband to wife and between sweethearts who still had unprotected sex. PSI did market research to find out why Cambodians resisted using condoms and what would make them change their attitudes. A survey indicated that most Khmers in romantic relationships believed that using a condom implied you didn’t trust your partner. But it was “okay” to use condoms for family planning. So PSI marketed the OK brand condom, and designed a series of television ads showing young couples negotiating their condom use. It was a huge success—and sales of the OK condom went up 7.5 percent in just one year.
PSI also helped produce a popular television soap opera ominously titled Punishment of Love, which chronicled a couple’s ongoing saga of unsafe sex and its consequences. PSI supports dozens of “edutainment” projects like this throughout the developing world, reaching hundreds of millions of people with healthy behavior change messages.
Because many of those millions have no access to TV or even
radio, the organization sends mobile video units stashed in rugged four-wheel-drive trucks to rural outposts. As evening fell, I had the thrill of adventure in my heart while I accompanied one such tricked-out truck deep into the hinterlands of Cambodia. By the end of this one day, I had already seen and done more in Cambodia than I imagined I would in my lifetime. PSI was giving me a window to the world, through the lens of public health, the building block of a sustainability, and as painful as the glimpse often was, I was also loving every minute of it.
My companions were a dynamic team of gregarious kids, many of them HIV-positive (and breaking considerable social taboos by outing themselves in public). They were experienced, energetic, and determined to improve health outcomes among poor people, and proving it by putting on up to twenty-five shows a month in fields, parks, and villages across Cambodia. Taking this show on the road was no act of whimsy—the journey was arduous and difficult. The peer educators were more than professionals: They sang and acted, entertained and engaged their rapt audience as if their lives and the lives of others, depended on it. And they do. Their presence is a fantastic draw for rural folks, some of whom don’t even have electricity. From the truck they show episodes of the soap opera, and then perform comedy routines and bring up members of the audience to participate in skits that combine medically accurate sex education with good old-fashioned fun.