by Somaly Mam
After completing the Tom Dy Center, my first priority was to find a place where the children we had rescued could grow up. Some children could simply never be returned to their families—there was too great a risk that they would be sold back into prostitution. By now we were housing several very young children, some as young as seven or eight, whom we had rescued from brothels. These girls had suffered enormously and they needed care. They needed someone to talk to and trust. They needed to go to school and rebuild themselves as people. I didn’t want to give them to an institutional orphanage where they would be rejected and mocked or merely fed and watered.
I thought the ideal situation for these girls would be to grow up somewhere outside Phnom Penh. Sometimes the pimps stood outside our shelter in Tuol Kok and threatened the girls. Its location was becoming known, and there was a lot of movement, with new women arriving and residents leaving all the time. It was not a stable place to grow up. The idea came to me that I could buy some land in Thlok Chhrov, near my father’s property, and make it into a children’s center. I had visited my father several times, and the village was growing—prosperity was spreading there too. The school was spacious. The forest was close. There were a lot of new people in Thlok Chhrov, and the old ones were excessively nice to me now that I was a white man’s wife and drove there from the city in a car.
I wanted to show those villagers that even if you have been a prostitute, even if your skin is dark, you can still be a good person. You can be clever, and you can succeed. After the way they had treated me, I had made a good life for myself. I was helping others, and they could do that too.
Above all, if I built a shelter in Thlok Chhrov, it would be far enough from Phnom Penh that the children would be safe. They could grow up in a garden, straight and strong, and go to school.
With the money from the Prince of Asturias Award, AFESIP bought a piece of land right near the village school in Thlok Chhrov. As a matter of fact, the land we bought was the same field where I had thrown a grenade and practiced cleaning a gun in military training. All around it were rice paddies and orchards. On it we built a spacious house on stilts. It has a fishpond and a chicken coop and space to house a dozen weaving looms and sewing machines, so the girls can learn a trade. I want it to be beautiful for them too, so we plant flowers together. A seed is like a little girl: it can look small and worthless, but if you treat it well then it will grow beautiful.
Whenever we find underage children in the brothels, we always ask them if they want to see their families again. They are sometimes very young, but they deserve to be heard, and we do occasionally reintegrate girls back into their families, if their parents can be trusted. We need to be sure that they won’t be resold, and we follow up such cases with frequent visits. Sometimes it is enough to give the family a little money, so they can start up a business.
But often the girls beg to stay on with us, and I take them to Thlok Chhrov. They see the little girls their age—seven, eleven, thirteen—in their blue skirts and white shirts, happy together. They see the food—it is good home cooking, and many of these girls are hungry. They see animals and flowers. They know that all the girls in our house have done the same things they have done, lived through the same life they did. They ask me, “If I stay here for a week, and try to go to school, can I have a school uniform like the others?” I tell them yes, and at the end of the week they want to stay forever. They can live with us, but only until they grow up. Then, as hard as it is to say good-bye to a child you have brought up—for whom you are, in some sense, her only family—it is time for her to leave too.
When the children moved into that center in 1999, my heart lifted. I felt that I had finally done something right. They live there in an atmosphere of love and understanding and they know they are safe. We have fifty-five children there now, and we recently expanded the house again. The youngest is Ath, thirteen months old. Strictly speaking, we shouldn’t have taken him in, but someone left him in the garbage outside our center in Phnom Penh when he was a few days old, and the cook adopted him.
One of the girls living in our Thlok Chhrov house right now is Sry Mach. She was six years old when AFESIP rescued her from a brothel, along with her sister, Sry Mouch, who was nine. That was in early 2006. The raid took place in a town near the Thai border and rescued about ten girls, but those two sisters were by far the youngest prostitutes on sale. We took all ten girls back to Phnom Penh with us, but those two I took with me, on my lap. They were much too frightened to talk. They didn’t answer my questions and only ate fruit like savages when I stopped by the roadside to buy them some food. They held each other like little animals. They reminded me of little birds, with huge eyes and with their mouths open only for food.
As I said earlier, younger girls are very likely to become infected with HIV and other diseases, because of tearing. Sry Mach has AIDS. She’s very sick—she has had pneumonia and TB, and she has been in the hospital several times. She does not want to leave us to go to a special AIDS charity, so she’s receiving antiretroviral treatment from Médecins Sans Frontières. She has never told me much about her story, only that a white man hurt her. The AFESIP psychologist says Sry Mach has put her trauma behind her and we should help it stay that way, so we don’t ask her questions. Her sister, Sry Mouch, is ten years old now and she’s doing fine.
Another six-year-old whom we rescued recently is called Moteta. After being alerted about her by another prostitute, one of our informers—whom we call peer educators—we found Moteta, beaten black and blue, in a cage in a Tuol Kok brothel. She was sold to the brothel by her mother, and almost immediately after, the meebon’s business began going bad. The meebon called a fortune-teller, and the fortune-teller said Moteta had brought an evil spirit. To get rid of it they would have to hurt her, to beat it out. They had already sold her virginity, of course, but they put Moteta in a cage and beat her.
With children this young, you don’t ask questions. Moteta calls me “Grandmother,” and I tell her, “Don’t be frightened, I’ll protect you.” I promise her that nobody will ever hurt her again. She’s so used to working all the time that she’s always trying to wash everyone’s clothes and clean the house in the Thlok Chhrov center. She was in the brothel for so long that she called the meebon her mother. She’s been with us for eighteen months; she’s now seven years old.
Our oldest resident in Thlok Chhrov is Ma Li—she’s nineteen, but she’s lived with us ever since she was rescued, four years ago, and she doesn’t feel ready to leave yet. She has her school certificate, but she wants to stay and teach weaving, and she’s in charge of all the little girls now.
Setting up the AFESIP children’s center in Thlok Chhrov is the best thing I have ever done. Most of the girls who live there are between twelve and fifteen years old, and they are so sweet to one another. The older girls call the littlest ones “younger sister,” and when new girls come in they help them as much as they can. We have a nurse and we look after them. They go to the village school in crisp school uniforms. They can talk to a psychologist, but some of these girls don’t want to talk. Weaving is another kind of therapy, a way of clearing your mind and making something beautiful.
They are good girls and look after the elderly in the village. They’re always very respectful of adults and they’re always first in the class at school. At first the villagers rejected them for what they’d done, because they were dirty. They called them whores. But now they admire them and protect them from strangers. They tell me, “Somaly, you bring up your girls so beautifully.”
I tell the children I love them; I say they are good. I tell them, “It’s up to you to show that, no matter what has happened to you, you are still clever and good and strong.”
I know the people who paid money to hurt these children. I know the clients. Some of them are tourists, but most are Cambodians. They are tuk-tuk drivers, cops, shopkeepers—ordinary men. The only difference in social class is the order in which they use the girls. The richest,
the government officials and big businessmen, go first. In the end, when a girl costs only five thousand riel—just over one U.S. dollar—it’s the poor’s turn. It’s hard to say which is worse.
To me, few people are lower than the men who use prostitutes. They pay to rape women, teenagers, and little girls. They use violence—they hit, slap, and bite, like in the porn videos that are on sale everywhere. It excites them to use power and to see pain. Although some clients pretend to believe that they are somehow doing the girls a favor, the reality is violence and rape. I spent a lot of time thinking about why, in Cambodia, people felt justified in treating women and children this way.
How do you become somebody who can be so careless about other people? Cambodians have been traumatized by the years of war and suffering, and it has made many people completely self-centered, especially in the cities. If there’s an accident on the road, they won’t stop and help. The idea is, if you stop, someone may accuse you of having caused the accident, and you’ll be stuck with the bill. And it’s true—people do that.
To men, women are like servants. That’s the way it has always been in Cambodia. Girls are taught only shame and ignorance about their bodies, and men have their first sexual experience in brothels. Rape is the only thing they know.
I wanted to try to begin to change this mentality. In 1999, Emma Bonino managed to get us funds for a campaign to educate men. We went to the Ministry of Defense to explain why this was essential, and we received the authorization to go to police stations and military camps and give lectures. The first time I did it, everyone said, “What? You’re going to talk to them about sex? Aren’t you embarrassed and ashamed?” I was definitely embarrassed, but I didn’t think anyone else would do it.
I took Mr. Chheng, a male social worker from AFESIP, with me. We started off by explaining how to protect yourself from contracting AIDS. The men were interested because the epidemic was becoming widespread, and they were scared. We explained everything, starting from the very basics. With the help of a banana, we even showed them how to put on condoms. This was the moment to say things loud and clear, to get them talking. By asking them questions, we arrived at the problem of their relationship with their wives.
A lot of Cambodian men say they go to brothels because their wives don’t like making love. They talk about this openly. Cambodian women are taught to submit, but the idea of female pleasure in our culture is foreign. The men say their wives’ passivity disgusts them. No one is happy in this situation. Tradition says the wife must stay quiet, unmoving, while the husband gets on with his business.
One man said his wife actually told him to go to prostitutes. He never saw her naked and never even saw her breasts when she breast-fed their children. If he tried to take off his clothes, she said, “If you want to do like in those films, go see the whores.” He burst out laughing—“Oh those young Vietnamese girls, just freshly arrived—when they get undressed, what a marvel! They’re plump, they have white skin, like young piglets!”
The AFESIP lecturers confronted these subjects simply and directly. We talked about mutual pleasure, and pain. We showed them a video of a little girl who recounted how she had been raped—exactly what had happened to her, and who had done it. Sometimes one or two of the girls from our shelter would come to talk about what had been done to them. The men in the audience would often break down and cry. Many of them had been clients of prostitutes just like these girls, but somehow it had never occurred to them to think about how the girls were being treated.
In the first month we received four hundred letters from men who had attended our lectures. In the two years that we did this, we reached thousands of men, most of them soldiers and policemen—men who needed to think about these things. We taught them about what the brothels are really like and how they work. It was also useful because we made a few friends in police stations, even though most of them were junior police officers.
It took enormous amounts of organization and energy rallying the public to come to our events, touring with the education team, and maintaining the cars on our terrible roads. And in 2000, after Emma Bonino resigned from her job with the European Union, our funding from ECHO stopped. We decided to wait for better days to start the program up again.
At that time we were suddenly swamped by a huge arrival of girls from two rescue operations. Almost all of them asked to stay on at the shelter. It was a bad time to be caught short of funds. We called a meeting of all AFESIP Cambodia personnel to work out what needed to be done. In the end we all had to pool our salaries and everything we had left over from essential expenses in order to feed the girls.
AFESIP’s financial problems always come at the end of the year. However many girls we predict will come, there are always more. It’s impossible to refuse them shelter or to evict them. I could receive funding for five hundred girls—we would still need more.
.13.
AFESIP
The year 2000 was a difficult, painful time for our family. At around the same time as AFESIP lost the European funding for our educational campaign, I had a miscarriage. I felt horribly guilty that I had not been more careful and rested as the doctors said I should. Also, Phanna’s husband left her. He took off with another woman, with all of Phanna’s savings. Phanna was still a volunteer with us, teaching sewing classes for free, but she had a part-time job with PADEK, also teaching sewing.
AFESIP took shape slowly, in fits and starts; it was never a planned progression. We grew as the need arose. We set up basic classes in reading and writing Khmer. We expanded our training programs to teach cooking, weaving, and hair-dressing—skills that can quickly translate into jobs. We began teaching every one of our residents small-business skills, things like how to keep accounts and run a shop. Whatever they end up doing, it’ll be important that they learn to keep their own accounts.
My father began coming to our center more often. He had moved to Phnom Penh to be with Mother. She was still the cook and caretaker of our shelter, and Father volunteered to teach the girls to read and write.
It amused me to overhear him teaching girls the chbap srey. He would assemble them in a circle under the shade of a tree. After class he would tell them that the good parts of the old code are the need for silence and privacy. But it doesn’t mean you should not defend yourself. That, he said, you are permitted to do.
Father never spoke to the girls directly about prostitution, but he told them, “What you have learned, from experience, is worth much more than gold. If you have a house it may burn down. Any kind of possession can be lost, but your experience is yours forever. Keep it and find a way to use it.”
We had begun receiving funding from UNICEF, from the Dutch network SKN, from the Spanish government and the agency Manos Unidas. Our Tom Dy Center grew larger. The sex business in Cambodia was becoming more and more professional, and it was reaching out to a new market.
The temples of Angkor were drawing tourists. Every night of the year, thousands of foreigners rented hotel rooms in the town of Siem Reap, nearby. They were Japanese, German, American, Australian—and some of them wanted to sleep with young girls and children. We began finding so many girls imprisoned in brothels in Siem Reap that in 2001 we opened a shelter there too. Until we intervened, the police had never done anything about it, because they had never been told to.
Most of the clients of Cambodian prostitutes are locals, but some are foreigners. It’s a very profitable business, the sale of sex. The traffickers earn a lot of money, especially if the girl is young. In Siem Reap, an ordinary girl, not a virgin, might bring in about fifteen dollars for about five days of work. Four girls will make you almost $360 a month, and cost you nothing but a bit of rice and a few guns. Since the annual income of more than a third of the population is less than $360 a year, with profits like these it’s clear that you can bribe whomever you want.
And it’s not just Cambodia, by any means. Every day fresh girls are trucked from Cambodia across the Thai border. Cambodia is a
destination country, a transit zone, a place of export; Cambodian girls go to Thailand, Vietnamese girls come to Cambodia. It’s an industry whose product is young human flesh. With fake passports, the girls are sent to Taiwan, Malaysia, Canada. Mafias traffic women around the world. It’s a huge global business, as lucrative as drugs, and Southeast Asia is one of its epicenters.
In 2002, I was in France, accepting an award from the town of Nantes, when I received a phone call. A group of armed policemen had come to our AFESIP shelter in Phnom Penh. We had recently taken in fourteen young Vietnamese girls after a brothel raid. The girls had been brought to Cambodia from Vietnam, and they had no passports. The police arrested the girls for “immigration irregularities” and took them away.
Of course, what really must have happened was that the pimps paid a judge a lot of money to get the girls back. Young Vietnamese girls are a prize in Cambodia for their white, fresh skin. By the time we got a court order to release them, most of the girls had already disappeared, and we never saw them again.
If I had been there, if I had had a gun on me, I don’t know what I might have done. I felt real violence within me. There is no law, no police, no justice to protect little worms like us. If you’re strong, or if you have powerful protectors, you’re left alone. If not, forget it.