by Somaly Mam
After that happened, we set up an AFESIP office in Vietnam and began talking to the Vietnamese and Cambodian authorities about setting up a safe way to get these girls home. We proposed that the Cambodian police could release the girls into the care of AFESIP, at least until the Vietnamese authorities could identify them. That would keep the girls safe. We offered to help the police by identifying the people who created the problem—the traffickers. We also suggested that AFESIP could build a training center in Vietnam, like the Tom Dy Center in Phnom Penh.
The authorities agreed, and we made new, separate arrangements for the Vietnamese girls we found. We rented another house as a short-term shelter where they could stay. Some of them spent only three months with us waiting for their papers; others stayed much longer. We asked an ethnic Vietnamese woman from Cambodia to give them literacy classes and a Vietnamese-speaking former prostitute to give them counseling.*1
We also set up a new organization, AFESIP Vietnam, and opened a shelter in Ho Chi Minh City. It works just as we do in Phnom Penh. Some girls have nowhere to go: they are homeless or have violent families. Often they have step-fathers who try to take advantage of them; almost always, there is rejection by their family or community. These days there are traders in almost every province—people who make a commission from the brothels when they bring in a new girl. It is better for our girls to learn a skill and stay out of harm’s way.
In 2001, I became pregnant again, and the doctor said the baby was a boy. Ning and Adana were over the moon about it. Ning was ten and Adana six, and both were ecstatic about having a baby brother. I tried to take better care of myself. I tried to travel less along the bumpy roads between provincial villages and stay in Phnom Penh a little more.
Nikolai was born in April 2002. The girls were adorable. They stayed with me in the hospital room in Bangkok that night, along with their new brother, and every time he whimpered they raced over to his cot to tell him, “Hush, little brother,” all night long.
By this time, AFESIP’s operation in Cambodia had become much more sophisticated. We had set up teams of social workers, many of them former prostitutes, to go out every day, distributing condoms, telling girls how to get to our shelter, and advising them on how to calm clients who are drunk or violent. They also collected information on where the brothels were. We printed flyers with our phone number. We created and expanded an AFESIP clinic where women could come for free medical treatment.
We offered small sums of money to peer educators. These are often former prostitutes who alert us when a girl is very sick or when a minor child arrives in the brothels from the countryside. Nowadays pimps change their “personnel” every two or three months in order to attract customers with the appeal of novelty. Then they trade the girls on, to brothels in the countryside, or in Thailand.
We hired a psychologist to talk with the girls, because so many of them are depressed and suicidal. We sent teams out at night to the parks and open areas where some of the worst kinds of prostitution take place. The “orange women” are girls who sell oranges in the public gardens. For the price of an orange, the client also fondles the girl. For twenty-five cents he can have sex with her. Often a crowd of men will gang-rape an orange girl, and it’s not uncommon to find a dead body in the morning.
These prostitutes don’t have the money to pay for medical care, but they have our telephone number. They call us when they’re ill, and our tuk-tuk driver brings them to our clinic. Here they can receive treatment and rest for fifteen days or so, if they are able. We make use of the time to explain that there are ways out of their situation, that their lives aren’t over. When they understand this, hope can return to them. They may begin to believe that they are not alone, that we can help. One day, they will come to us, but until then, they help us by letting us know about children and young girls who are being held against their will.
We cannot rescue every prostitute in every brothel. We try to focus on the worst cases, the captives, the children. When we hear about these things, we send investigators to the neighborhood. One of our full-time investigators is Srena, the young cop I met when I first moved back to Phnom Penh. They pose as clients. They talk to the girls in the brothels and take down their statements. If the girls say they have been sold, we make up a dossier and bring it to the government office of trafficking for evaluation, so that they can decide what needs to be done and verify all the details.
The local police are called in, but we try to withhold the exact location of the brothel until the last possible minute. AFESIP usually goes on the raid to observe the proceedings. We shelter the girls at the AFESIP center while a case can be prepared against the brothels.
I talk with every woman who comes into our center. I don’t judge her, and she knows that. I sit beside her and explain that if you’ve been a prostitute, it doesn’t mean your life is over. I talk about the women we employ, many of whom are former prostitutes too. I show these girls my clothes, and say, “You can learn to make this.” I tell them, “Don’t trust me, because you mustn’t trust people. Decide for yourself.”
In 2003, we opened an AFESIP garment workshop, and I take the women there. They know that in Cambodia a garment factory is often a brutal place, crowded and poorly ventilated. Many women are so ill treated and exploited there that they may even choose to become prostitutes voluntarily, though initially they don’t usually realize what that choice means. Our AFESIP Fair Fashion workshop isn’t like that. It’s a decent environment, where every employee is treated humanely, and a girl knows that every woman who works there has shared her experience.
She can see that it’s possible to get out of prostitution and make your way to a decent life that is clean. Almost all the women who come to us have some kind of illness or another. Sometimes it’s just that they’ve been starved and beaten, but after ten or fifteen unprotected sex acts every day for weeks or years, you catch diseases. Many of them have tuberculosis or HIV, and they usually agree to stay with AFESIP, if only to rest for a few days.
If they leave, these women know they can come back. There’s a wall around our shelter in Phnom Penh, but that’s to keep the pimps out, not to keep the girls in. And if they stay with us, we give them a completely new environment. At the Tom Dy Center, a paralegal whom we work with gives each woman advice and explains her rights. These women usually have no idea about this—after all, there is nothing in daily life in Cambodia to indicate that they have any rights. The paralegal urges them to lodge a complaint with the police. This can be a very important step toward rebuilding themselves. These girls need to feel they are not bad, not guilty for what they have done.
If they want to talk, we have a Khmer psychologist on staff, and this therapy can help to free them of the burden of their oppression. But talking is not an easy or common thing in Cambodia. People tend to be very restrained, and tradition demands you remain silent about misfortune.
In 2003 we opened an AFESIP office in Thailand, where the prostitution and trafficking industry was even larger than in Cambodia. We began looking through the centers where the Thai authorities kept illegal immigrants. Many girls there were from Cambodia and Vietnam and had been taken across the border by force to become prostitutes. The centers were not safe for them, and we began helping them get back home. We also began participating in rescue operations in Thailand.
In 2006 we set up another office in Laos, with a shelter and training center in the Sisattanak district. A few years ago a survey by the International Labour Organization found that almost one in ten women and girls from Sisattanak had left home to go to Thailand. One-third of them were younger than twenty-five. These girls leave home with a trader, often a woman who tells them they will be hired as domestic servants. They become bodies on sale in the big glassed-in bars in Bangkok, where the world’s tourists pick a girl by her number, or they service locals in other much dirtier and more violent places on the side of the road.
AFESIP’s shelter in Laos gives them medical care and v
ocational training, so they can return to their villages or start a new life on their own. We teach the women to cultivate mulberry trees and to produce and market silk. There are so many girls that we’ll soon need another shelter in Savannakhet Province. Eventually we need to start a shelter in Burma too, though it’s difficult to get the authorities to agree; we see huge numbers of Burmese girls.
At Siem Reap, there’s even a brothel with Korean, Romanian, and especially Moldovan women. The Asian clientele will pay a great deal for that kind of exoticism. It’s a global industry, and for some reason the world puts up with it.
The advantage of this network of offices is that AFESIP can now act as a mediator between Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, to help them pool their efforts to protect these women, and to help these women return to their homes. Most important, we can give the authorities information so they can fight the traffickers.
In the years since we first set up AFESIP in Cambodia, we have helped more than 3,400 victims of prostitution get back on their feet. In Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam we have helped another 1,000 or so. All of them have to go back to normal life at some point, and they have to be equipped to look after themselves.
Reintegration can be a long process. It takes a year and a half to train a woman to take the test for the government’s hairdressing certificate. If she has been badly damaged, it may take months for her to rebuild herself before she is even ready to begin. Some girls can become independent after ten months. For others who have suffered deeper trauma, it takes a minimum of two years.
When their training is over, we find every girl a job in an environment that is safe and humane, or we buy her the basics to set up an independent life—a sewing machine or a pig. We also visit her regularly, at least once a month for the first three months and repeatedly after that, for at least three years. That’s the minimum time for assuring ourselves that our efforts have succeeded.
Some of the girls are like part of our family. They invite us to their weddings. After ten years, they still bring their children for a visit, every year.
We can do all of this only because governments and organizations give us money, but we also need the donors’ support in much more important ways. To explain this, we always ask our benefactors to come and visit AFESIP. A few years ago, the Spanish secretary of state for foreign affairs, Mr. Cortés, came to see us with a government delegation, and they visited the sites. Mr. Cortés listened through an interpreter while a few of the girls told their stories. He came away transformed. He told me that he had heard me explain the work several times in Spain and that he had read the reports, but what he had heard here directly from the lips of the victims surpassed understanding. He was overwhelmed.
Sometimes it’s hard to convince the donors to visit. They stay in their air-conditioned offices, push their paperwork around, and simply don’t have the time. I try to tell them that their human presence and moral support are as important as their financial aid to the girls, who need to be recognized as full fellow human beings.
We have a great deal of support from many people around the world, and for that we are very grateful. But we sometimes have the impression that, for some benefactors, giving money is a way of getting rid of the problem—they don’t want to hear any more about it. It goes without saying that we can’t do this work alone. It’s too big for us. We want our action to be part of a whole chain of action, because it is not enough to look after some of the victims: we want human trafficking to end.
.14.
The Victims
Since we started AFESIP, the brothels have grown larger and more violent. We find women chained to sewers. Girls come to us beaten half to death. They are so young. Increasingly we see that the meebons have addicted them to drugs so they won’t ever try to escape. When I was young we were terrorized with snakes and heavy fists, but these girls suffer a more brutal sort of torture. They have marks that are worse than anything I have ever endured.
One day a girl named Srey Mom arrived at the shelter in Phnom Penh. She was bleeding and black and blue all over. I knew we should take her to the hospital, because I thought she might die from the wounds, but she begged us not to take her there—she said the pimps would go there to look for her. She pleaded, “If I die, let me die here.”
We looked after her. When she got better, we started to talk. She was fifteen. She had been sold to a brothel run by a well-known pimp who caters mainly to the military police. This man is known to have killed several girls. Srey Mom was locked up there for four months, beaten, chained, raped without respite.
The house, which was in Tuol Kok, was built on stilts above a marsh, like so many Cambodian houses. The sewage ran directly into the water. One evening, Srey Mom made a hole in the floor big enough to slip through and she waded through the watery filth. She went to the police and told them everything. The police wrote down everything she said. They proposed to take her to a shelter on a motorbike. She gladly accepted. Then they took her back to the brothel from where she had just escaped.
The pimps thrashed her, and she thought they would kill her for sure. She made it out again, through the same hole, which was hidden. In the morning, having asked some people the way, she arrived at the AFESIP shelter, which wasn’t far off. She didn’t want to leave our shelter because she was certain the pimps and their friends the police would be patrolling the area. She didn’t even trust the hospital—she knew that anyone could sell her for just a few dollars.
Srey Mom said one girl in her brothel was kept chained up. She said another girl had been tied up and burned because she refused clients and had tried to escape. Srey was certain she was destined for the same fate—a fate her grandmother had sealed when she sold her into this life.
A while back, I met a mother who would go to a brothel to get the money her ten-year-old daughter earned for her. When I reproached her for this, she retorted, “She’s my daughter. I carried her for nine months; I suffered to give birth to her. I’ll do what I like. She’s not yours.”
“I have a daughter that I carried too,” I objected. “I suffered as well in giving birth. But if I haven’t got anything with which to feed my child, I’m the one who’ll go out and prostitute myself, not her.”
“Well, I have a husband who beats me. As soon as there’s any money in the house, he drinks, then he beats me up and rapes me. He hits the children. And my daughter is in the brothel so that, thanks to her, there’s a little money. And maybe she’ll meet a man who’ll marry her.”
Another time we were talking to a man who had raped his own daughter, a mere child. We asked him why.
“Her mother is beautiful and she attracts all the cocks in the village. So to hurt her, I raped her daughter, who’s pretty too.”
“But this daughter is also yours!”
“No, she’s her mother’s. It’s her mother who was pregnant. This child is nothing to me. I didn’t carry her in my womb, did I?”
These are the kind of answers we get when we inquire.
Often, it must be said, parents don’t know where their daughter works or exactly what she does. I think some parents truly believe that when they sell their daughters to traders, these men and women will find them domestic work as maids in the big city. But most of them do know their children are going into prostitution. To avoid paying commissions, they take their daughters to the brothels themselves. They know they are entering their daughter into a prostitution network that fans all over Cambodia, that trucks girls to Thailand, to Laos, to Singapore, even as far as Canada. But these parents do it anyway. They care only about themselves.
Sokhon was the first child we had at AFESIP who died of AIDS. Her parents died when she was seven years old, and her older sister sold her into domestic service in Phnom Penh. The wife beat her and the husband raped her, and one morning when she was about eight she left the house where she was working and she walked as far as she could.
Sokhon ended up in the gardens in front of the Royal P
alace, where a motodup driver started talking to her. He told her he would help her, then took her to a brothel in Tuol Pak, where she was sold, and raped, and tortured.
When we rescued her she was twelve. She had TB, along with AIDS, and was so close to death that her pimp just dumped her at the hospital. The hospital called us, because if they were going to treat her, someone was going to have to pay. I went to the hospital and found the money to pay for her care. She had every kind of mark on her body, and she was so thin she seemed made of rope. She looked like me, and her situation felt exactly like my own had once been. Everyone was frightened to touch her, but I took her in my arms.
I suppose some man paid a lot of money to have sex with Sokhon so he could purify himself of the AIDS infection. The belief that you can eliminate AIDS if you have sex with a virgin child is an abomination and responsible for enormous, terrible suffering.
Sokhon got better for a little while. She used to love her blue and white school uniform, but she knew she was going to die. That affected me enormously, and I spent a lot of time with her. She used to ask me whether there was a God and why he allowed such things to happen to a little girl who had never done anything wrong.
The first thing she asked me was to find and look after her little brother—that was what she was most concerned about. We found him and took him to a Buddhist pagoda; that was when I began asking a group of bonzes to look after the younger brothers of our girls and bring them up at the temple, since we can’t house boys in our shelters.
Sokhon was very disturbed. One night, when she was already very sick, she asked me to sleep next to her. In the middle of the night, while I was sleeping, she cut my foot with a knife. She said she wanted to mix our blood—she rubbed her bleeding arm on me. She knew it could endanger me, and I think that she did it so she wouldn’t be alone in her suffering.