by Somaly Mam
Kolap was six years old when her mother sold her. When they got to the brothel, Kolap thought her job was only going to be washing up, but she pleaded with her mother not to leave her. She hugged her mother by the neck, and her mother slapped her and pushed her away. When Kolap grabbed her ankles, her mother kicked her. She walked away with fifty dollars, and Kolap’s virginity was sold.
They scrubbed her down and plastered her with lightening cream, in order to make her a more appetizing color. When she resisted, they beat her for several days in succession. After her first week, they sewed her up again, without an anesthetic, and sold her to another brothel. She went from one brothel to another until she was ten, when we rescued her. Her life during those years was truly a journey through hell.
About a year after she came to us, Kolap asked me if I would take her to see her mother in Kandal. Before that she had always refused contact. I took her to her home village to find her mother. The woman actually started to cry when she saw her.
Kolap said, “Don’t cry. I’ve come to ask you, why did you sell me? Why did you hit me when I kissed you? Why did you kick me when I tried to hold on to you? You had fifty dollars in your hands.”
“I didn’t sell you,” stammered the woman. “I didn’t know it was a brothel.”
“How can you say that?”
“We had nothing to eat.”
“You’re lying. You’ve managed to live pretty well till now.”
Kolap’s little brother intervened to say he feared she would sell their younger sister too, only the child was handicapped and nobody wanted to buy her.
“You haven’t changed. But you’re no longer my mother. That’s my mother,” said Kolap, and pointed at me. “She didn’t give birth to me, but she has given me all the rest.”
We left. Kolap didn’t want to stay for another minute in that house of sorrows. She was eight years old, with the body of a child, but her spirit was weighed down by an adult suffering.
Kolap is fourteen now, and she lives in our children’s center in Thlok Chhrov. She’s tall and she’s at the top of her class in secondary school. She has never spoken of her mother again. She only says that as soon as she leaves us, she will bring her brother and sister to live with her and put them through school.
Sometimes parents take us to court to get their daughters back, with an eye to selling them on again. There’s a profit to be made in it. But our legal position is strong—our charter authorizes us to shelter and represent such children. A mother who sells her daughter disqualifies herself as a guardian.
From time to time I am engulfed by rage at what I see around me. Recently there was the case of one young girl called Kaseng. Her parents were out one evening, and she was wandering in the streets when she was captured by a group of six or seven drunken men in their fifties. She was eight years old. They took her to a house and raped her one by one. Since she was too narrow, they took a knife and cut her vagina. Someone brought her to us. I took the child to the hospital to get her sewn up and then to the police to make a report. She began to recover. Her mother, who was very poor, said that ever since the child had been born she had brought nothing but bad luck, and she refused to take her back.
When the trial of Kaseng’s abusers came up, an AFESIP staff member was sent to observe the proceedings. The rapists had paid off the judge. They claimed that she was provocatively dressed and that they’d paid her. In any case, they said, she was young and would have time to remake her life. The judge determined that it was impossible to send men of such venerable age to prison, and they were set free, laughing.
This child was a victim in every way—of the men, of the courts, of her family. We could have appealed the case, but she didn’t want to. She pleaded with me not to do it. “I don’t want to see them or hear what they’re saying about me,” she begged. “I never want to go to court again.”
Blind with anger, I lashed out and told everything to a close adviser of the prime minister, a man who had helped me in other circumstances. I asked him to tell me how such a miscarriage of justice could be possible in a country that claims to be civilized. How can we allow our justice system to remain so corrupted by organized crime and by ordinary bribery that a crime as vile as this one goes unpunished?
My friend looked into it and referred the matter back to the court. We’re still waiting to find out if the child can get some kind of compensation. But this can’t work for every case—I can’t telephone people in high places every time we lose in court, because sometimes it happens several times a month.
Even if we do make a scandal, the political authorities can only try to force the judicial machine into action. Then things get blocked up and nothing happens. The results are rarely satisfactory. We have laws in Cambodia, but everyone ignores them. The law of money prevails. With money you can buy a judge, a policeman—whatever you want. There are moments when I want to throw in the towel and stop doing all this. It feels too big for me to fight—the pimps, the corruption, the judges who aren’t even for sale because they were bought long ago.
Corruption is like gangrene at the heart of the Cambodian legal system. All too often, justice is for sale. In the beginning, even when AFESIP managed to pressure the police into conducting a raid on a brothel, the pimps were often freed within days.
Since the start of AFESIP, we’ve brought about two thousand cases before the courts. We’ve only won about 5 percent of them, and most of those victories are recent. We know our way around the system now, and I think the judges are more careful these days: they know that AFESIP doesn’t give up easily. Still, it’s rare for the criminals to spend more than six months in prison, and most of them continue to be freed after just a few days in police custody.
Maybe it was different in Cambodia before Pol Pot. Even today, you do find good people in the countryside—villagers who care for one another and are always ready to share their meal with a stranger. But I was born after the great dislocations that ripped my country apart, and as soon as I opened my eyes on the world I saw only violence and corruption. Where are the supposedly admirable traditions of the Khmer? Where is their Buddhist morality?
I’m a Buddhist—just an ordinary Buddhist. I go to the temple sometimes. I give rice to feed the elderly at the village temple in Thlok Chhrov. But the men who torture girls also go to the temples. Are they Buddhists?
One day I put this question to the priest who heads the temple I frequent. He said, “Somaly, after thirty years of war, we even have monks who go to brothels and rape children. And there are others who are good and don’t know why they’re good.”
I’ve spent a decade building AFESIP, and it’s been a decade of pain. I can’t distance myself from the suffering of these girls. We carry the same wounds. I share their suffering, their horrors. It is difficult for me not to blame all men for the actions of a few.
In those years of building AFESIP, Pierre had a lot to put up with. Our marriage was under a lot of strain, and it seemed not even the birth of our darling Nikolai could bring us closer together. In 2004 we separated, and we are now divorced.
In 2004, AFESIP began receiving reports about a hotel, the Chai Hour II. It was one of the biggest new brothels in Phnom Penh, a six-floor supermarket of female flesh, where customers could pick out girls standing behind a glass window, by their numbers, and have them delivered straight to their hotel room. Our investigators talked with girls who worked there, and they said they were forced into prostitution. Of the roughly two hundred girls working in the hotel as “hostesses” and “karaoke girls,” many were minors. There were also virgins for sale on the premises.
To free these girls, we had no choice but to go to the police, even though we knew this wouldn’t necessarily mean the guilty would be punished.
The Chai Hour II was a big operation—by far the largest brothel we had ever taken on. We knew that it was run by wealthy and powerful traffickers, and we realized that they probably had close connections with police and government offic
ials.
Our dossier on the hotel was in the hands of the authorities by September. At the beginning of December, the police agreed to conduct a raid. An investigating magistrate had been designated as the person in charge. Once everything was decided, we had to move fast, since leaks were bound to occur.
The raid took place on the afternoon of December 7, 2004. Some of the people at the hotel managed to flee, but eight pimps were taken into police custody, along with eighty-three women and girls. There weren’t enough police cells to house the girls, and many of them were underage. As usual, AFESIP agreed to take them into our shelter that night, to keep them safe while the police needed them for questioning, as several of the girls had agreed to bring charges against the pimps.
Before I left that night, I spoke to each of the girls. Some of them said they wanted to go back to work. One or two were the mistresses of highly placed men. For men of high position, there’s almost an obligation to keep a little virgin or a minor in a luxurious brothel—it’s a mark of status. (They usually also have wives and “official” mistresses with their own apartments.) These girls had expensive cell phones and used them to ring their protectors to express their outrage. I explained to them that AFESIP doesn’t keep women against their will, but they had to stay with us under police authority. The police required them to be available for questioning for a few days, then they could leave.
Most of the girls were in shock. Several showed marks of their beatings. The youngest ones, especially, found it hard to comprehend that they were now safe—that they could stay with us if they wanted to and go to school.
When I left the AFESIP shelter that night, a large black Lexus was parked in front. Two men—two pimps—said they wanted to come in. We refused them access. Our rules for-bid traffickers from coming onto our premises—that’s why our Phnom Penh center has a high wall and a strong gate.
The next morning I began receiving phone calls. Well-placed friends called me, warning me to be cautious: “Somaly, you’re dealing with important people here. You’re going to get into trouble.” The assistant of a person who worked with us in the anti-trafficking unit of the Ministry of the Interior called me in tears to say that her boss was in the office of the police chief, being fired.
I called another person I knew, and he said that he’d heard that the eight pimps had all been released. He too warned that I should be careful. He told me, “Stay out of this, it’s too big for you.” He told me I should free all the women from the Chai Hour II.
Then a woman who worked at the AFESIP shelter phoned to tell me that a mob of men was forming in front of the gates. She said that some of them were in uniform, from both the military and the police, and asked what they should do.
At 11:40 a.m. my contact at the Interior Ministry finally called me back. He said, “Release the girls. Your life is in danger. We have no power over this.” At around noon, while I was still on the phone, about thirty armed men smashed down the gates. The girls and the AFESIP staff inside were terrified. They recognized some of the attackers as the eight men who had just been freed from jail. Their ringleader hit the staff members and threatened to kill them. The men forced all the girls they could find into cars or onto motorbikes that were waiting outside.
They took ninety-one girls in all, some of whom had been with us for only a few weeks and were beginning to smile and trust that we could keep them safe. We never saw any of them again.
One girl hid in the bathroom the whole time. She was thirteen and had only come to us the week before. She had just begun to believe that she really was safe now. When I got to the AFESIP shelter and took her in my arms, she couldn’t stop sobbing and shaking.
I was angry, so horribly angry. What can you do when the mafias that run the trade in women become so rich they are more powerful than the law?
I phoned Pierre, who was in Laos. He phoned the French embassy. Then a staff member from the AFESIP shelter called. She said she had heard a group of boys in the market saying they were going to lob grenades into the center and kill the staff one by one. I called a meeting and told everyone we had to suspend our operations temporarily and gave them all time off. I tried to help them stay calm, but I was frightened too.
I am not an intellectual. I have no specific expertise. I don’t know how to speak properly and I’ve never had a proper education. But sometimes it’s up to me to stay calm, to have an answer for everyone, to give people strength and help them to overcome themselves. I live day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. I don’t know what will happen to me when I leave this room. Nobody does.
The next day, December 9, some of the local press began reporting that the girls from the Chai Hour II had pushed down the gate in an attempt to escape because AFESIP was holding them against their will. They also reported that all the girls were over eighteen. I began receiving countless calls from people of influence in government and the police suggesting that I just keep quiet and not interfere in what didn’t concern me. Friends warned me that I would get myself killed if I tried to make this into a confrontation and suggested I leave the country for a while, as soon as possible.
The municipal chief of police produced a communiqué that charged us with kidnapping the women and impeding the liberty of working people. It was a statement that was full of lies and venom. Journalists from local newspapers reported that the Chai Hour II was an ordinary hotel, offering massages and a karaoke parlor, and that all the girls were willing to testify that they were not prostitutes.
Pierre was flying home to Cambodia from Laos, but he called a press conference while he was in transit, in Bangkok, to try to get support for us from the international press.
The next day my children were followed by motorbikes on their way home from school. I knew I had to go to Kampong Cham, to check on the children in Thlok Chhrov. The staff who worked there were terrified that there would be a raid on them too, and the children were in a panic.
We left at four in the morning, but still, a car followed us. Fortunately they weren’t very clever, and we managed to lose them before we reached Thlok Chhrov. I tried to calm the girls there. I told them that nothing would happen to anyone and that we had lawyers. I was trying to think clearly, but I was frightened too. I didn’t want to take my friends’ advice and leave the country—I couldn’t simply get up and leave all these girls and AFESIP’s staff behind.
But it seemed pressure was also building from an unexpected source. Officials from the American embassy came to see me, to find out what was going on and look into it themselves. We began receiving phone calls from people at the UN. I was invited to the French embassy to speak with the ambassador. Journalists began to call.
In the space of a few days, the tide began to turn. In Europe, newspapers were reporting the case, and we heard that diplomats from the European Union and the U.S. government were threatening Cambodia with economic sanctions if more was not done to stop sexual trafficking and corruption in the government. The Chai Hour II was now a symbol of something important.
The English-language Cambodia Daily led an investigation to see who had forced open the gates of the AFESIP shelter. Neighbors testified that it was the traffickers themselves who had led the assault. AFESIP received discreet invitations to return to work, and the government agreed to set up a panel to investigate the case and look into whether any corruption was involved.
Many months later, the commission reported that it “lacked evidence” of any corruption or that any women had been forcibly removed from the shelter. Some people are too big to take on. If I spelled out names there’d be a bullet through my head tomorrow. I’d have crossed the boundary that separates life and death in our country. That still may happen one day. But before it does, at least I will have spoken out.
In some ways, the Chai Hour II case unblocked the system for us. AFESIP began receiving markedly more help from the authorities. But eighteen months later, the Chai Hour II case came back to haunt us in the most horrible, personal way.
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In July 2006, while a journalist, Mariane Pearl, was in Phnom Penh to interview me for Glamour magazine, Ning’s school phoned. Ning had disappeared. She had left the school grounds at midday and hadn’t come back. The cell phone I’d given her for her fourteenth birthday wasn’t picking up. I instantly panicked. Ning is not the kind of girl who would just take off. She is a sweet, loving child. She has her own secrets, but she would never seek to worry me.
My instant reaction was that my deepest fear had been realized: the traffickers had taken my child. In Cambodia, this is not a far-fetched scenario. Every year thousands of girls are abducted and sold into prostitution. Most of them are poor, but my adopted daughter would be a special target. My blood froze.
I phoned Pierre, who was temporarily in Thailand. He promised to fly to Cambodia right away. Then I phoned everyone I knew at the police and in the government and told them what had happened. And I settled down to focus on finding Ning.
This is what I know how to do—I know how to trace girls through the prostitution networks. Every investigator we had ever employed at AFESIP went to see every informant who had ever contacted us. Very quickly, we heard that Ning had been seen getting into a car with several people in it, just outside her school. A woman and several men were in the car, and the woman was someone connected to the Chai Hour II.
Four days went by, of frantic phone calls and the even worse terror of waiting. During those four days, Mariane Pearl was a rock for me. She told me about the abduction of her own husband, Daniel Pearl, by Islamic militants in Pakistan in 2002. She helped me retain my self-control.
I knew that if Ning had already been taken to Thailand, we might lose her. The first thing we did was send people out to the main border towns with her photo. Our only hope was if she was still in the country; in that case we might still find her and get her back.