Global Diary: Cambodia | Glamour
On the day in May that I land in Cambodia, Somaly is in the midst of a personal crisis so serious that it is hard to fathom. Her 14-year-old daughter, Ning, has been missing for almost 24 hours. Somaly fears the worst: that Ning has been kidnapped—perhaps by a young man the family knows—and is at risk of being sold to a brothel.
It sounds simply unimaginable. But as Somaly understands so well from her own line of work, tragedies like this are not uncommon here. Girls are regularly abducted, sometimes right off the streets. Such brutality is fallout from decades of war, totalitarianism and genocide. Still deeply bruised from the dictatorship of Pol Pot in the seventies, Cambodia today ranks as one of Southeast Asia's poorest nations, where a human life isn't worth much. Children here are bought and sold into sexual slavery, sometimes by their own parents, for tiny sums of money.
As a result, Cambodia has earned a reputation as one of the worst places in the world for human trafficking. The problem is so severe that Cambodia's government established a special office, the Anti-Human Trafficking and Juvenile Protection Department, devoted to the issue. Sereywath Ek, Cambodian ambassador to the United States, says, "We've made advances," but still the sex trade thrives, fueled by both local men and foreign sex tourists.
The moment Somaly tells me of the unfolding tragedy with her daughter, I understand her fears as if they were my own. Four and a half years ago, my husband, Danny, a journalist, was kidnapped and ultimately killed by Islamist militants in Pakistan. It gives us a strange but undeniable bond that the two of us feel instinctively, and we embrace.
Somaly tells me she is going to meet with the police about the search for her daughter, so I set out to learn more about the sordid world in which she works. It turns out to be surprisingly easy. Far from being hidden, Phnom Penh's brothels operate in the open, some right in the heart of the city, even though prostitution is officially illegal. I travel to one of the sex districts with a team of Somaly's social workers, who are allowed into the brothels by the owners because they bring supplies like condoms, soap and toothpaste.
Thus my encounter with the haggard young woman—I learn that her name is Apov and that she's 22—and her sad little room. As I step outside the brothel, I see a girl with a bandage on her head, stained with iodine. A social worker, Chantha Chhim, asks what happened. The girl points to a metal stool and answers in Khmer, the national language. "A man hit me for talking badly to him," Chantha translates. The girl also has rows of parallel scars on the inside of her arm. "Amphetamine," says Chantha. When girls get high, she explains, they sometimes engage in self-mutilation.
A female pimp reclines nearby in a purple hammock, watching us nonchalantly. As we leave, the girls give us faint, almost apologetic smiles. They service about 15 clients a night, mostly migrant laborers. Men pay the equivalent of a dollar for sex, but most of that money goes into the pimp's pocket. The girls themselves get a salary of about $15 a month, which amounts to mere pennies for each sex act.
