Posted on 01/19/2005 7:28:26 PM PST by wagglebee
BATTAMBANG, Cambodia
A year ago, a pimp handed me a quivering teenage girl. Her name was Srey Neth, and she was one of the hundreds of thousands of teenagers who are enslaved by the sex trafficking industry worldwide.
Then I did something dreadfully unjournalistic: I bought her.
I purchased Srey Neth for $150 and another teenager, Srey Mom, for $203, receiving receipts from the brothel owners. As readers may remember, I then freed the girls and took them back to their villages.
Now I've come back to find out how they coped with freedom.
At first, it turns out, everything went well for Srey Neth. Our plan was for her to start a shop in her village, near Battambang. She invested $100 I had given her to build a shack and stock it with food and clothing. For a few months, business boomed.
The problem was her family. Srey Neth's parents and older brothers and sisters had a hard time understanding why they should go hungry when their sister had a store full of food. And her little nephews and nieces, running around the yard, helped themselves when she wasn't looking.
"Srey Neth got mad," her mother recalled. "She said we had to stay away, or everything would be gone. She said she had to have money to buy new things."
But in a Cambodian village, nobody listens to an uneducated teenage girl. Indeed, the low status of girls is the underlying reason why so many daughters are sold to the brothels. So by May, Srey Neth's shop was empty, and she had no money to restock it.
"It was our fault," her father told me, looking ashamed. "It was not Srey Neth's fault."
Srey Neth worried about her father, who was coughing up blood from tuberculosis. She also worried about her older brother, who could not afford to get married, and about the family debts, which could cost her family its land.
It was that kind of concern for her family that had led her, at the suggestion of a female cousin, to sell herself to the brothel in late 2003 and send the proceeds home.
This time, she thought about looking for work as a dishwasher in neighboring Thailand for $1.50 a day. A trafficker said he could smuggle her into Thailand and get her a dishwashing job, but only if she promised him $100.
Some 700,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year, and that's often how they end up in the sex industry: they assume debts and then, when they cannot quickly repay the money, gangs force them into brothels - where they are stuck until they are dying of AIDS.
Fortunately, I'd arranged for American Assistance for Cambodia (www.cambodiaschools.com), an aid group, to keep track of Srey Neth. It offered her something less risky: a move to Phnom Penh to learn to be a beautician. So, with money sent to the group by New York Times readers a year ago, Srey Neth started in the beauty school.
That's where I met her again. She was beaming, and she proudly told how she had learned to give manicures and haircuts. She placed third in her class in applying makeup, and she's even studying English. She bubbles with happiness in the way a teenager should.
"I'm happy with Srey Neth," said the beauty school's owner, Sapor Rendall. "She studies hard."
Ms. Rendall added that there was only one problem with Srey Neth: "She doesn't want to do massage. ... I've talked to her about it many times, but she's very reluctant."
Massages are routine in beauty shops in Cambodia and are not sexual, but for Srey Neth, they scream danger. I'm delighted.
Srey Neth cut my hair - I was her first paying customer - and she is excitedly talking about starting her own beauty shop so she can support her family again. She says she'll call it Nick and Bernie's, after me and Bernard Krisher, the chairman of American Assistance for Cambodia.
Today Srey Neth steers clear of the boys trying to flirt with her - she's still deeply distrustful of boys and men - but she has learned to laugh again. She is a happy, giggly, self-confident reminder that we should never give up on the slaves of the 21st century. I couldn't be more proud of her.
That's the good news. In my column on Saturday, I'll tell you about Srey Mom.
What is the point you're trying to make in #56? Where did I assert that there wasn't sex tourism?
What's the exact source of your statistics, above?
The Danish police, for example, have dropped the number of missing from 450+ to 68 in just the last two weeks. If even the Danish police and the Danish embassy can't get a good fix on the dead and missing, where in the heck do you get your hard numbers with a gender breakdown?
It's rather suspicious.
No, I'm not. But it might seem so to any ninny who had never been to Asia and could not comprehend the disconnect between press sensationalism and the truth.
The truth is that prostitution in Asia is first and foremost a local phenomena, for the locals. Westerners do not drive it nor are they responsble for it.
I'm sorry you can't get that fact through your skull.
I'm also sorry that you fall prey to any sloppy reporting or false anecdote (e.g. post #55) pushed in front of you, no matter how patently false it may be (again, #55).
Finally, more mature people - certainly those who have lived and worked in the region - recognize that prostitution is a problem, but they don't wish death upon those who are engaged in what is otherwise perfectly legal activity. Your position is a little harsh, to say the least.
I can understand that you deny the State Department report and that you sympathize with the perps but I have no sympathy for you when you do so.
It is a LIE that Angkor has defended IN ANY WAY sex tourism. And you have the balls to accuse HIM of not having sufficient reading comprehension. Funny man.
More humor. That quotation IN NO WAY claimed the sex tourists were Western. Most foreigners who come for that are Japanese I believe.
"The myth that Westerners are responsible for Asian prostitution is absolutely ludicrous and bizarre"
As opposed to the State Department report which I linked that states:
"Widespread sex tourism in Thailand encourages trafficking for forced prostitution."
You can look up the term 'widespread' to see if it improves your reading comprehension.
It seems to me that even though you it is evil for Western tourists to travel for the sex you can't help yourself but put up some kind of defense for them.
No, I didn't deny it, I asked what point you were attempting to make by producing it. It says nothing substantive to bolster anything you've said here. Only that there's is Western sex tourism, which I've not denied.
So again I ask, what was your point in producing it here?
Laughably, you also included the second paragraph on "street workers", which in your apparently pornographic mind means "street hookers." Whereas it actually means beggars, and has nothing at all to do with the sex trade.
We're done here. You don't even understand the premise of the discussion.
You seem to also have a reading comprehension problem.
"... recognize that prostitution is a problem, but they don't wish death upon those who are engaged in what is otherwise perfectly legal activity. "
Just as soon as he gets back from skiing, maybe next week...
That's wonderful! Congratulations to him.
One of the problems with getting girls out of this is that their families usually put them there in the first place, and even if the girl eventually gets a chance to try something else, the entire family is still hanging on to her.
This is called the "crab effect" by people who work with low-income people: when somebody gets out of jail and starts to go straight, or gets a job and starts to earn money, the whole family appears right away to take advantage of him. It's like crabs in a bucket: pick one up and all the rest grab onto it. And if frequently ends up pulling people right back down.
But this story looks like it might have a happy ending someday, at least.
I posted your comments where you wrote they are not responsible and that it is perfectly legal.
So again I ask, what was your point in producing it here?
To counter your defense of Western tourists who are guilty of perpetuating this slavery
Laughably, you also included the second paragraph on "street workers", which in your apparently pornographic mind means "street hookers." Whereas it actually means beggars, and has nothing at all to do with the sex trade.
I note your contention that "street workers" are beggars and are never sexually exploited. I don't believe you but I note it for the record.
We're done here. You don't even understand the premise of the discussion.
I understand. Men are weak and easily corrupted.
You think THAT was a defense of prostitution? If so it means you do not use or understand logic so it it worse than mere incomprehension.
I don't the subject or you funny at all.
The report does not identify the percentages of those who tour and sample but does list those who import the slaves. "Thai women are trafficked to Australia, South Africa, Japan, Bahrain, Taiwan, Europe and North America for sexual exploitation."
That is the standard defense libertines use, that "it is perfectly legal," etc.
Those who import these women/girls/boys are their own countrymen who establish rings to accomplish this. If you can find more than a handful of Thai/Cambodian/Vietnamese hookers in the states I'll eat my hat.
Trying to blame this on the West is typical Leftist disinformation and you fell for it. That is the issue not whether prostitution is good or not.
Angkor was trying to explain that you fell for this anti-Western canard.
He was attempting to say that death is not the penalty for such activity. Sin though it is.
He wrote "those who are engaged in what is otherwise perfectly legal activity."
Why am I not surprised to find people denying that these perps and their slaves really exist in any number worthy of our concern ?
Thankfully President Bush takes it seriously.
No one has said anything like that. OR defended prostitution on this thread.
It might interest you to know that the areas hardest hit by the tsunami were not the areas where the sex trade is big. These areas were very upscale and expensive unlike the seedy areas where the pimps ply their trade.
I am also glad Bush is speaking out in great contrast to the PoS who held office before him. The latter would likely be sampling the pimps' wares.
Don't look for enemies where there are none.
The quotes are right on this thread.
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