Posted on 01/15/2005 1:11:35 PM PST by wagglebee
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia
Sex trafficking at its worst is the slavery of the 21st century, yet it has become one of the world's growth industries. To understand how brazen it is, step up to the second floor of the Chai Hour II Hotel here in the Cambodian capital.
It's like an aquarium: beyond a glass wall are dozens of teenage girls in skimpy white outfits, each with a number. The customer orders a girl by number, and the manager delivers her a moment later to a private room.
A Cambodian police report in my hands describes the Chai Hour II as a case "of confinement of human beings for commercial sex" and adds that it is also "a place for trafficking/sale of virgin girls." All told, the report says, 250 girls and women work in the six-floor labyrinth of cubicles.
So last month, Cambodia's top-ranking female police officer ordered a raid on the Chai Hour II and rescued 83 girls. They were taken to a shelter run by Afesip, an aid group mainly financed by Spain.
But the next day, the trafficking tycoons turned the tables and raided the shelter. About 30 raiders, some wearing military clothing and at least one driving a car with military license plates, broke down the shelter gate, beat up one woman on the staff and took all the girls back to the brothel.
Aarti Kapoor, a legal adviser to Afesip, acknowledges that dozens of the girls genuinely wanted to return to the brothel; shame, drug addiction and a desperate need for money keep many in the sex trade. But dozens of others, she says, wanted to stay in the shelter but were forced back anyway.
To top it off, Cambodia's top police official reprimanded the female officer who had ordered the raid on the Chai Hour II and even briefly suspended her from her post.
We've had narco-trafficking states; Cambodia may be becoming the first sex-slavery state.
The U.S. State Department estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 people a year are trafficked across international borders, mostly girls and most of them for the sex industry. Many more, like the girls in the Chai Hour II, are trafficked within a country.
As it becomes a global industry, sex trafficking is increasingly controlled by organized crime, like the ethnic Chinese mafias in Asia, and the criminals use their profits to buy government officials. Cambodia had made progress against child prostitution in the last couple of years, but now the sex industry has struck back.
The Chai Hour is so bold that it drove some of the girls to the U.S. Embassy for a protest against Western interference. A lawsuit, nominally by the girls themselves (who say they're masseuses and entertainers rather than prostitutes), seeks $1.7 million from Afesip, in an apparent effort to drive it out of the country, and Afesip's staff has received many death threats.
"This is very dangerous, and I'm very scared about my security," said Pierre Legros, a founder of Afesip, who has hired eight bodyguards to protect his children. His wife, a Cambodian who also works for Afesip, has twice had guns held to her head.
I dropped by the Chai Hour II, explained that I was an American reporter and asked to interview the owner. He was "out." Teenage girls, looking about 15 and older, floated about, but the alarmed managers blocked me from interviewing them. A security goon made it clear that photos were out of the question - but a pimp did politely serve me a cup of tea.
The State Department's office on trafficking, to its credit, has been jumping up and down ever since the raid on Afesip occurred. "It's unacceptable - it's egregious," the office's director, Ambassador John Miller, told me this week. "This was government complicity."
But nothing will happen unless we get higher-level outrage in Washington and other foreign capitals.
President Bush has done more than his predecessors in making sex trafficking an issue, and his State Department has done a first-rate job exerting pressure - but there's so much more that we could do. The Bush administration could put a real dent in sex trafficking if we were to treat it as firmly as we do, say, pirated movies, and this brazen incident in Cambodia would be a fine place to start.
In the 19th century, the civilized world recognized that slavery was a moral blot on humanity and rose up against it. So why should we acquiesce in 21st-century slavery, when 15-year-old girls are imprisoned in brothels and sentenced to death by AIDS? Those kids in the Chai Hour II Hotel have nowhere else to turn, and their lives are in our hands.
bump for later review
Ping
It might be good to start with disciplining those UN staff who are known to use the services of these girls. The West can have a role to play in proscecuting those citizens who are buying sex with underage girls, where ever they are in the world. This includes UN staff, soldiers and sex tourists.
I agree, trade sanctions are an option. However apartheid was around (on the books at least) for more than just "a few years." It became official policy in 1948 and wasn't removed until 1991.
There is no telling how long this horrid injustice will continue in Cambodia, even with a US embargo in place.
That's actually one of the main reasons why. By and large, it isn't the women of the Third World who hate us.
You're right; however, trade sanctions by the US and other industrialized nations weren't implemented until sometime in the mid-1980's, that is what I meant by ending Apartheid within "a few years." By the same token, Reagan's arms build-up was basically a form of economic sanction against the Soviets and that also worked within a decade. If you examine the past century, you will see that no nation has ever prospered economically if the United States was actively working to apply economic pressure.
Cuba is pretty much the same way. They have a thriving market in sex with underage girls. Canadians are their best customers.
Cuba has been a thorn in our side for nearly half a century, I really wish we would do something about them. I think that Reagan truly missed a golden opportunity by not launching on Cuba directly from Grenada back in 83.
"Tell me why American people are so hated in this world when the the treatment of women is better here than anywhere in the world?
That's actually one of the main reasons why. By and large, it isn't the women of the Third World who hate us."
Why are white men so hated even within their own country and even by their own women? We treat women better here than any other place or time in history. For this we receive nothing but contempt it seems.
how is this america’s problem to solve??? what is wrong with you??? we are all HUMAN BEINGS. You’re saying that powerless girls who are repeatedly raped don’t deserve america’s help because they aren’t american? it makes me so depressed and dissapointed with humanity when i read a comment such as this...
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