On a January day in 2004, 14-year-old Ashley Pond came home and told her parents how much she was enjoying her sophomore year at Rocklin High School, just north of Sacramento. "She never wanted to move from Rocklin," her father recalled. "She wanted to live there forever."
The following night, Ashley and the rest of the family -- her parents, James and Athena, and two younger siblings -- sat down and watched a "Dateline" NBC special, "Children for Sale," on Cambodia's sex traffic in children.
Then they held a team meeting on how to respond to what they'd seen. What the Ponds decided changed everything, not only for Ashley but for at least another 97 teenage girls on the other side of the world.
This is a story about a family and a ministry and an international tragedy . . . and I wouldn't be surprised if a few readers are struggling to focus right about now. That name -- Ashley Pond -- still paralyzes so many of us who were living in the Portland area in 2002, when she and Miranda Gaddis disappeared in Oregon City, the final victims of Ward Weaver.
The two Ashley Ponds were the same age. But while the Ashley who died in Oregon endured years of sexual abuse, much of it at the hands of her biological father, the Ashley who grew up in California is the daughter of parents so determined to stop the prostitution and rape of children in Southeast Asia that they moved their family to Cambodia in 2005.
James Pond had a background in intelligence and special operations with the Marines. His experience with drug interdiction helped him to understand what's driving the country's $30 billion industry in human trafficking and sex slavery.
"The traffickers I've met personally have a moral ambivalence that's clouded by how lucrative it is," Pond said. "Drugs and guns you can only sell once. People you can sell over and over again."
After several months in Cambodia, the Ponds decided the greatest need was a sanctuary in which the victims of the sex trade, virgins at 12 and veterans at 15, could begin the recovery process.
A place where they could receive medical care for their sexually transmitted diseases and dental work on the teeth that had been knocked out by the most zealous of the American sex tourists. A safe house in Phnom Penh where the girls could be tutored in 21st century job skills.
So it was that James and Athena Pond formed Transitions Cambodia, an Oregon-based nonprofit designed to provide freedom and hope for victims of abuse and exploitation. To benefit their work, special screenings of the film "Holly," which stars Ron Livingston, Chris Penn and Thuy Nguyen, will be 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the Hollywood Theater.
James Pond estimates there are 27 million victims of the human slave trade in the world; 97 emotionally and physically battered girls have entered their program. Because many of the girls are 14 or 15, and "still in their prime," Pond said, "we've had traffickers pursue some of them. But there is so much residual product that they've decided why go after those girls when you can just recondition a new one."
And while the Cambodian government has finally grown embarrassed that it's the hub of the world sex trade, Pond said, Chinese and Korean mobsters are moving in, muscling out the local brothel owners and forming VIP clubs for government officials, "which in reality are high-class, high-security commercial sex operations."
Yet he holds on to the same hope he's offering the girls in the face of the brutality that has haunted his family since that January night in 2004. It's a cruel and vicious world, as many Ashley Ponds out there know, and you can only hope to change it one life, one girl, at a time.
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