Rescuing Children from Sexual Slavery in Cambodia

Brian McConaghy with Ratanak staff working with children in Cambodia's brothel districts.

February 7, 2012
The Providence, Canada

As a former RCMP forensics investigator, Brian McConaghy has visited hundreds of crime scenes and heard the stories of countless victims of violence and abuse. But nothing has ever disturbed quite like the horrors of Cambodia’s child sexual exploitation trade.

The Richmond father of two has dedicated his life to rescuing children from brothels, saving them abject sexual slavery with his charity, Ratanak International.

McConaghy first visited the South Asian country in 1989, when it was still struggling in the aftermath of a genocidal civil war. At the time, he was working for the police and in his spare time helping vulnerable international students adjust to Canada, and he made a trip to several Asian countries to better understand their cultures.

While on visit to Thailand, he was shocked to see conditions in a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border, where diseases like dysentry and tuberculosis were rampant. Cambodian children there were dying from a lack of basic medicine from conditions that were simple to treat.

“I was in the RCMP and had a fair amount of experience in life, but nothing prepared me for a refugree camp where 42,000 people were being held hostage by Khmer Rouge,” McConaghy recalled.

The story of one sick child in particular touched him: a girl named Ratanak (her name means “precious gem” in Khmer) was lying in a hospital bed in Cambodia, dying for a lack of basic medicine. He watched a documentary back home that detailed her death and he vowed to return and gain entry to Cambodia and assist. His intention was to return with several suitcases of medication, but with the generous donations of Lower Mainland residents, he ended up with nine tons of medical supplies.

He then spent more than five months trying to wrangle a visa into the country. He finally succeeded and smuggling all of the medical supplies into the country. Friends and family urged him to do it again, so he did, founding Ratanak in the process.

“I wanted to prevent such absolutely absurd deaths,” said McConaghy, who lives in Richmond with his wife and two adopted Cambodian-born sons, Andrew and Ian.

Cambodia is a country battered by history. The South Asian nation of 13 million that shares borders with Thailand and Vietnam, got caught in the crossfire during the U.S. war in Vietnam. An estimated two million Cambodians were also made refugees by U.S. bombing in Cambodia designed to flush out Viet Cong. A famine followed in 1975. The brutal Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, and Pol Pot’s Communist party renamed the country Kampuchea. Under his rule, all Cambodians were forced to work in farms and all intellectuals, including doctors, teachers and lawyers were persecuted and killed as the leaders attempted to return the country to its agrarian roots. Citizens were reeducated, much like the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution. Anything or anyone considered Western-influenced was eliminated. An estimated one to three million people were killed or died for lack of food or medicine during this period — a fifth of the population wiped out in the country’s infamous “killing fields.” A Vietnamese-led invasion in the late 1970s put an end to the regime, but fighting with Khmer Rouge hold outs continued in pockets throughout the 1980s, terrorizing the countryside: 1999 was Cambodia’s first full year of peace in 30 years.

Once inside Cambodia, he realized that conditions within the country’s borders were even worse, with widespread malnutrition and virtually no medical care due to the Khmer Rouge’s slaughter of intellectuals, including doctors.

The charity continued to develop and started working on the ground near Battambang, a large, northwestern city in a region that was still littered with landmines and unexploded ordinances from the war. After a few years, as peace returned, the charity soon got more involved fundraising to build and refurbish hospitals and clinics in several needy districs and helping with poverty and social problems in the region, which was at the time also undergoing an AIDS crisis. In addition to sending medical aid, in the mid-1990s McConaghy began assisting orphans whose parents had been killed in the war or taken sick, and providing care for the HIV-infected.

“It was devastating,” he recalled. “There were no doctors there and people had no understanding of what had happened to them. There were no social supports. We got to know the kids and we heard their horror stories.”

Among the stories were tales of sexual abuse and exploitation. But as much as McConaghy wanted to help them, he knew that child prositiution was an “ugly, difficult and dangerous” business heavily controlled by mafia and organized crime. He wasn’t sure his grassroots, shoestring charity was up for the battle.

That all changed when McConaghy was assigned to investigate a horrific child sex slavery case in Vancouver. McConaghy was already reeling from the Robert Pickton investigation, which he had been working for many months, and which opened his eyes to the way women in his own province were being sexually brutalized and murdered by a serial killer. But then he was assigned to view videos of child sex assault recorded by Vancouver pedophile, Donald Bakker while vacationing in South East Asia, abusing local children. It was McConaghy’s job to try to find anything he could in the videos of the seven victims to help identify where they were taken so police could help rescue the helpless, abused children.

“The children were very young, the videos were horrific,” McConaghy said. “Pursuing these first seven victims changed everything for me. They are not just stories. You are looking at seven little kids as the are being assaulted. I had done many, many homidices, but this was nothing like that. It’s awful work.”

But as a result of that work, McConaghy and the Vancouver police investigation team managed, against the odds, to locate and rescue five of the seven victims in Cambodia. The break in the case came when he was watching an American television documentary one night, an expose on child brothels in the country, and miraculously he recognized several of the rooms as being the same as the crime scenes in the Bakker evidence videos. In fact, the documentary team had been in touch with him months before as they were preparing the show, asking him, because of his work in the country if he could help them find places where the rescued children could go. At the time, he had no resources to help them, and it broke his heart to say no.

But he realized that he couldn’t turn his back on these children, no matter the personal danger involved in trying to rescue children from criminal syndicates and mafia-run brothels. He decided to dedicate Ratanak’s team to rescuing other Cambodian children from similar fates.

“I never wanted to be in a position to say no again,” said McConaghy who is guided by his Christian faith in his work.

McConaghy explained the danger involved in working with law enforcement to bust the criminal-run brothels.

“To rescue a child from a brothel is no different than trying to separate cocaine from a drug trafficker; they are just product for mobsters. There are kids who haven’t seen sunlight for three years, and they have been raped thousands of times. And in terms of the global abuse of children, in Cambodia the children are younger, as young as five, with devastating consequences,” he said.

“The term we see for this is human-trafficking, but that’s just a modern word for slavery.”

True to his word, in 2006, McConaghy’s organization helped open a secret, high-security residential rehabilitation facility, called the NewSong Centre, somewhere within the capital of Phnom Penh’s city limits. It provides a refuge for up to 60 children at a time, offering psychological support, education, foster care, and later on, even job training to help them recover and eventually reenter the world. Most of the children they assist are girls, but they have also launched a pilot project to try and help abused boys, who can be even more emotionally and physically damaged by their attackers.

“They really do come in wrecked, the behaviours we see are bizarre, from suicidal acts to assault, everything happens. When they first arrive, it’s just brutal,” said McConaughy, who has now retired from the RCMP and is working full-time for his charity.

In fact, Ratanak’s facilities are now home to the five victims in the Vancouver case that McConaghy worked on. They are undergoing rehabilitation, recovering and “going on with their lives,” he said, adding that he visits them regularly and took them out for pizza on a recent trip there in late 2011. Some of the other girls they have worked with have gone on to learn sewing and jewellry–making and sell their wares at a Phnom Penh store called Daughters of Cambodia.

Now, Ratanak is not only involved in protection, but several other projects, including prevention. Many poor, rural children are tricked into brothels by recruiters who convince their parents they are going to a city for school or a job. So the charity has started education programs in villages in 11 provinces in the country, including major cities like Siem Reap and Sihanoukville. To date they have trained more than 26,000 people to indentify traffickers and keep their kids safe. They also assist local and international law enforcement in their efforts to track abused children in the country. And they even do outreach in brothel districts, trying to assist children trapped in the mafia-controlled industry in whatever way they can.

But in spite of all the violence and abuse he has seen, McConaghy insists that “Cambodia is an incredibly beautiful country,” and that his work is, overall, uplifting.

“One of the most powerful things for me is the realization that even though I didn’t think I had any skills to offer at all, expecially in helping sexually-exploited kids, is that I did have something to offer, and that I could actually impact what has turned out to be thousands of lives,” he said.

“It’s been an incredibly rewarding experience. Yes, I spend a good amount of time with kids in trauma who are suffering, but I also share my time with them in tears of joy seeing children that are changed.”

Learn more about Ratanak International or follow them on Twitter or Facebook. View photos and videos of their work. Donate to the cause or get involved in raising awareness or funds.