Enslaved as a child, a young woman gives voice to the horrors of human trafficking with a breakthrough radio show.
She remembers a home that looked
fancy on the outside but ominous on the inside, a dark maze of bare
chambers. She remembers the parade of men, one after the other, day by
day, forcing her to have sex. She remembers contemplating death. She
wasn’t yet 10 years old.
A former sex slave finds solace at a center run by the Somaly Mam Foundation. (Jesse Pesta)
Her
name is Sreypich Loch, and she was a slave in a Cambodian brothel. If
she refused sex, she says, she would be beaten, shocked with an electric
cord, denied food and water. “What else could I do?” she asks.
Loch,
now around 20 years old, managed to escape that world and works today
to rescue other girls. She helps grab them out of brothels, and she
hosts a radio show in Phnom Penh, giving the girls a forum for their
stories. It’s a groundbreaking effort for a young woman and former sex
slave in this male-dominated society.
She
hopes that by talking about her past, she will help people understand
that slavery is alive and well. When people “hear the voice of the
survivor,” she says on a recent visit to New York City, “we can help
others.” She traveled to the U.S. with the group that helped save her,
the Somaly Mam Foundation, named for another survivor of the sex trade
in Cambodia.
Loch’s
story may sound extreme, but it is not some isolated incident. An
estimated 27 million people are victims of slavery around the world,
according to the U.S. State Department. The buying and selling of humans
is a multibillion-dollar global business, ensnaring vulnerable people
who are often kidnapped or tricked into the trade.
Loch’s nightmare began when she was
a child in Phnom Penh. Her stepfather raped her, she says, when she was
just a girl; she thinks she was around 7 years old. He threatened to
kill her if she told anyone. She would be raped again that year, by a
stranger who snatched her from the street. He made the same threat, she
says: tell anyone and die.
She
stayed silent. “I was young. I was scared,” she says, speaking softly.
“In Cambodia, many fathers rape their daughters; brothers rape their
sisters.” Consistently ranked as one of the poorest and most corrupt
nations in the world, Cambodia is still reeling from the brutal Khmer
Rouge regime, which massacred as many as 2 million people in the 1970s.
Intellectuals and city dwellers were targeted and tortured in an attempt
to create a completely agrarian society. Families were ripped apart.
One
day Loch worked up the nerve to tell her mother about the rapes. She’s
not sure how much time had passed since the assaults, she says, as she
was just a child and memories fade. But she has a vivid memory of her
mother’s response. “She hit me,” Loch says. “She didn’t believe me. I
think: she does not love me.”
Loch
ran away from home, having lost faith in her family, she says. She
remembers a heavy rainfall and the feeling of not knowing where to go.
She hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I cried and cried,” she says. And
then she was found by a gang of men. “Five men raped me on the street,”
she says. “I wanted to die.”
That
might have indeed been her fate if a woman hadn’t come along, offering
to help. The woman took Loch to her home—or so Loch thought. The house
turned out to be a brothel. She was locked in a basement room and forced
to “sleep with many, many men every day,” she says. “I couldn’t see
light, just dark.”
Her
eyes fill with water at the thought of it. Then she pauses, closes her
eyes for a moment, and continues. “If I said no, pimp hit me,” she says.
“I tell pimp, please kill me.” Then she adds, “I am people. I am not an
animal. How could they do me that way?”
Sreypich Loch (right) with her rescuer, Somaly Mam, on a visit to New York City. (Courtesy of the Somaly Mam Foundation)
Loch’s
story mirrors that of many rescued Cambodian girls, who report being
drugged, locked in coffins, whipped, even covered with biting insects in
order to make them submit to sex. While their stories can be difficult
to verify independently, the U.S. State Department confirms that the
enslavement of girls in Cambodia is pervasive. “The sale of virgin girls
continues to be a serious problem in Cambodia,” the State Department
said in its annual Trafficking in Persons Report released this summer.
“Cambodian men form the largest source of demand for child prostitution,
though a significant number of men from the United States and Europe,
as well as other Asian countries, travel to Cambodia to engage in child
sex tourism.” Among local men, demand is often fueled by myths that sex
with a virgin brings luck or good health.
Cambodia
“does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination
of trafficking,” the State Department report says, but is making
“significant efforts to do so.” Officials reportedly convicted 62
trafficking offenders this past year, an increase from 20 offenders the
prior year.
Years
had gone by, Loch says, when a client took her out of the brothel to
his own home. There, she found an open window and fled, she says, hiding
in the shadows until a policeman found her. “My body was bad, smelled
not good,” she recalls. When she told her story, the police connected
her with anti-trafficking officials. They in turn referred her to a
center run by former sex slave Somaly Mam, according to a spokeswoman
for Mam’s foundation, a grassroots group with shelters across Cambodia.
No police action was taken against Loch’s captors, the spokeswoman says.
Loch, for her part, remembers seeing all the girls at the shelter and
thinking she had been sold to another brothel.
That
was around four years ago, when Loch was in her midteens. At the
center, she learned to sew and began attending school. In 2010 she
joined an offshoot of Mam’s foundation called Voices for Change, a group
of young slavery survivors who rescue girls from brothels. The
activists gain access to the brothels by bringing supplies such as soap
and condoms. Once inside they tell the sex workers that they can escape,
with the help of the foundation and the police. The victims often need
convincing. Many have been enslaved in the sex trade for so long, they
don’t know how to function in the outside world; they wonder how they
would support themselves. The activists tell them they can learn a
trade, such as sewing or hairdressing, at the shelters.
The
year Loch joined the group of young activists, she received an
invitation to tell her story on a commercial radio station in Phnom
Penh. The show sparked a storm of interest, with listeners calling in,
reporting suspicious situations and asking about sentencing for pimps
and traffickers. Loch saw an opportunity to help the public understand
the shadowy world of slavery. This year she launched her own show, which
she now hosts five days a week, interviewing former sex slaves as well
as lawyers and legislators. She believes it’s the personal narratives of
the girls that make people stop and listen.
Loch
says she is “so happy” about her job. At the same time, she says it’s
difficult to be reminded every day of her life in captivity. She is also
haunted by the absence of her mother in her life; she has not seen her
since she left home as a child.
She
draws strength, she says, from her fellow survivors. The bond between
these women is clear. On her trip to New York with two other young
survivors, Sina Vann and Sopheap Thy, she holds their hands and hugs
them frequently as they attend events and tour the city. In jeans,
sneakers, and T-shirts, their dark hair pulled back into ponytails, the
young women are quick to laugh at themselves and at one another. Vann
jokes that Loch has great strength because “she eats a lot.” Loch makes
fun of Thy for taking photos of flowers instead of Manhattan
skyscrapers.
They
look for restaurants that serve familiar dishes—rice and fish—and they
marvel at the enormous platters of food that arrive. They look forward
to going home and sharing their stories with the rest of the rescued
girls. They call each other “sister.”
Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and
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long. Abigail Pesta
is an award-winning journalist who has lived and worked around the
world, from New York to London to Hong Kong. Currently she is the
editorial director of Women in the World at Newsweek and The Daily Beast. She is a former editor-at-large of Marie Claire magazine, and a former news editor at The Wall Street Journalin Hong Kong. She also has worked as an articles editor at Glamour, where she launched Mariane Pearl’s popular column about women changing the world. Abby writes short stories for her website, Fine Words Butter No Parsnips.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
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