Part Six: From poverty to social pariah

Twelve-year-old child at the Trauma Recovery Centre in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. This girl is among the children at the centre who have been sexually abused. Most of the abusers are local men, but some of the children (not the girl pictured) have been the victims of so-called sex tourists. Photograph by: Sopheak Kong , World Vision

Prostitutes have few chances for other employment or for ever getting married

By Daphne Bramham,
Vancouver Sun
March 23, 2012
Read part one, part two and part three here.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia - Sreylin is tiny. Her dangling flip-flops barely touch the floor even though she’s sitting on the edge of her chair.

She has a classic Khmer face, like the enigmatic Buddhas at Angkor Wat. But she’s dressed in jeans and a black Calvin Klein T-shirt with rhinestones. Her thick, black hair is pulled back in a ponytail.

Sreylin is 16 with only a Grade 4 education. She was rescued by police from the commercial sex trade in 2010. She got there by selling her virginity for $200.

“Everything I have done, I have done for my family to help improve their living conditions,” she says, softly. “I just wanted to help them.”

Sreylin is not her real name. To secure the interview, I’ve agreed to use a pseudonym and I asked her to pick a name. She chose the name of her best friend from childhood, a girl whom she recalls as beautiful and kind.

Kindness was sadly lacking in Sreylin’s life until police raided a Phnom Penh guest house a year ago.

Cambodia’s sex industry and its reputation as a cheap and safe destination for sexual predators relies on poverty and desperation. It’s fuelled by the exploitation of children and feeds a demand that is both local and global.

Despite the scale of the perverse business, prostitutes are social pariahs with few chances for other employment or even for getting married.

*

Sreylin is the middle child in a family of seven. Through an interpreter, she tells me that her father works in a restaurant kitchen and her mother sells fruit and flowers by the temple. But there’s never enough money.

Slightly more than a quarter of Cambodia’s 14.7 million people live below the international poverty line of $1.25 US a day.

Poverty forced Sreylin out of school. It costs $10 a month for each child to attend. When there’s not enough money for all the children, the boys often continue while the girls go to work or stay home to look after the other children.

One night, Sreylin went with some new friends to a karaoke bar. She stayed out all night and then went to her older sister’s house. Her parents were there. They told her they really needed money. They didn’t ask her to sell herself. They didn’t have to.

By staying out all night, Sreylin had effectively destroyed her reputation as a virgin. She’s never gone home again. She can’t.

“I told my new friend I wanted to sell myself. There was a phone call. And then the auntie of my new friend called another person. They took me to Battambang province [northwest of Phnom Penh].

“I went to a hotel and stayed with a man there and then I returned to Phnom Penh in the evening. He was Khmer [Cambodian].

“My new friend’s auntie handed me only $200. Another auntie in Phnom Penh asked me for $10 and I sent $150 to my parents. The rest of the money I used to pay for rent and to buy some new clothes.”

Sreylin lived with another family whose home consisted of a kitchen, a bathroom and an undivided living and sleeping space.

She cooked and cleaned for the family and, once or twice a week, she was pimped out.

Sometimes she was sent to a guest house. Other times, she was told to have sex with a local man or a foreigner right there in the house with no walls for privacy.

The family also sold their own daughters.

They didn’t lock up the three girls or chain them. They knew they had nowhere else to go and no other opportunities for work.

During a police raid nearly 18 months ago, the brothel-owner’s daughters were found in a guest house with foreign men. Had that not happened, Sreylin may never have found her way out.

Police searched for the daughters’ birth certificates, which led them to the house where Sreylin was staying. Everyone there was arrested, including Sreylin. At the police station, Sreylin and the other girls were put in a separate room from the foreigners, the guest house owner and the parents.

*

Sreylin was referred to the World Vision trauma recovery centre where she still lives in a big room, sharing a mosquito net with three other girls with similar stories.

“I sold myself,” Sreylin says. “But my parents didn’t know. I worked that kind of job and I just sent the money to my family without telling them where the money came from. I told them I was working as a waitress in a restaurant.

“I rarely visited my family because I was afraid that because I was working that job my older brothers and sisters [and brother-in-law] would beat me up.”

Her parents now know about Sreylin’s sacrifice and they keep in close contact with her. But Sreylin can’t go back. WorldVision’s counsellors have gone on home visits with her and are convinced that because of her brothers and brother-in-law, Sreylin would not be safe from violence or further exploitation.

Now, she worries her younger sister might bow to the same pressure. “In my heart, I don’t want my younger sister to become like what I became.”

With no other safe options, Sreylin remains at World Vision’s safe house. She’s getting counselling and going to school. She’s getting better at reading and writing Khmer (the Cambodian language). She’s learning Vietnamese and English as well as how to weave and turn silk into scarves and sarongs.

She dreams someday of being married and having children, of having a better life without having to deny her past.

But, she lives in limbo; too old to be adopted, too young and vulnerable to live on her own.

She tearfully asks me to adopt her. It’s a promise I wish I could have made.

dbramham@vancouversun.com

LINK:

World Vision Cambodia: www.worldvision.org.kh