The women who sold their daughters into sex slavery

A neighborhood in Cambodia is a global hotspot
for the child sex trade. The people selling the
children? Too often, their parents. CNN Freedom
Project and Mira Sorvino, award-winning actress
and human rights activist, investigate. By Tim Hume, Lisa Cohen and Mira Sorvino Photography by Jeremie Montessuis for CNN Phnom Penh, Cambodia (CNN) hen a poor family in Cambodia fell
afoul of loan sharks, the mother
asked her youngest daughter to take a job. But not just any job. The girl, Kieu, was taken to a hospital and
examined by a doctor, who issued her a
"certificate of virginity." She was then delivered to
a hotel, where a man raped her for two days. Kieu was 12 years old. "I did not know what the job was," says Kieu, now
14 and living in a safehouse. She says she
returned home from the experience "very
heartbroken." But her ordeal was not over. After the sale of her virginity, her mother had Kieu
taken to a brothel where, she says, "they held me
like I was in prison." She was kept there for three days, raped by three
to six men a day. When she returned home, her
mother sent her away for stints in two other
brothels, including one 400 kilometers away on
the Thai border. When she learned her mother was
planned to sell her again, this time for a six-month stretch, she realized she needed to flee her home. "Selling my daughter was heartbreaking, but what
can I say?" says Kieu's mother, Neoung, in an
interview with a CNN crew that travelled to Phnom
Penh to hear her story. Like other local mothers CNN spoke to, she
blames poverty for her decision to sell her
daughter, saying a financial crisis drove her into
the clutches of the traffickers who make their
livelihoods preying on Cambodian children. "It was because of the debt, that's why I had to
sell her," she says. "I don't know what to do now,
because we cannot move back to the past." It is this aspect of Cambodia's appalling child sex
trade that Don Brewster, a 59-year-old American
resident of the neighborhood, finds most difficult
to countenance. "I can't imagine what it feels like to have your
mother sell you, to have your mother waiting in
the car while she gets money for you to be raped,"
he says. "It's not that she was stolen from her
mother -- her mother gave the keys to the people
to rape her." Brewster, a former pastor, moved from California
to Cambodia with wife Bridget in 2009, after a
harrowing investigative mission trip to the
neighborhood where Kieu grew up -- Svay Pak,
the epicenter of child trafficking in the Southeast
Asian nation. "Svay Pak is known around the world as a place
where pedophiles come to get little girls," says
Brewster, whose organization, Agape International
Missions (AIM), has girls as young as four in its
care, rescued from traffickers and undergoing
rehabilitation in its safehouses. In recent decades, he says, this impoverished
fishing village – where a daughter's virginity is too
often seen as a valuable asset for the family –
has become a notorious child sex hotspot "When we came here three years ago and began
to live here, 100% of the kids between 8 and 12
were being trafficked," says Brewster. The local
sex industry sweeps up both children from the
neighborhood -- sold, like Kieu, by their parents –
as well as children trafficked in from the countryside, or across the border from Vietnam.
"We didn't believe it until we saw vanload after
vanload of kids." Global center for pedophiles Weak law enforcement, corruption, grinding
poverty and the fractured social institutions left by
the country's turbulent recent history have helped
earn Cambodia an unwelcome reputation for child
trafficking, say experts. UNICEF estimates that children account for a
third of the 40,000-100,000 people in the country's
sex industry. Svay Pak, a dusty shantytown on the outskirts of
the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, is at the
heart of this exploitative trade. As one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods
in one of Asia's poorest countries – nearly half the
population lives on less than $2 per day -- the
poverty in the settlement is overwhelming. The
residents are mostly undocumented Vietnamese
migrants, many of whom live in ramshackle houseboats on the murky Tonle Sap River, eking
out a living farming fish in nets tethered to their
homes. It's a precarious existence. The river is fickle, the
tarp-covered houseboats fragile. Most families
here scrape by on less than a dollar a day, leaving
no safety net for when things go wrong – such as
when Kieu's father fell seriously ill with
tuberculosis, too sick to maintain the nets that contained their livelihood. The family fell behind
on repayments of a debt. In desperation, Kieu's mother, Neoung, sold her
virginity to a Cambodian man of "maybe more
than 50," who had three children of his own, Kieu
says. The transaction netted the family only $500,
more than the $200 they had initially borrowed but
a lot less than the thousands of dollars they now owed a loan shark. So Neoung sent her daughter to a brothel to earn
more. "They told me when the client is there, I have to
wear short shorts and a skimpy top," says Kieu.
"But I didn't want to wear them and then I got
blamed." Her clients were Thai and Cambodian
men, who, she says, knew she was very young. "When they sleep with me, they feel very happy,"
she says. "But for me, I feel very bad." The men who abuse the children of Svay Pak fit a
number of profiles. They include pedophile sex
tourists, who actively seek out sex with
prepubescent children, and more opportunistic
"situational" offenders, who take advantage of
opportunities in brothels to have sex with adolescents. Sex tourists tend to hail from affluent countries,
including the West, South Korea, Japan and
China, but research suggests Cambodian men
remain the main exploiters of child prostitutes in
their country. Mark Capaldi is a senior researcher for Ecpat
International, an organization committed to
combating the sexual exploitation of children. "In most cases when we talk about child sexual
exploitation, it's taking place within the adult sex
industry," says Capaldi. "We tend to often hear
reports in the media about pedophilia, exploitation
of very young children. But the majority of sexual
exploitation of children is of adolescents, and that's taking place in commercial sex venues." The abusers would often be local, situational
offenders, he says. Research suggests some of
the Asian perpetrators are "virginity seekers," for
whom health-related beliefs around the
supposedly restorative or protective qualities of
virgins factor into their interest in child sex. Whatever the profile of the perpetrator, the abuse
they inflict on their victims, both girls and boys, is
horrific. Trafficked children in Cambodia have
been subjected to rape by multiple offenders,
filmed performing sex acts and left with physical
injuries -- not to mention psychological trauma -- from their ordeals, according to research. In recent years, various crackdowns in Svay Pak
have dented the trade, but also pushed it
underground. Today, Brewster says, there are
more than a dozen karaoke bars operating as
brothels along the road to the neighborhood, where
two years ago there was none. Even today, he estimates a majority of girls in Svay Park are
being trafficked. Virgins for sale Kieu's relative, Sephak, who lives nearby, is
another survivor. (CNN is naming the victims in
this case at the request of the girls themselves,
as they want to speak out against the practice of
child sex trafficking.) Sephak was 13 when she was taken to a hospital,
issued a certificate confirming her virginity, and
delivered to a Chinese man in a Phnom Penh
hotel room. She was returned after three nights.
Sephak says her mother was paid $800. "When I had sex with him, I felt empty inside. I
hurt and I felt very weak," she says. "It was very
difficult. I thought about why I was doing this and
why my mom did this to me." After her return, her
mother began pressuring her daughter to work in a
brothel. Not far away from Sephak's family home,
connected to the shore via a haphazard walkway
of planks that dip beneath the water with each
footfall, is the houseboat where Toha grew up. The second of eight children, none of whom
attend school, Toha was sold for sex by her
mother when she was 14. The transaction
followed the same routine: medical certificate,
hotel, rape. About two weeks after she returned to Svay Pak,
she says, the man who had bought her virginity
began calling, requesting to see her again. Her
mother urged her to go. The pressure drove her to
despair. "I went to the bathroom and cut my arms. I cut
my wrists because I wanted to kill myself," Toha
says. A friend broke down the door to the
bathroom and came to her aid. Mothers as sex traffickers CNN met with the mothers of Kieu, Sephak and
Toha in Svay Pak to hear their accounts of why
they chose to expose their daughters to sexual
exploitation. Kieu's mother, Neoung, had come to Svay Pak
from the south of the country in search of a better
life when Kieu was just a baby. But life in Svay
Pak, she would learn, wasn't easy. When her husband's tuberculosis rendered him too
sick to properly maintain the nets on the family's
fish pond, the family took on a $200 loan at
extortionate rates from a loan shark. It has now
ballooned to more than $9,000. "The debt that my
husband and I have is too big, we can't pay it off," she says. "What can you do in a situation like
this?" "Virginity selling" was widespread in the
community, and Neoung saw it as a legitimate
option to make some income. "They think it is
normal," she says. "I told her, 'Kieu, your dad is
sick and can't work… Do you agree to do that job
to contribute to your parents?'" "I know that I did wrong so I feel regret about it,
but what can I do?" she says. "We cannot move
back to the past." But she adds she would never do it again. Sephak's mother, Ann, has a similar story. Ann
moved to Svay Pak when her father came to work
as a fish farmer. She and her husband have
serious health problems. "We are very poor, so I must work hard," she
says. "It's still not enough to live by and we're
sick all the time." The family fell on hard times. When a storm
roared through the region, their house was badly
damaged, their fish got away, and they could no
longer afford to eat. In crisis, the family took out a
loan that eventually spiraled to about $6000 in
debt, she says. With money-lenders coming to her home and
threatening her, Ann made the decision to take up
an offer from a woman who approached her
promising big money for her daughter's virginity. "I saw other people doing it and I didn't think it
through," she says. "If I knew then what I know
now, I wouldn't do that to my daughter." On her houseboat, as squalls of rain lash the
river, Toha's mother Ngao sits barefoot before the
television taking pride of place in the main living
area, and expresses similar regrets. On the wall
hangs a row of digitally enhanced portraits of her
husband and eight children. They are dressed in smart suits and dresses, superimposed before an
array of fantasy backdrops: an expensive
motorcycle, a tropical beach, an American-style
McMansion. Life with so many children is hard, she says, so
she asked her daughter to go with the men. She would not do the same again, she says, as
she now has access to better support; Agape
International Missions offers interest-free loan
refinancing to get families out of the debt trap, and
factory jobs for rescued daughters and their
mothers. The news of Ngao's betrayal of her daughter has
drawn mixed responses from others in the
neighborhood, she says. Some mock her for
offering up her daughter, others sympathize with
her plight. Some see nothing wrong with she did at
all. "Some people say 'It's OK -- just bring your
daughter (to the traffickers) so you can pay off the
debt and feel better,'" says Ngao. A new future Not long after her suicide attempt, Toha was sent
to a brothel in southern Cambodia. She endured
more than 20 days there, before she managed to
get access to a phone, and called a friend. She
told the friend to contact Brewster's group, who
arranged for a raid on the establishment. Although children can be found in many brothels
across Cambodia -- a 2009 survey of 80
Cambodian commercial sex premises found three-
quarters offering children for sex – raids to free
them are infrequent. The country's child protection infrastructure is
weak, with government institutions riven with
corruption. Cambodia's anti-trafficking law does
not even permit police to conduct undercover
surveillance on suspected traffickers. General Pol
Phie They, the head of Cambodia's anti-trafficking taskforce set up in 2007 to address the issue,
says this puts his unit at a disadvantage against
traffickers. "We are still limited in prosecuting these violations
because first, we lack the expertise and second,
we lack the technical equipment," he says.
"Sometimes, we see a violation but we can't
collect the evidence we need to prosecute the
offender." He admits that police corruption in his country,
ranked 160 of 175 countries on Transparency
International's Corruption Perceptions Index, is
hampering efforts to tackle the trade in Svay Pak.
"Police in that area probably do have connections
with the brothel owners," he concedes. Brewster believes that corruption was to blame for
nearly thwarting Toha's rescue. In October 2012,
after Toha's call for help, AIM formulated plans
with another organization to rescue the teen, and
involved police. "We get a warrant to shut the place down," recalls
Brewster. "Fifteen minutes later, Toha calls and
says, 'I don't know what happened, the police just
came with the owner and took us to a new place.
I'm locked inside and don't know where I am.'" Fortunately the rescue team were able to
establish Toha's new location, and she and other
victims were freed and the brothel managers
arrested – although not before the owners fled to
Vietnam. Toha's testimony against the brothel managers,
however, resulted in their prosecutions. Last month, at the Phnom Penh Municipal
Courthouse, husband and wife Heng Vy and
Nguyeng Thi Hong were found guilty of procuring
prostitution and sentenced to three years in jail.
Both were ordered to pay $1,250 to the court,
$5,000 to Toha, and smaller sums to three other victims. Brewster was in court to watch the sentencing; a
small victory in the context of Cambodia's child
trafficking problem, but a victory nonetheless. "Toha's an amazingly brave girl," he says on the
courthouse steps, shortly after the brothel
managers were led down to the cells. "Getting a telephone when she's trapped in a
brothel to call for help, to saying she would be a
witness in front of the police…. She stood up and
now people are going to pay the price and girls will
be protected. What it will do is bring more Tohas,
more girls who are willing to speak, places shut down, bad guys put away." Like the other victims, Toha now lives in an AIM
safehouse, attending school and supporting
herself by weaving bracelets, which are sold in
stores in the West as a way of providing a
livelihood to formerly trafficked children. In the eyes of the community, having a job has
helped restore to the girls some of the dignity that
was stripped from them by having been sold into
trafficking, says Brewster. It has also given them independence from their
families -- and with that, the opportunity to build
for themselves a better reality than the one that
was thrust on them. Now Sephak has plans to
become a teacher, Kieu a hairdresser. For her part, Toha still has contact with her
mother – even providing financial support to the
family through her earnings – but has become
self-reliant. She wants to be a social worker, she
says, helping girls who have endured the same
hell she has. "(Toha)'s earning a good living and she has a
dream beyond that, you know, to become a
counselor and to be able to help other girls," says
Brewster. "You see the transformation that's
happened to her."