Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times |
By Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times, November 16, 2011
Phnom Penh,
Cambodia
When I write about
human trafficking as a modern form of slavery, people sometimes tune out as
their eyes glaze over. So, Glazed Eyes, meet Srey Pov.
She’s a tough interview because she breaks down as she recalls her
life in a Cambodian brothel, and pretty soon my eyes are welling up, too.
Srey Pov’s family sold her to a brothel when she was 6 years old. She
was unaware of sex but soon found out: A Western pedophile purchased her
virginity, she said, and the brothel tied her naked and spread-eagled on a bed
so that he could rape her.
“I was so scared,” she recalled. “I was crying and asking, ‘Why are
you doing this to me?’ ”
After that, the girl was in huge demand because she was so young. Some
20 customers raped her nightly, she remembers. And the brothel twice stitched
her vagina closed so that she could be resold as a virgin. This agonizingly
painful practice is common in Asian brothels, where customers sometimes pay
hundreds of dollars to rape a virgin.
Most girls who have been trafficked, whether in New York or in
Cambodia, eventually surrender. They are degraded and terrified, and they doubt
their families or society will accept them again. But somehow Srey Pov refused
to give in.
Repeatedly, she tried to escape the brothel but she said that each
time she was caught and brutally punished with beatings and electric shocks.
The brothel, like many in Cambodia, also had a punishment cell to break the
will of rebellious girls.
As Srey Pov remembers it (and other girls tell similar stories), each
time she rebelled she was locked naked in the darkness in a barrel half-full of
sewage, replete with vermin and scorpions that stung her regularly. I asked how
long she was punished this way, thinking perhaps an hour or two.
“The longest?” she remembered. “It was a week.”
Customers are, of course, the reason trafficking continues, and many
of them honestly think that the girls are in the brothels voluntarily. Many
are, of course. But smiles are not always what they seem. Srey Pov even
remembers flirting to avoid being beaten.
“We smile on the outside,” she said, “but inside we are crying.”
Yet this is a story with a triumphant ending. At age 9, Srey Pov was
able to dart away from the brothel and outrun the guard. She found her way to a
shelter run by Somaly Mam, an anti-trafficking activist who herself was
prostituted as a child. Somaly now runs the Somaly Mam Foundation to fight human
trafficking in Southeast Asia: She’s the one who led the brothel raid that I
recounted in my last column.
In Somaly’s shelter, Srey Pov learned English and blossomed. Now 19,
Srey Pov can even imagine eventually having a boyfriend.
“Before I didn’t like men because they hit me and raped me,” she
reflected. “But now I think that not all men are bad. If I find a good man, I
can marry him.”
Somaly is creating an army of young women like Srey Pov who have been
rescued from the brothels: well-educated and determined to defeat human
trafficking. Over the years, I’ve watched these women and girls make a
difference, and they’re self-replicating.
In my last column, I described a frightened seventh-grade Vietnamese
girl who was rescued in a brothel raid that Somaly and I participated in. That
raid in the town of Anlong Veng has already had an impact, for six more
brothels in the area have closed because of public attention and fear that they
could be next. And the seventh-grade girl is recovering from her trauma at a
shelter run by Somaly, where a girl named Lithiya has taken her under her wing.
Lithiya, now 15, is one of my favorites in “Somaly’s army,” perhaps
because she wants to be a journalist and has taught herself astoundingly good
English. Trafficked at age 9 from Vietnam, Lithiya was locked inside a brothel
for years before she climbed over a wall and escaped. Now a ninth grader, she
is ranked No. 1 in her class.
Srey Pov, Lithiya and Somaly encountered a form of oppression that
echoes 19th-century slavery. But the scale is larger today. By my calculations,
at least 10 times as many girls are now trafficked into brothels annually as
African slaves were transported to the New World in the peak years of the
trans-Atlantic slave trade.
So
for those of you doubtful that “modern slavery” really is an issue for the new
international agenda, think of Srey Pov — and multiply her by millions. If what
such girls experience isn’t slavery, that word has no meaning. It’s time for a
21st-century abolitionist movement in the U.S. and around the world.
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