Bopha fled an abusive husband and a barren province to look for a job in the capital, and at first it looked like she landed a decent one.
Each evening she dons a gold-trimmed red dress and a silk sash, and a van takes her to a breezy outdoor eatery perched on a boardwalk overlooking the Mekong River. She joins a phalanx of fetching young women who greet customers and plead with them to buy a dizzying variety of international beers, wines and liquors. Purchase Bopha’s French wine and she will pour, chat and flash a coy smile.
But after only a week in the job, Bopha, 22, is familiar with its underside. Working solely on commission, she has sold but a single bottle of her expensive wine, earning $2.
She has been groped, fondled, treated rudely, and propositioned for sex three times. One man offered $50.
Though her Battambang farming family is deep in debt, Bopha has vowed to resist. “They ask me, but I think they are looking down on Cambodian women,” she says, her eyes welling with tears. “I don’t want to bring a bad name to my province. I took this job, but my mind is pure.”
Not all “beer girls” can resist for long. An increasing number are selling sex with the beer, and one-fifth are infected with HIV, government surveys show.
AIDS workers here are starting to focus on the girls’ role in the epidemic, and challenging the major liquor companies that employ the girls to take responsibility for their health and working conditions.
Untold thousands of beer girls ply their trade in Cambodia, Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia. In the vast world of Cambodian sex work, experts say, beer girls are the royalty. While brothel workers are chained to their beds or sold like cattle, beer girls are paid better for sex and have more discretion in choosing their partners.
But that very freedom may make beer girls among the most vulnerable to HIV. Government surveys show they are less likely than brothel workers to make their men wear condoms. “The clients tend to develop more of a sweetheart relationship with these girls, and there is thought to be a relationship of trust,” said Dr Var Chivorn of the Reproductive Health Association of Cambodia, which counsels beer girls.
And in a traditional society such as Cambodia’s, beer girls still carry a stigma. Respectable girls wear conservative clothing, go home early and are rarely seen touching their boyfriends or husbands in public. Beer girls work late, are sometimes given miniskirts as uniforms, and flirt openly to keep the liquor flowing.
“I don’t tell my family what I do,” said Thach, 24, who sells Carlsberg beer. “I feel very ashamed. They say that beer girls are not good girls.”
With base salaries as little as zero and more typically running from $20 to $80 a month, the girls depend heavily on commissions, typically from $2 to $3 per case of beer sold. Refusing a client’s advances can be tantamount to losing a sale, they say.
“If you refuse them, next time when they come, they no longer drink Foster’s,” said a smiling Sokun, a 16-year-old Foster’s girl. Though she said she has not had sex with customers, later that night she was seen caressing the arm of a middle-aged man. Foster’s pays a base salary of $20 a month, company officials say.
It is the commission-based sales methods that most infuriate AIDS workers here. “We have to make the multinationals realize that they are de facto prostituting young women to sell their beer,” said Kim Green, AIDS program coordinator for Care International in Cambodia.
Some companies forbid the girls from activities that might lead to sex—or that might make other customers feel neglected. Cambodia Breweries, which makes Tiger Beer, forbids girls from sitting with the clients or spending too much time with any one client. “I don’t want my girls to go over to the other side of the business,” said Tai Hong, general manager of Cambodia Breweries.
Tai Hong estimated that Cambodia Breweries employs between 150 and 180 beer girls. The company advises girls to stay away from customers who are too aggressive or forward, he said.
Such rules are common but can be ineffective when beer girls are working on commission, said Nith Sopha, a health officer of NGO Family Health International. “The girls still have to do something to convince the client to buy,” she said. “The companies are acting with one eye open and the other eye closed.”
Even as Cambodia has emerged as the most AIDS-prone nation in Southeast Asia in recent years, beer girls have slipped between the cracks. The government’s high-profile condom-use campaign monitors and penalizes brothels if women contract HIV. But beer companies are not involved in the campaign.
Now, aid organizations are paying more attention to so-called indirect sex workers such as beer girls, karaoke parlor employees and masseuses. Last year, aid organizations began offering AIDS awareness programs to beer girls, and Var Chivorn estimates that two-thirds of beer girls in the capital have spent at least an hour in such a program.
But the programs are funded largely by US taxpayers, not the beer companies, Var Chivorn says. And they don’t affect working conditions, says Green. “No matter what kind of knowledge they have, or how many condoms they have, men still will be grabbing them and trying to get them to have sex.”
Much of the beer that is sold is manufactured by Western companies with strict policies protecting their own employees from dangers such as sexual harassment. Most of the girls, however, do not work directly for the beer companies, but for locally-based distributors and exporters.
“I think our distributor takes this very seriously,” said Margarette Skov, spokesperson for the Denmark-based Carlsberg beer. Local distributor Diethelm and Company has told her the distributor employs staff to monitor the girls’ activities. “It seems like he’s treating [the girls] well, just like any employee.”
But a verbal assurance from a distant distributor is not enough, Green says. She notes that in the garment sector, international awareness of sweatshop conditions has spurred Western companies like the Gap to inspect and monitor contracted factories. The same could happen in the beer business, she says.
“It’s their beer. They should be responsible for selling their beer. These companies have good policies to protect their own staff, and they could require that of their distributors.”
Tai Hong of Cambodia Breweries said restaurant owners, as well as beer companies, should take some responsibility for the girls’ safety. The restaurants insist on beer companies employing the girls because pretty young women attract clients, he said. If a beer girl complains about an abusive customer, restaurant owners should ask those customers to leave, he said.
“We hope outlet owners will know when to step in to defuse the situation. I think the outlet owner has that responsibility because the customers are under his jurisdiction.”
Green envisions a future when Cambodian bars and restaurants are run more like legitimate gentleman’s clubs in the West, where men are free to ogle and chat with the girls, but a grope or rude comment is grounds for ejection or even arrest.
“The girls become eye candy. You can still sell a lot of beer that way.” (Names of beer girls have been changed.)
