Tuol Kork district’s brothel strip: ground zero for cheap sex. Motorbikes, utility vehicles, dump trucks and bicycles all kick up dust on this desperate, narrow street, where women move in and out of doorways like ghosts.
From every doorway, prostitutes look men up and down as they pass, some clucking their tongues, some puckering their lips, some simply yelling as they all compete for customers.
Among them sits Mom, a 28-year-old who has been a prostitute her entire adult life. She is an outspoken woman who wants rights for workers who choose to sell sex.
“We have to learn to demand our rights,” she said. “I’m equal to other women; I just have a different job.”
Like prostitutes everywhere, those in Cambodia have very little control over their lives, subject to the whim of brothel owners, pimps, mamasans and the thugs or police protecting them. But solidarity among prostitutes is growing here, and with that is some semblance of independence from what has become an oppressive cycle of abuse, poverty and inevitable dead ends.
Mom is a member of the Cambodian Prostitutes Union, which has about 60 members in Tuol Kork. It is one of the growing number of organizations and agencies pushing for prostitute empowerment.
The union focuses on HIV and health education, even holding workshops for members and other workers in which they are taught the safest ways to have sex, both to avoid sexually transmitted diseases and other injury.
On the walls of the union’s headquarters—a hot, wooden house wedged between two brothels—there are pictures of the girls in role playing games, demonstrating unsafe sexual positions, and learning the best ways to make a man “finish” faster.
In 1997, the government estimated about 15,000 prostitutes worked in brothels. The women who work by choice—the 40 percent who are not trafficked—benefit from these sessions, Mom says. They deserve rights, not crackdowns from the government.
Now efforts are being made at every level to empower the women in the sex sector, to give them a voice and a measure of control over their lives. From the efforts of government officials and agency workers, sex workers are finding ways to meet together, share ideas and protect each other’s individual rights.
Through the work of NGOs pushing for empowerment, young women are learning that the only people they can count on for their safety is themselves.
Agencies like the Urban Sector Group and the Cambodia Women for Peace and Development Association are starting to string women’s networks together, teaching the prostitutes that they can protect themselves, that there is safety in numbers.
The Urban Sector Group, for example, recently finished a one-day meeting in which sex workers discussed sexual experience and skills, making sex safer for them, said Meas Chanthan, an assistant program coordinator for the agency.
The Women for Peace and Development agency has begun a program in which workers from two brothels are teamed together. If one girl is having trouble, the others are taught they can help out—mainly by making themselves visible, speaking up, chastising the offending customer. Groups of workers select a leader, who meets monthly with other leaders to discuss current situations and problems, from extortion by police to violence from clients, said Chou Bun Eng, director of the organization.
Those group leaders, in turn, select a “network leader,” she said, who meet less frequently. Eventually, they will expand to more and more brothels.
Her agency has also sent sex workers to India and South Africa to meet with unionized prostitutes.
Empowerment comes from “control at an individual level,” said Rosanna Barbero, a program director at Oxfam Hong Kong, an international NGO that in Cambodia teaches prostitutes self-respect, the power of their sexuality, and “body integrity.”
Sex education is one way to do that, she said.
The longer a man takes to ejaculate, the more damage he can do to a worker’s vagina, increasing her risk of disease and other complications, explained Barbero.
The problem of prostitution is inextricably linked to the rights of women at all levels of Cambodian society, Barbero says. Prostitutes or no, women in the country are often considered second-class citizens with very few rights, sexual or otherwise.
She recalled with amusement in one workshop, Oxfam brought together sex workers and middle-class Cambodian women and began asking questions about sex—who controls it, when, where, and how often. There was very little that set apart the prostitutes from the so-called good wives, she said.
Men still very much control sexual freedom in the country, which perpetuates prostitution, so poverty reduction alone won’t necessarily alleviate the prostitution phenomenon.
“It’s easy to blame everything on poverty,” Barbero said. “But that also ignores the reality of the situation.”
Given the circumstances that bring women to brothels in the first place, it is very difficult to bring them out. There are few jobs available as it is, and women feel afraid or “shy” to return home to their families after prostituting.
One way to bring some stability and a sense of self-worth into prostitutes’ lives is to give them certain freedoms associated with any other line of work, Barbero said.
Some groups “argue that prostitution is the ultimate exploitation of women,” Barbero said. However, if the government, agencies and the sex workers themselves can eliminate the exploitive elements of prostitution—debt-bondage, abuse, criminal elements—then prostitution can coexist with human rights, she said.
Barbero’s agency has designed a model community for prostitutes, intended to offer them ownership, protection and rights. Under the plan, which is now being reviewed by Phnom Penh municipality and the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, brothels would be grouped together in a walled compound, complete with a main entrance and security exits. There are plans for food stalls, a day-care center and a clinic.
Each community would be run by a board of directors, all of them sex workers themselves, thereby eliminating problems of ownership and debt bondage. Criminals, too, would be shut out of the community, Barbero said.
Each board would have an executive director who would communicate problems and needs to other directors and the Women’s Affairs Ministry.
None of these communities have been built so far. Women are still on their own, left to defend themselves. But there are still women like Mom in Tuol Kork.
For her, there is no difference between her work and anyone else’s profession. The only thing that the high numbers of prostitutes show is that “men look down on women.”
But, she said, in the end it works out evenly.
“It is an exchange,” she said. “The man has his money, and I have my vagina.”
(Additional reporting by Ana Nov and Phann Ana)
