Throwing down a newspaper at the Journalism Library in Phnom Penh’s Cambodia Communication Institute, university student Mom Sophun says it upsets him to read about trafficking in Cambodia.
“I wonder, who are the exploiters?” he said.
Thanks to prejudice against trafficking’s victims, that question has been difficult to answer. Mom Sophun says he’s heard of women who, in spite of a whole life behaving in “traditional” Khmer ways, kill themselves rather than face the shunning that comes with their victimization.
“Everybody should encourage them to struggle for their life, even if they were prostitutes,” he said.
The shameful shaming of trafficking’s victims undermines attempts to crack down on human traders, said Janet Ashby, an adviser to the Cambodian National Project Against Trafficking in Women and Children in the Mekong Sub-Region.
Trafficking victims are the “best human resources” to prevent other women from falling prey to the recruiters and gangsters, Ashby said.
“I worry when victims come home and they’re too embarrassed to tell the truth. It’s a serious problem if they hide their former job,” Ashby said.
Trafficking victims would be especially useful in identifying scam artists and the ploys they use, which would help defeat the exploiters’ usual lure—the promise of a high-paying job, Ashby said.
“The only thought is how they can earn a lot of money and help their families out of poverty. They really are ready to risk anything because their stomachs demand it,” Ashby said.
According to World Bank statistics, the per capita income in Cambodia hovers around $280 per year. That poverty makes young women and girls easy prey for traffickers, experts say.
The silence of trafficking victims also threatens communities if—or more likely, when—trafficked women and girls come home with sexually transmitted diseases, experts say.
“When they’re abroad, women can’t go into a clinic or ask for help from the police, because they’re there illegally,” Save the Children Norway Information Officer Sou Sophanara said.
During a news conference last Thursday, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson put some blame for trafficking on Cambodia’s cultural attitudes toward sex, which tolerate men going to brothels but stigmatize women and girls who have sex outside of marriage.
Many observers and experts concur, pointing out that Khmer slang refers to women and girls who lose their virginity as “broken.” Another metaphor has it that women are silk, which is destroyed if stained, but men are gold, which only gets more polished.
For victims of trafficking, this double standard is devastating. After hard labor in brothels or factories in Cambodia’s cities or abroad, often in and out of jail, they face the additional trauma of being ostracized by old friends and relatives, Ashby said.
“Their neighbors won’t even let children be around them,” Ashby said.
This has the effect of undermining victims’ relationships with their families, who feel social pressure to exile the victims.
If Khmer culture plays a part in creating trafficking, trafficking in turn is destroying Khmer culture, officials and experts say.
The numbers on trafficking in Cambodia are difficult to establish. The UN estimates that more than 200,000 people are trafficked in Southeast Asia each year.
At least 30,000 Cambodian women and children have been sold into Thailand—where they either stay to work in sweatshops or brothels, or move on to the US, Singapore and Taiwan, according to Ashby.
Although the scale of Cambodia’s trafficking is relatively small compared with other countries, experts say it is on the rise.
Cambodia has also garnered international attention because its small population, high profile and active NGO community make it a “manageable” problem, Robinson said last week.
Other experts agree. “This is a test case for human rights,” said Pierre Legros, representative of the NGO Afesip.
In the meantime, as officials work to put together new laws and tougher enforcement, members of the public must take a look at their own actions and attitudes, Ashby said.
“If there’s no buyer, there would be no seller,” she said.
