By NICHOLAS KRISTOF
My Sunday column returns to a regular theme — human trafficking — and recounts a raid on a brothel in northern Cambodia with one of my heroes, Somaly Mam. The youngest girl in the brothel had been trafficked from Vietnam a few months ago when she was in the seventh grade, meaning that she was born in 1999. That makes her about 12 years old.
Her youth made her very popular in the brothel. There were sometimes lines of men waiting to have sex with her, and she could have 20 customers a night. Of course, she didn’t get a penny of that income.
There’s a tendency in some quarters to be non-judgmental about trafficking and even to criticize the raids on these brothels as traumatic to the girls involved. Well, it strikes me as pretty traumatic for a 12-year-old girl to be raped 20 times a night, seven days a week — not including the tortures that pimps worldwide use to break a girl’s spirit. This trafficking, in other words, has nothing to do with consenting adults and everything to do with rape and child abuse. Figuring what to do with adult prostitution is a tough challenge (I favor experimenting with the Swedish model), but cracking down on human trafficking should be a no-brainer.
Obviously, not all prostitution is enslavement or trafficking, and some is voluntary. China probably has more prostitutes than any country in the world, and it is largely voluntary with the women themselves keeping the money they earn. But in many countries — including the U.S., for that matter — there is a considerable amount of prostitution that is forced or involves minors. Talk to the survivors, and the stories are chilling. For that matter, read Somaly Mam’s terrific memoir, “The Road of Lost Innocence,” which offers a luminous window into what these girls go through.
The other reaction that people sometimes have is resignation, the sense that forced prostitution is as inevitable as it is evil. On the contrary, I’m struck every time I visit Cambodia how much improvement there is. In Poipet, most of the brothels are now shut down, and one trafficker there whom I’ve known for years is now reduced to selling lottery tickets — because kidnapping girls and selling their virginity is just too dangerous. There was one police-run brothel in Poipet that I thought would never close because of its connections, but it is now just a plain vanilla hotel. Sure, there’s still prostitution in Poipet and no doubt some children are still held in cages and sold to buyers — but much, much less often than before. And this change came about because of international pressure from the United States and other governments, from news organizations, and from NGO’s. Read the column and weigh in with your thoughts.
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