Author survived sex trade, lives to rescue others

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Author survived sex trade, lives to rescue others

Postby sam » Tue Sep 16, 2008 9:11 am

Author survived sex trade, lives to rescue others

In "The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine," Somaly Mam recounts her years in the child-sex trade and her efforts to give voice to and rescue other victims.

By Paula Bock
Somaly Mam

"The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine"
by Somaly Mam with Ruth Marshall
Spiegel & Grau, 193 pp., $22.95

Somaly Mam's haunting story starts in Cambodia's mountains, before she's sold into prostitution.

She is a child. No name, no parents, no home. She forages for wild fruits and sleeps in a hammock under the moon, whispering to trees her sorrow over not having a mother. "When things got unbearable, I confessed my secrets to the waterfalls, because the water couldn't reverse its flow and betray me."

Mam has the dark skin of her tribe, the Phnong, a mountain people so remote her village has never been visited by doctor, nurse or preacher. It doesn't have schools or use money. Her childhood coincides with the Killing Fields era; Pol Pot praises the Phnong because they live collectively and have no Western habits, so the Khmer Rouge leave them alone.

At 10, Mam leaves the forest, tricked by a cruel man who claims to be her grandfather. He sells her virginity, then sells her in marriage to an abusive soldier when she's 14, then to a Phnom Penh brothel when she's 16. Clients rape and beat her, brothel owners torture her with snakes, maggots, car batteries. She submits, but her spirit isn't broken. She helps two younger girls escape. More torture. Four years of it.

It's sickening to realize that as a sex slave, Mam suffered rape and abuse as bad as the Killing Fields' torture. What's worse, increasing numbers of girls worldwide are forced into prostitution, some as young as 5. A Canadian nonprofit estimates 1 in 40 girls born in Cambodia will be sold into sex slavery. Mam explains trafficking from a girl's perspective in a fresh, often poetic voice. If you care about what's happening to girls globally, this is an important book to read.

Finally, Mam buys her way out of bondage, in part with money from a regular European client. In his hotel, she experiences her first shower: "He ... turned on a shiny thing, like a snake, and it flashed to life, spitting at me ... That was the first time I ever used proper soap, and I remember how good it smelled, like a flower."

Years later, after marrying a French aid worker, Mam returns to the brothels with soap ­ and condoms ­ for prostitutes. She gets medical care for the girls, then begins outright rescue and rehabilitation. She co-founds Acting for Women in Distressing Situations (AFESIP in French) and the Somaly Mam Foundation (www.somaly.org), so far freeing 3,400 girls from brothels in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.

As an activist, Mam condemns parental greed, the Cambodian culture of silence, and the collusion between politicians, police and prostitution syndicates. She's won the prestigious Prince of Asturias Award for humanitarian work and was named Glamour Woman of the Year in 2006, a CNN Hero in 2007. Stress and danger continue. Gangsters kidnapped her daughter for four days after her rescue group pressured police to raid a big brothel.

And Mam is still tormented by memories of rape and the stink of sperm. She showers incessantly and slathers on perfumes, but finds no relief. She feels dirty even though she's so beautiful, she outshines supermodels at foundation fundraisers.

Sleepless, she pours herself into helping victimized girls. "I'm one of them ... I wear their scars on my body.... It's the evil that was done to me that propels me on. Is there any other way to exorcise it?"
"Your orgasm can no longer dictate my oppression"

Trisha Baptie
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Re: Author survived sex trade, lives to rescue others

Postby sam » Thu Sep 25, 2008 1:13 pm

A Heroine From the Brothels
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

http://www.nytimes .com/2008/09/25/opinion/25kristof.html?hp

World leaders are parading through New York this week for a United Nations General Assembly reviewing their (lack of) progress in fighting global poverty. That’s urgent and necessary, but what they aren’t talking enough about is one of the grimmest of all manifestations of poverty — sex trafficking.

This is widely acknowledged to be the 21st-century version of slavery, but governments accept it partly because it seems to defy solution. Prostitution is said to be the oldest profession. It exists in all countries, and if some teenage girls are imprisoned in brothels until they die of AIDS, that is seen as tragic but inevitable.

The perfect counterpoint to that fatalism is Somaly Mam, one of the bravest and boldest of those foreign visitors pouring into New York City this month. Somaly is a Cambodian who as a young teenager was sold to the brothels herself and now runs an organization that extricates girls from forced prostitution.

Now Somaly has published her inspiring memoir, “The Road of Lost Innocence,” in the United States, and it offers some lessons for tackling the broader problem.

In the past when I’ve seen Somaly and her team in Cambodia, I frankly didn’t figure that she would survive this long. Gangsters who run the brothels have held a gun to her head, and seeing that they could not intimidate Somaly with their threats, they found another way to hurt her: They kidnapped and brutalized her 14-year-old daughter.

Three years ago, I wrote from Cambodia about a raid Somaly organized on the Chai Hour II brothel where more than 200 girls had been imprisoned. Girls rescued from the brothel were taken to Somaly’s shelter, but the next day gangsters raided the shelter, kidnapped the girls and took them right back to the brothel.

Yet Somaly continued her fight, and, with the help of many others, she has registered real progress. Today, she says, the Chai Hour II brothel is shuttered. In large part, so is the Svay Pak brothel area where 12-year-old girls were openly for sale on my first visit.

“If you want to buy a virgin, it’s not easy now,” notes Somaly, speaking in English — her fifth language.

Somaly’s shelters — where the youngest girl rescued is 4 years old — provide an education and job skills. More important, Somaly applies public and international pressure to push the police to crack down on the worst brothels, and takes brothel owners to court. The idea is to undermine the sex-trafficking business model.

In her book, Somaly recounts how she grew up as an orphan and was “adopted” by a man who sold her to a brothel. Once when Somaly ran away, the police gang-raped her. Then her owner, on recovering his “property,” not only beat and humiliated her but tied her down naked and poured live maggots over her skin and in her mouth.

Yet even after that, Somaly occasionally defied him. Once two new girls, about 14 years old, were brought in to the brothel and left tied up. Somaly untied them and let them run away. For that, she was tortured with electric shocks.

As Cambodia opened up, Somaly began to get foreign clients, whom she vastly preferred because they didn’t beat her as well, and she began learning foreign languages. Eventually, a French aid worker named Pierre Legros and she got married, and together they started Afesip, a small organization to fight sex trafficking. They have since divorced, and Somaly works primarily through the Somaly Mam Foundation, set up by admiring Americans to finance her battle against trafficking in Cambodia. It’s a successful collaboration between American do-gooders with money and a Cambodian do-gooder with local street smarts.

The world’s worst trafficking is in Asia, but teenage runaways in the United States are also routinely brutalized by their pimps. If a white, middle-class blonde goes missing, the authorities issue an Amber Alert and cable TV goes berserk, but neither federal nor local authorities do nearly enough to go after pimps who savagely abuse troubled girls who don’t fit the “missing blonde” narrative. The system is broken.

A bill to strengthen federal anti-trafficking efforts within the U.S. was overwhelmingly passed by the House of Representatives, led by Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York. But crucial provisions to crack down on pimping are being blocked in the Senate in part by Senators Sam Brownback and Joe Biden, who consider the House provisions unnecessary and problematic. (Barack Obama gets it and says the right things about trafficking to the public, but apparently not to his running mate.)

With U.N. leaders this week focused on overcoming poverty, Somaly is a reminder that we needn’t acquiesce in the enslavement of girls, in this country or abroad. If we defeated slavery in the 19th century, we can beat it in the 21st century.
sam
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Re: Author survived sex trade, lives to rescue others

Postby bluecoat28 » Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:09 pm

crucial provisions to crack down on pimping are being blocked in the Senate in part by Senators Sam Brownback and Joe Biden, who consider the House provisions unnecessary and problematic.
Hmmm... Mister Anti Violence Against Women, huh. Interesting. I wonder why Biden is blocking it. It's strange, because he's been portrayed as such a pro-woman guy. So now the maggot image is in my head. That's a new one.
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