Research suggests some of the Asian perpetrators are "virginity seekers," for whom health-related beliefs around the supposedly restorative or protective qualities of virgins factor into their interest in child sex. The abusers would often be local, situational offenders, he says. But the majority of sexual exploitation of children is of adolescents, and that's taking place in commercial sex venues." "We tend to often hear reports in the media about pedophilia, exploitation of very young children. "In most cases when we talk about child sexual exploitation, it's taking place within the adult sex industry," says Capaldi. Mark Capaldi is a senior researcher for Ecpat International, an organization committed to combating the sexual exploitation of children. Sex tourists tend to hail from affluent countries, including the West, South Korea, Japan and China, but research suggests Cambodian men remain the main exploiters of child prostitutes in their country. They include pedophile sex tourists, who actively seek out sex with prepubescent children, and more opportunistic "situational" offenders, who take advantage of opportunities in brothels to have sex with adolescents. The men who abuse the children of Svay Pak fit a number of profiles. "When they sleep with me, they feel very happy," she says. He moved to Cambodia with his wife in 2009 after a harrowing investigative mission trip to the neighborhood. "We didn't believe it until we saw vanload after vanload of kids."ĭon Brewster, a former pastor from California, is the founder and director of Agape International Missions, an organization dedicated to rescuing and rehabilitating the victims of child trafficking in Cambodia and smashing the networks that exploit them. The local sex industry sweeps up both children from the neighborhood - sold, like Kieu, by their parents – as well as children trafficked in from the countryside, or across the border from Vietnam. "When we came here three years ago and began to live here, 100% of the kids between 8 and 12 were being trafficked," says Brewster. In recent decades, he says, this impoverished fishing village – where a daughter's virginity is too often seen as a valuable asset for the family – has become a notorious child sex hotspot. "Svay Pak is known around the world as a place where pedophiles come to get little girls," says Brewster, whose organization, Agape International Missions (AIM), has girls as young as four in its care, rescued from traffickers and undergoing rehabilitation in its safehouses. "It's not that she was stolen from her mother - her mother gave the keys to the people to rape her."īrewster, a former pastor, moved from California to Cambodia with wife Bridget in 2009, after a harrowing investigative mission trip to the neighborhood where Kieu grew up - Svay Pak, the epicenter of child trafficking in the Southeast Asian nation. "I can't imagine what it feels like to have your mother sell you, to have your mother waiting in the car while she gets money for you to be raped," he says.
It is this aspect of Cambodia's appalling child sex trade that Don Brewster, a 59-year-old American resident of the neighborhood, finds most difficult to countenance. "I don't know what to do now, because we cannot move back to the past." "It was because of the debt, that's why I had to sell her," she says. Like other local mothers CNN spoke to, she blames poverty for her decision to sell her daughter, saying a financial crisis drove her into the clutches of the traffickers who make their livelihoods preying on Cambodian children. Mira Sorvino details going behind the scenes of this illicit trade. Karaoke bars are a common front for child prostitution. "Selling my daughter was heartbreaking, but what can I say?" says Kieu's mother, Neoung, in an interview with a CNN crew that travelled to Phnom Penh to hear her story. When she learned her mother was planning to sell her again, this time for a six-month stretch, she realized she needed to flee her home. When she returned home, her mother sent her away for stints in two other brothels, including one 400 kilometers away on the Thai border.
She was kept there for three days, raped by three to six men a day. She says she returned home from the experience "very heartbroken." But her ordeal was not over.Īfter the sale of her virginity, her mother had Kieu taken to a brothel where, she says, "they held me like I was in prison." "I did not know what the job was," says Kieu, now 14 and living in a safehouse. The girl, Kieu, was taken to a hospital and examined by a doctor, who issued her a "certificate of virginity." She was then delivered to a hotel, where a man raped her for two days. When a poor family in Cambodia fell afoul of loan sharks, the mother asked her youngest daughter to take a job.
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