The Human Face
Of Modern Slavery
Reality check: There are more slaves in the world today than were taken from Africa in the four centuries of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade--over 27 million. Of those, two million are children exploited in the commercial sex trade.
Human trafficking is the fastest growing criminal industry in the world, with annual profits exceeding that of ExxonMobil ($32 billion from sex trafficking alone). The average girl forced into prostitution is 13. Many are younger than that.
As a father, I am haunted by this thought. Even as I type, kids are being sold for sex in cities across the East--Tel Aviv, Dubai, Mumbai, Bangkok, Tokyo and Phnom Penh. In 12 hours, the same will be true in the West--Amsterdam, Rio, Toronto, Atlanta, Dallas and Portland. In the underworld, a girl is a money tree. Unlike a kilo of cocaine or a cache of AK-47s, a girl can be sold a dozen times a night for years. Siddharth Kara at Harvard estimates that a stable of four girls in a Western European apartment brothel can net a pimp an annual income of $300,000.
We in the West have a hard time believing that this is really happening, that the forcible exploitation of humans for profit is not only alive and well in the 21st century but worse than ever before. We are taught in history class that slavery ended after the Civil War. This is partially true: our ancestors defeated one incarnation of the monster. But the instinct of people to buy and sell other people for economic gain did not die with the 13th Amendment. It went underground and metastasized, waiting for conditions to ripen again. Then in the 1990s, slavery exploded into new life, fueled by globalization, the post-Cold-War economic vacuum, the Internet, and rising demand for cheap commercial sex and labor.
Four years ago, I was an attorney working in commercial litigation. If you had asked me how well I understood human trafficking, I would have told you about Svay Pak, Cambodia and the Western sex tourists who traveled there to abuse children. I would have told you about the heroic team of investigators, lawyers and social workers from the International Justice Mission working in the red light areas of India to rescue children from pimps and traffickers. But if you had asked me how well I understood the trade in the United States, I would have had little to say. Sensitive as I was to justice issues, I knew almost nothing about slavery in my own country.
The first stage of my awakening occurred in the spring of 2008. Interestingly, it was art that made trafficking personal, a film that brought it home in my heart. I started talking about it with my wife, scratching the surface of the world I thought I knew, and learning how profoundly I was in the dark. My wife's response to trafficking was even more visceral than my own. The truth about forced prostitution (bluntly put, the serial rape of women and children for profit) touched her deeply. Not long afterward, that touch triggered an epiphany. The concept for A Walk Across the Sun was hers before it was mine.
In the beginning, I struggled with the idea. I had a mountain of student debt and a law practice to grow. I knew that to write a novel on global human trafficking I would need the help of people in places of influence and danger; I would need time to research and write; and I would need resources to travel. In the end, however, I could neither ignore the idea's attractiveness nor deny its moral imperative. I was not in a position to rescue girls from brothels, but I could tell a story that would bring trafficking alive for readers just as a film brought it alive for me. I could lend my voice to the rising chorus of abolitionists saying: "Not in my generation."
When I said "yes" I dived deep, immersing myself in the literature on trafficking, learning the stories of slaves, traffickers, and customers, studying the international legal landscape, interviewing activists and officials in the U.S. and Europe, and traveling to India to see the reality of trafficking on the ground. In Mumbai, I met investigators working the streets of the red light areas to collect tips about captive children. I met attorneys laboring within the justice system to prosecute pimps and brothel owners. I met social workers with the most difficult job of all--putting rescued girls on a path toward healing and reintegration.
I knew, however, that I could not take my readers inside the sex trade unless I had gone there myself. Thus, one humid night a few days before I returned to the West, I met a man outside Mumbai Central Station, only a few blocks from Kamathipura, the city's largest red light area. The man was a friend of a friend and had offered to take me on an undercover "brothel tour." We took a taxi to M.R. Road where we met a malik--a brothel owner--known to my guide. After some negotiation, the man led us up two flights of steps to a room outfitted with couches and a mirror. The malik locked the door, closed the blinds and brought out about eight girls. All of them were young, and all of them were scared. I did not need a psychologist to tell me that they were not free to leave.
It has been almost three years since that night, but I can still picture the faces of those girls, still remember the revulsion I felt shaking the brothel owner's hand after I declined to make a purchase. I am haunted by the truth of slavery because I have seen it with my own eyes. I wrote A Walk Across the Sun to bring that truth alive for people like me, people who might prefer to believe that slavery is dead, or at least confined to dark alleys in the developing world. Human trafficking spans the globe, and so does my story--sweeping the reader from Mumbai to Paris to New York and Atlanta and revealing the many dimensions of the trade. The story is honest; it is hard-hitting, and based on the best research available. But--and this is critical--it is neither overwhelming nor grim. A Walk Across the Sun is a story of hope.
Hope, you say? How can you be hopeful after all you have seen? The answer is written in the pages of our history. However powerful and pervasive it may be, slavery is no more inevitable now than it was in the 1850s. But we cannot expect to counter a $32-billion-a-year industry without a massive society-wide effort. To vanquish this incarnation of the monster, we must pool our talents and resources, petition our elected officials to turn the millions in our war chest into billions, and commit ourselves to the cause of freedom for as long as it takes to win. It may take a generation, but it can be done. The only question is whether we have the courage to say "yes."
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The dreams of
The Girls of Phnom Penh
Documentary explores the lives of three teenage sex workers
Cambodia is a land of dreams deferred. The enthusiasm of liberation from France in the 1950s fueled a vibrant cultural renaissance, exemplified in the ‘60s by the heady optimism of the Khmer rock era, a new musical movement. In the ‘70s, Khmer rock was suppressed by the Khmer Rouge, who killed one-fifth of the country’s population and brought the nation to ruin and collapse. It has been 30 years since the fall of Pol Pot’s regime, but the dreams of a prosperous, modern country have still not been fulfilled.
In The Girls of Phnom Penh, director Matthew Watson introduces us to three sets of aspirations deferred. We met three teenage girls — Srey Leak, Me Nea, and Cheata — who have dreams of becoming beauticians and falling in love. But these three girls, chatting by day about music and boys like their 16- and 17-year-old counterparts anywhere in the world, work at night as prostitutes in a karaoke club in Phnom Penh. They work to support their families, who, according to Watson, often depend completely on the money they are earning. For that reason, the girls defer their dreams again and again, night after night.
The poverty of the country falls particularly heavily on the shoulders of young girls. “The daughters aren’t seen in the same way as the sons, very sadly, and it’s almost like it’s the daughter’s responsibility to earn a living for the family, more so than the boys,” said Watson, speaking from London. This is an aspect of Cambodian culture called “chbab srey”, or “the role of women.”
The concept becomes a particular danger to young Cambodian girls on account of another common cultural belief in Cambodia and many other Asian countries. “These men genuinely believe that having sex with a virgin girl gives them special powers, and extra health, and extra luck if they gamble, and might make them live longer,” explained Watson.
Consequently, men save up for months to be able to buy a girl’s virginity, which can fetch as much as $1,200 from an interested buyer. “These girls practically have a bounty on their heads,” said Watson. “If their virginity is worth, say, $700, then, tragically, the temptation is there for the parents to sell the daughters, and often it’s a one-off; they’re not selling their daughters into prostitution.” What is intended as a one-time transaction, however, often serves as a gateway to a life in Cambodia’s massive sex industry.
While Watson’s first film, Cambodia: The Virginity Trade (2009), was an informative documentary on the Cambodian sex trade, The Girls of Phnom Penh is a beautiful and intimate portrait of the girls trapped by the system. “I really wanted to just show people how these girls live, and how they’re basically ordinary girls,” he said. “They’re quite normal girls, but in quite awful situations.”
Sadly, the awful situation in which the girls are ensnared is all too normal in Cambodia. Culturally, women who are not engaged in the sex trade in one form or another are not expected to be out at night; a woman encountered during a night on the town, whether she is ostensibly a waitress, a karaoke singer, or anything else, is almost unavoidably also engaged in prostitution of some kind.
“When men go out at night, they’re basically surrounded by these girls who are all working in the sex industry, and it just, sort of, feeds on itself. It’s perfectly normal for a man to go out with his friends any night of the week, have a few drinks, and then sleep with a prostitute.”
Watson becomes agitated thinking about his filming experience. “My crew slept with prostitutes all the time, that just shows how — and this really, really upset me — but it’s just so normal for men, for all men out there, to sleep with sex workers,” he said. “It shouldn’t be as normal as it is.”
After filming, Watson and his colleagues were able to raise the money to help Srey Leak, Cheata, and Me Nea out of their debts, and send them to a school where they are now studying to become beauticians. A special charitable fund, called the Cambodia Fund, has been set up to help girls in the same circumstances, and is now officially registered as a British charity.