Not By Choice

Conversations With A Sex Worker  

A young Cambodian relates the appalling events that led her into prostitution.

It was the sort of day that made you want to really seize all opportunities.
There was a beautiful blue sky dotted with white wisps of clouds and the kind of sun benevolent enough not to burn your skin.
It was 8am in Cambodia and the adventure at hand was a trip through Angkor Archaeological Park.
My guide?
A 22-year-old sex worker named Samnang, the Cambodian word for Good Fortune.

“You can call me Sam,” she said, smiling shyly.

I had met Sam two days earlier, by accident, when I got lost meandering through the streets of Siem Reap.
At first, she tried giving me directions, but when I failed to comprehend, mostly because I’m not good with maps, Sam offered to walk me back to where I was staying during my week-long visit.

When we arrived, I asked Sam to have dinner with me, but she declined, saying she had to work.
When I asked what she worked as, she explained in halting English that she was a sex worker.
I tried to sound casual, telling her why I was in Cambodia and that I was looking for someone who could show me around.
I asked if she would be interested.

And so, two days later, on a gorgeous day in Siem Rep, Sam takes me on a journey very different from the one I had in mind.

As we walk down Sivatha Road, we talk about our lives and I ask her if she would tell her story for me to share with others.
She agrees but asks that no photographs be taken.
We find a restaurant and seat ourselves for a meal.
Spicy chicken rice at 8.30am is indeed the breakfast of champions. 

The Journey Begins

Sam’s life began as a rather happy one, but it quickly turned into a horrific series of events.
Born in Vietnam, she went to Thailand when she was 17 in search of a better life.
She found a job as a waitress.
One day, she met a foreigner named Gerard who was very pleased to learn that she was a Vietnam native.
He was a businessman who was enthusiastic about importing cheap scooters into Vietnam.

After several lunches and dinners, Sam agreed to take Gerard to Vietnam to help him start his business.
Felicitations of love followed soon after, and a promise of marriage was extended.
One thing led to another and Sam found herself pregnant two months into the relationship.
The business was also warming up.
But Gerard’s ardour toward her cooled drastically.

“He began ignoring me and wasn’t shy about doing it openly,” she shares.
Gerard also turned out to be a paedophile, having his way with many underage girls.
“In Vietnam, if you have money, you can get away with anything; you just pay the police to keep them quiet,” Sam says, frowning.
I tell her that this happens around the world.

Gerard left Sam in her third month of pregnancy.
“I tried asking him to help me and the baby with some money, but he said it’s not his problem anymore,” she says, her voice thick with emotion.
“He told me that I should get an abortion, which he was willing to pay for. I didn’t want to do this and I had nowhere to go. One day, while I was looking for odd jobs, I met an old friend who was working as a seamstress. She took me in without question.” 

On the Run

Months later, Sam gave birth to a beautiful girl and named her Maelea, which means Flower Garland.
Soon after this, she found a job as a cleaner and life seemed better for a while.

About a year later, while she was out with her baby, Sam bumped into Gerard at the local market.
The man who initially wanted to get rid of the baby now wanted her for himself when he saw how cute she was.
“I refused of course,” Sam says.
“I knew what he did with the other young girls. I didn’t trust him anymore and I was afraid that he would hurt my baby.”

But Gerard got his way through his connections and by using corrupt officials.
But after a month, Sam got Maelea back with the help of a visiting social worker from the United States.

“I cried for days after I saw what he had done to my baby. Her private parts were swollen and discoloured. She was only one year old.”
Sam’s petite body shook with heavy sobs from this terrible memory.

When confronted, Gerard rejected the accusations and threatened to hurt Sam and the baby if she continued to pester him.
But he still wanted Maelea.
“He would come to the house that I shared with my friend and send thugs over to threaten us. I was afraid for our safety and decided that I would leave and hide out in Cambodia.” 

Starting Anew

After a difficult journey, Sam found herself in a foreign country.
She couldn’t speak the language, and had a little child to feed.

“I tried for three months to find a job. No one would hire me. I had to beg on the streets with my daughter in my arms. We were staying at bus stands and wherever else that we could find shelter. I thought that if feeding my daughter and providing her with a roof over her head meant that I had to sell my body, then it was a small price to pay.”
And so she turned to prostitution.

“I will never forget the first time I did it. I just kept my mind on the food that I will be able to buy for my child and me. That made it easier.

“I have been doing this for four years now and have met many women like me. In the early days, one of them told me that I would get used to it, that it would get easier. This is not true. I have never gotten used to it and I will not be doing this for much longer.”
There was conviction in her voice.

Sam says she will give it another half a year.
“What will my daughter think?” I am stumped for a reply.

“Soon, she will be old enough to start asking me questions,” she adds.
Later, I ask her if she would ever tell Maelea of her past.
Sam takes a long pause and says, “Right now, I don’t know if I will. I want to be honest, but I also think that she doesn’t have to know the ugly side of my life.”

I ask what she would like to do for a living.

“I am saving some money to go back to school and study. I want to become a teacher.”
And then she asks shyly, “Do you think I can?”

I am too overwhelmed to say anything and I nod my answer.

At the time of writing, Sam has already started her classes.
After so much misfortune, it does look like she is going to live up to the meaning of her name after all.

Source: Cambodia Today - June 2011

The Maid - Yes Or No, They Are Our Daughters, Too

Escaping Hard Labour: Maids In Malaysia Return 

David Boyle and Mom Kunthear

Photo by: Sovan Philong

A group of Cambodian workers are trained at VC Manpower office in Phnom Penh’s Sen Sok district last August before departing for Malaysia.

---

If the recruitment agencies want to go legit they
have  to stop providing loans, it’s as simple as that

One week after they arrived at a maid training centre in Malaysia last year, two teenage Cambodian girls say their intake of recruits, fed up with working conditions, tied their instructor to a chair and fled the premises.

The girls say they had been forced to work from 7am to 5pm with just a three-minute lunch break, performing a monotonous training programme before going home to study English before bed.

Their instructor, they say, had devised a spirit-crushing regime, making the girls wash every floor, surface and utensil in the centre, then wash the same items again for days on end.

“I wondered why the office was small, yet my boss ordered me to clean it again and again,” says Soy, who has requested her real name be concealed.

“The trainer did not hit me, they just blamed me. I could not endure working in the office so much.”

Soy and two other girls with her were under the minimum legal working age in Cambodia – 18-years-old – and well below the required 21 to work in Malaysia, according to photocopies of their birth certificates obtained from the rights group Licadho and seen by The Post.

The documents show the girls were aged between 15 and 16 at the time of departure – an assertion that the company that sent them there, Ung Rithy Group Co Ltd, strongly denies.

Outside the offices of the labour company Soy says her, and 12 other trainees, found themselves stranded with no idea where they were, no passports and no way of calling home.

Stumbling upon a church, the girls say they took refuge and began a long process involving the anti-human trafficking group Tenaganita, the Cambodian embassy in Malaysia and a lawyer who ultimately would lead to the repatriation of the three girls while their other colleagues were sent back to work.

Conditions like those described by the girls echo a recurring theme documented in a litany of complaints filed to rights groups and police by women working in Cambodia’s labour-recruitment industry.

Aegile Fernandez, anti-human trafficking coordinator of Tenaganita, says her organisation has rescued 55 Cambodian women and girls from abusive conditions at different firms since April last year, at least 20 of whom were underage.

But Fernandez says these efforts have been hamstrung by an alarming aspect of what she has been told by the Cambodian embassy in Malaysia is government policy.

“The embassy tells us that it is a policy of the Cambodian government that the [rescued] girls must be sent back to the agency,” she says.

“From our experience once the victims go back to the agency, they are abused by the agency and then they are re-trafficked back to Malaysia.”

The Cambodian embassy was repeatedly called to confirm or deny that it advocated such a policy but officials did not make themselves available for comment.

Koy Kuong, spokesman for Cambodia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, denies any such policy exists.

“In principle the embassy has to cooperate with the company to repatriate them back to Cambodia, not to send them back to the company for further employment,” he said.

“The Cambodian embassy in Malaysia, after rescuing them from the abusive places, cooperates with the respective country in order to repatriate them to their homes in Cambodia.”

Under no circumstances, he says, should a worker who is underage or who has allegedly been subjected to abuse be returned to the organisation which sent them to work, even if the company has paid for the return ticket.

“When they are repatriated into Cambodia the social affairs department or anti-human trafficking police take them back to their provinces,” he said.

When Soy and the girls arrived back in Phnom Penh on June 16, 2010, staff members from both rights group Licadho and Ung Rithy Group were waiting to pick them up.

Both sought to take custody of the girls.

Licadho argues that as underage workers sent to Malaysia by Ung Rithy Group, they could not be sent back to the very firm that had recruited the girls in the first place.

Company denials
However Ung Seang Rithy, president of Ung Rithy Group, denied yesterday the girls were underage while employed by her company.

“My company has never had even one underage worker, so the organisation has to find the evidence for me to show that my company has underage girls,” she said.

“I don’t accept workers into our company if there are not parents proclaiming in front of us that their children are aged 21, and we have the documents that express that from the authorities.”

It is a claim An Bunhak, the director of the Association of Cambodian Recruitment Agencies, backs up.

“I do not accept that they were underage because we have the documents to prove that the girls are of enough age,” he said, arguing it was the parents who provided identity documents verifying their ages – a claim the girls dispute.

Those documents could not be forwarded yesterday because his office was closed for Khmer New Year, he said.

An Bunhak also says that because Ung Rithy Group paid for the girls’ travel, a claim he has backed up with copies of their flight itineraries, they rightfully should have been returned to the company.

He alleges the Licadho staffers who were waiting at the airport to pick up the girls did not have appropriate identification, a claim Licadho rejects, leading him to write a letter to authorities accusing Licadho of “kidnapping”.

Both An Bunhak and Ung Seang Rithy also deny the girls escaped abusive conditions but rather became embroiled in near-lethal fights that almost landed them in jail.

Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division says it is ludicrous to suggest that by paying for tickets the company had a justifiable claim to take custody of the girls.

“Their argument that ‘we paid, we have the right to take’ displays a complete lack of understanding from Ung Rithy about human rights,” he said.

That the age of the girls remains contested nearly a year after they returned, raises important questions about the arcane lines of responsibility, regulation and monitoring of an industry that propels its recruits, underage or otherwise, into foreign territory.

Labour legislation
As the Cambodian Ministry of Labour prepares a new draft sub-decree to update 1995  legislation regulating the labour-recruitment industry, rights groups have been left in the dark about what shape the legislation will actually take. Only an early draft of the new sub-decree has been released publicly.

If that is any indication of the final form the legislation will take, then key measures that groups such as Licadho, Adhoc and South East Asia Investigations into Social and Humanitarian Activities have called for to effectively regulate the industry will not be included.

One of those, rights groups, such as Licadho and HRW, stress, must be a mechanism to prevent trainees from entering debt bondage.

Upfront loans offered by labour-recruitment firms to poor Cambodian families desperate for some financial relief can be an almost irresistible temptation, one that Soy’s mother says she succumbed to despite harbouring significant concerns about her daughter’s welfare abroad.

Before the girls left Cambodia Soy’s mother, who also wishes not to be identified, said Ung Rithy Group lent her US$1,000 – money the company is alleged to have demanded back along with expenses spent during the girls training after their escape.

“Licadho helped me because if we went to the company I would have to pay US$2,500 to them. I did not pay because Licadho helped us,” she said.
Ung Seang Rithy rejected this claim.

“There are difference cases in which we can use our right to demand [money], but I just want to clarify that the Ung Rithy Company has never asked or demanded the money from those workers,” she said.

Hou Vuthy, deputy general director at the Ministry of Labour, says it is illegal for recruitment firms grant the families of trainees upfront loans, unless the money is a provision to cover expenses related to the girls departure.

“It is illegal if the companies give the money to the trainees, but if the companies give money and don’t demand it back from the workers, it is okay,” he says.

Matthieu Pellerin, a consultant for Licadho, said that before trainees even enter the physical premises, such loans are tantamount to human trafficking.

“It’s a very simple form of debt bondage but it also falls into the definition of trafficking,” he said.

“If the recruitment agencies want to go legit they have to stop providing loans, it’s as simple as that.”

Prosecuting directors of labour firms who engage in unlawful recruitment practices and revoking licences, he says, are crucial first steps that need to be taken if Cambodia is serious about addressing an escalating problem.

According to information that Licadho say they received from the Ministry of Information, 53 minors between the ages of 13 and 17 were rescued from labour-recruitment companies last year.

Of the 53, 16 were rescued from Ung Rithy Group Co Ltd’s Kandal centre, 22 from VC Manpower Co Ltd and seven from Champa Manpower Co Ltd, Licadho says.

Again Ung Seang Rithy denies this allegation, while representatives of Champa Manpower were unaware of the case or unavailable for comment, as were representatives of VC Manpower.

Underage rescues
At a seminar of regional parliamentarians on labour trafficking earlier this month, Chou Bun Eng, Secretary of State at the Ministry of Interior, confirmed 55 underage trainees had been discovered in Cambodian labour-recruitment centres in the past year.

“We arrested eight suspects from the companies and rescued the underage workers and allowed them to return to their parents,” she said.

She was unable to recall the names of those arrested or the companies they had come from.

Eric Meldrum, operations director of South East Asian Investigations in Social and Humanitarian Activities, who works with Cambodian authorities to investigate cases of trafficking in labour recruitment, confirmed police were conducting serious investigations.

“My experience of working with the [anti] human-trafficking police is that they do actually do proper investigations in these cases,” he said, but while he was aware of prosecution in regard to labour trafficking, there had not been many.

And even if judicial authorities and regulatory bodies are able to take concrete action against labour-recruitment companies that act unlawfully in Cambodia, it is no guarantee that the basic rights of workers in Malaysia will be respected, Malaysian Senator Firdaus Haji Abdullah said.

He said Malaysia has been swamped with so many migrant workers, some 1.8 million in 2010, that authorities are simply unable to implement proper regulation of the industry, despite the existence of legislation to do so.

“Put it this way, you have a few bad apples here and there but again I keep on telling you [about] the huge number … I mean when you have 1.8 million people, less than 100 can cause a problem,” he said, referring to reported cases of abuse.

But banning migrant workers, he said, is no solution.
“[If] you stop issuing visas they come illegally. That’s what I’m saying: for every legally registered worker there is another illegal [worker].

“You can sum it up this way: migrant workers are an expanding problem faced with a shrinking solution.”

Source: Phnom Penh Post - Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Rural Poor And Rabies

CAMBODIA: Rural Poor Most At Risk From Rabies

KAMPOT, 1 April 2011 (IRIN) - Yinn Siet, 65, recalls in horror when a snarling dog bit her husband four years ago. Before he died, the farmer hallucinated and convulsed. “He barked like a dog,” she said. “We put a chain on him and locked him up.”

He had contracted rabies, a virus that kills nearly all victims who develop symptoms.

Yinn could not afford to bring her husband to the capital Phnom Penh, the only city in Cambodia that has a centre offering free treatment.

Even if she had, it would have been too late.

He left behind his family of seven, who are struggling to make ends meet through farming.

Cambodians in the countryside have little access to treatment for rabies, a preventable disease that disproportionately affects the rural young and poor.

If dog-bite victims do not seek immediate treatment, they are likely to die. The virus is untreatable after symptoms appear, which can be anything from 10 days to a year after being bitten.

“The loss of a family member to rabies has a profound psychological impact on the family,” said Deborah Briggs, head of the Global Alliance for Rabies Control, a US-based NGO. “The disease is frightening and it is devastating to watch a loved one die.” In 2007, the most recent year data are available, 810 human rabies deaths may have occurred in Cambodia, says a study in Neglected Tropical Diseases, a science journal.

The number is only an estimate. Hundreds of cases in the countryside go unreported, because patients are rarely hospitalized and tend to die at home.

The estimated rabies mortality for 2007 exceeded that of malaria (240 deaths) and dengue fever (400 deaths), the study said.

The report concluded that free post-exposure prophylaxis, an injection after a bite that prevents infection, is really only relevant for residents of Phnom Penh. Injections must be administered promptly, usually within 10 days of an infection.

The Pasteur Institute, a non-profit medical research and treatment centre in Phnom Penh, is the only institution in Cambodia offering free post-exposure treatments.

The rural poor often cannot afford lengthy and expensive visits to the capital and therefore miss out on the free treatment.

“We see maybe five patients per year who arrive with symptoms,” says Philippe Buchy, head of the virology unit at the Pasteur Institute, “and the only thing we can do is to send them to Calmette Hospital where they will die after few days.”

The fact that poor people are most susceptible to rabies means campaigns against the virus tend to be given lower priority, said François-Xavier Meslin, the Geneva-based team leader for neglected zoonotic diseases at the World Health Organization (WHO).

Epidemiology

Warm-blooded mammals, mostly dogs, spread the virus through bites, scratches, and licks on open wounds.

Typically between 10 days and a year after exposure, patients experience insomnia, headaches, a fever, and twitching around their wound.

Two to 10 days after those first signs appear, they hallucinate, have seizures, become fearful at the sight of water and experience paralysis. Most rabies patients die from respiratory failure.

Each year, about 55,000 people around the world die from rabies. More than 80 percent of cases are in Asia, according to WHO, which says half of all human rabies deaths occur in children under 15.

“Every one of those deaths could have been prevented as we have the vaccines… available to save their lives before clinical signs begin,” Briggs told IRIN.

In Bali, Indonesia, authorities culled 100,000 dogs to prevent the spread of rabies by shooting poison blow darts at them, but the authorities halted this policy last September in favour of a mass inoculation programme of 400,000 dogs (70 percent of the island’s dog population).

WHO’s Meslin does not advocate killing dogs because it is “inhumane,” he told IRIN.

In Cambodia, the Pasteur Institute recommends setting up a national rabies control programme to improve disease surveillance and access to treatment. It also recommends starting vaccination campaigns for dogs.

gc/cb

Theme (s): Health & Nutrition,
[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations] 

Source: IRIN News