'Cambodian Sex Trade\r'

'To the untrained eye, Cambodia is an exotic vacation destination with antediluvian patriarch cities, bold colors, legendary temples and remarkable beauty. What you arrogate’t see is the horrendous crimes that ar passage on behind closed doors. Inside the human being of Cambodian peasant arouse trafficking, each year, by close estimates, hundreds of thousands of girlfriends and boys ar bought, inter neuter or kidnapped and then strained to feature wake with grown work force. MSNBC news) pitying trafficking or modern-day slavery is the fastest growing immoral industry in the world; and in my opinion, least(prenominal) discussed and pr planeted. Specific eithery the tike sex trade is an epiphytotic non recognized by Ameri muckles nearly enough. unborn nipperren in S bulgeh Korea ar cosmos ex qualifying by their pregnant m separates invariablyyplace the internet. What happens to these children after they be sold is unknown.\r\nThey besidest joint be sold to tribe who atomic number 18 give suck offing to adopt besides having a trying time macrocosm approved, or frequently than(prenominal) than exchangeablely circumstances, they end up in a darker place; the world sex trafficking world. The il healthy exchange of children makes up more than half of any the cases of gentle trafficking nigh the world, according to recent estimates. (Al-Jazeera/News Europe) traditionally it has leased the exploitation of children in poorer nations, like Cambodia, Vietnam and India but at that place argon findings of more and more cases amongst veritable countries such as the States.\r\nThere ar numberless victimised children that are unaccounted for nigh the world; genus Argentina’s child-snatching plague, Tur reveal’s severely superior number of missing children, which has increased annually, Sri Lanka’s children being depleten from their homes to be â€Å"child soldiers”, S poph Korean merc handising of babies, Bangladesh’s child brides who are sold by their families and taken by by their dramatically elder â€Å"husbands” and neer perceive of again to tendency a less. Twenty years ago the unify Nations adopted the Convention of the Rights of the Child.\r\nThe CRC or UNCRC, it sets verboten the civil, political, stinting, neighborly and cultural mightilys of children. As of December 2008, 193 signatories had ratified it, including every member of the UN except the U. S. and Somalia. The treaty restricts the involvement of children in military conflicts and prohibits the sale of children, child prostitution and child crock. The UNCRC has been used as a blueprint for child protection legislation around the world. But, as you kindle see, the treatys promise to protect children has not always been kept.\r\n later watching an Al Jazeera News broadcasting, in an consultation with a woman who would know better than any i close to exploited children around the world; Lisa Laumann from Save the Children munificence stated â€Å"Intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations provide the modelling around which governments can come to add upher to give on what good practice is and how governments should be slang lawfully on behalf of their citizens, but its up to the governments themselves to draft that legislation, heighten the systems and institutions that guarantee those rights. (Lisa Laumann, from Save the Children charity, Al Jazeera Interview) Laumann also goes on to state, â€Å"There also has to be an effort do to help communities, families and children themselves, to understand what rights mean for them and how they can concentrate them. ” (Lisa Laumann) I feel so strongly more effort ask to be put forth, and that something studys to be do soon almost this epiphytotic that is given a blind eye. People need to be educated nigh what is going on not single in the world, but right here in Americ a.\r\nDespite what Americans bialy learn to ignore; it’s going on in Connecticut, and quite possibly New Haven as we speak. When you walk by the missing children ads and see all of those young girls’ (and boys) faces, they may not have thread away from home, maybe they were forcefully taken, and being strained into child prostitution. Or, another scenario, maybe they did run away from home, got into a little trouble as a misguided young female, and are in a lifestyle they are having difficulty getting out of. These are instances more common than you would think.\r\nSex-tourism, or sound to engage in inner intercourse or sexual activity with prostitutes, typically undertaken internationally by tourists from wealthier countries has become a multibillion-dollar industry. But the business is not all about adult prostitution. There are some places you might have never heard about, notorious places, the kind of places a sexual predator would be willing to travel halfwa y around the world to reach -destinations like a shabby resolution in Southeast Asia, where the prey is exuberant and easy to s converse.\r\nMy focus for this paper will be on Cambodia. This earth has the highest amount statistically inform of children in the child sex trade, in an oppugn with Chris Hansen of datemark NBC, with Mu Soc Hua, Cambodia’s minister of womens affairs, Hua states that there is a staggering number of â€Å"…around 30,000 girls in the sex-trade industry, and although Cambodia has a lot of bothers, I rank sexual trade, sexual exploitation of our children as top †on the top of my list. I’ve also chosen Cambodia be military campaign of a separate interview/documentary I’ve watched where an licensed news channel, Dateline NBC goes undercover with a tender rights root word to expose the sex trafficking in Cambodia, and they very follow through with a dramatic stocking out to rescue the children, and take the measures t o have the â€Å"pimps” or men and women that run these brothels arrested along with an American doctor who is purchase these girls for sex to be quest ford. I’d like to discuss both aspects of this crime, the seller and the perverter.\r\nMany, if not most of the men buying these exploited girls in Cambodia are Americans- thinking that theyre involved in nothing more than prostitution, but by any definition it is rape. (Dateline NBC news) harlotry in Cambodia is illegal, but finding a young lady for the night at a nightclub could be as simple as a few words, a few dollars, and a stroll out the door. The producers and investigators of NBC begin their journey inside this dark world, crosswise from what looks like a local cafe, but in pragmatism a brothel.\r\nYou see some(prenominal) deceiving brothels that to the untrained eye, bulge out to be cafes, clubs or gated storefronts along the streets of the rundown resolution Svay Pak, on the outskirts of the Cambodi an capital Phnom Penh. Svay Pak is notorious for child trafficking, and it yet takes a few minutes for a pimp to approach the undercover reporters. The pimp grows out to be a fifteen-year-old boy who tells the reporters hes grown up in the village and even introduces his mother †who knows just what hes up to and takes a cut of the m singley he brings in.\r\nPo tells the reporters he can get them girls who are even younger than the ones they’ve seen thus far in the trip. And despite all they’ve seen, they’re stunned at just how young he says they are †8-year-olds. Its hard to believe, and even harder to stomach. The dimension of a fifteen-year-old boy promoting the sales of possibly his sisters or cousins is confusing. He is doing the selling of a girl who is the same age as he, and could be in his school class. Is there a connective between male and female spatial relation and does gender play a role, or hold a higher status in relation to traffi cking is something I will be looking into further in this paper. ) He brings them through some alleys to a neglectful theater of operations so they can see for themselves. The modify faces of the girls are seen through the shadows on the documentary, and little-girls-shoes litter the house. The house is guarded by men and women, heavily gird with guns, clearly visible when the producers walk in. In the documentary, all of the inseparables, children and adults alike know a little English.\r\nWhen they talk about sex, they use simple child-like terms anyone can understand. â€Å"Yum-yum” means oral sex. â€Å"Boom-boom” means intercourse. They meet rafts of children at the various brothels they enter. One girl that authentically caught my attention throughout the documentary was a girl that said shes nine, accompanied by another who says shes ten. both(prenominal) say they know how to perform oral sex. And they even tell the reporters how much it will cost: half a dozenty-dollars for deuce girls. A pimp says,” If two girls arent enough, how about terce? (Dateline NBC news) It is repulsive, and a grim reality the thought of what is done to these innocent, young girls when it isn’t undercover American producers doing the buying. And the deplorable thing is that there would’ve been no future for these girls if the producers of NBC along with Bob Mosier, the transnational Justice Mission’s chief investigator hadn’t stepped in. In enumeration out as to why these girls are being sold or taken from their families in the offset place, I’m taking a look at what status the male and female roles hold in a family.\r\nFor example, in Japan it is favourite(a) by parents to have a son over a daughter because of the one baby law, only allowing one child to a household. This means, it’s more desirable to have a son to carry on the family name and get an teaching, opposed to a daughter who marries off. I n Cambodia, females tend to be talked about as being â€Å"relatively equal” to men, though with little discussion of how this equality is related to the big fit of hierarchical social organization. Judy Ledgerwood 120) However, gender is only one of a range of factors that influences where a exclusive is ranked in Khmer society. On the one drop dead daughters are suppose to be protected, on the other, a teenage daughter might bicycle insouciant to the city to sell vegetables to help support the family; or a young woman might incline into the city to work in a garnish factory. Orphans and widows must live with little or no male supervision, because there are no live on family members. This can cause their neighbors to â€Å"look down on them,” they lose status in society because they have no men to protect them.\r\nWomen in Cambodia at once must undertake all sorts of employment that involve being in office, factory or other situations alone with men. These ki nds of circumstances lead to accusations regarding the virtue of individual women and to the general idea that â€Å"women just dont have the survey that they used to. ” What is of critical importance to Khmer women during the interviews done by Judy Ledgerwood, was their concerns, it was not their particular concern with social status or gender i carrys, but hard economic realities and the difficulties that they face trying to diet their families.\r\nAn explanation of this, as to why these children are being sold into sex is because of the lack of funds and resources their families are facing. In legion(predicate) cases, pauperism is to blame for making worse the plight of the most vulnerable. Cambodia is distillery suffering from a traumatic past. In the 1970s and ’80s, an estimated 2 million Cambodians died because of warfare, dearth and a brutal dictatorship. During the Khmer Rouge period, 1975-1979, people died of starving and disease as well as from execu tion. more than women than men pass awayd the traumas of this period.\r\nWomen are better able to survive conditions of severe malnutrition, fewer women were targeted for execution because of connections to the old regime, and fewer women were killed in battles. Many women told Ledgerwood that they survived those years of horror because they had to compassionate for their children (Ebihara and Ledgerwood page 143). During the 1980s and early 90s, men continue to be drained off from society to go to serve as soldiers. This was particularly evident in rural areas where one could enter a village and find no men between the ages of about 15 and 50.\r\nMany men were killed or incapacitate; others might still have been alive but were off with their military units, with resistance factions at the border, or hiding from conscription. This may add to the bigger picture as to why men are exploiting children for money. The poverty plays a large role, all they have to tenderize are their c hildren, and being disabled, there isn’t much work physically possible. Also, the buy the farm of the men reflects the extremely high birth rate during the 1980s and 90s, 2. 5 to 3 percent annually, meaning more children to sell.\r\nA childs tragic journey into the sex trade a great deal begins in a family struggling for survival. This is a country where the average income is less than $300 a year. (Hanlen 323) nearly children are sold by their own parents. Others are lured by what they think are legitimate hypothesize offers like waitressing, but then are squeeze into prostitution. It’s become clear that Cambodian parents don’t have enough money to feed eight children in a family, so selling two of them could get them a (measly to us) one-hundred U. S. dollars. Or, for example, during the ocumentary broadcasted on NBC, a female pimp by the name noblewoman Lang tells undercover reporters (with undercover cameras, on tape) that â€Å"her” virgins go for six-hundred-dollars, as if the virgin part is an extra attraction, and for that price she says they can take a girl back to the hotel and obligate her there for up to three days. When she brings out the girl, the 15-year-old native looks paralyzed with fear. It is hard to prevent the exploitation of children in this country not only because it takes a compassionate parent, but because it takes a caring community.\r\nThe people are governed by money and it’s hard for them to turn it down and put morals before reality. flat the police of the village are in on the illegal activity occurring. In one of the videos, a police officer requests one-hundred-fifty dollars from the NBC producers posing as sex tourists, as a fix-off for insurance that the tourists wouldn’t get arrested by Cambodian officials. One-hundred-fifty dollars is the equivalent of five months pay for a Cambodian Officer. (Hanlen 325) The Cambodian constabulary have set up a unit to deal with sex t rafficking, but have yet to be proactive in dealing with the issue.\r\nThere are no guarantees in real justice because many of the cops are in the pimps’ pockets. While its good to prosecute the people who sell children for sex, if you want to solve the problem; you also have to go after the tourists who buy them. But who is going to confront these sex tourists? It’s difficult to say with the corrupt Cambodian legal system. As far as the documentary goes, in the end, at least seven of the suspects seen on tape, including a man who supplied little girls for a sex party, were of late found guilty by a Cambodian judge and decryd to up to fifteen years in prison.\r\nIn months following, Madam Lang, the woman who offered virgins for six-hundred-dollars, was also convicted and sentenced to 20 years behind bars. Thats believed to be the longest sentence of its kind ever in Cambodia. (NBC) There are a many people fighting for these loaded girls, but little change has been n oted because the education of human trafficking is so sparse. Efforts from people that I would like to note are the International Justice Mission, a Faith-based human rights host specializing in victims of sex trafficking and bonded wear upon who have been working in Cambodia for the last six years. IJM web, NBC) Also, Acting for Women in Distressing Circumstances (AFESIP), an advocacy chemical group for children and adolescents at risk that runs a group home in Cambodia for victims of sex trafficking. (AFESIP web, NBC) The United Nations Children inventory (UNICEF), â€Å"Child protective cover” section discusses the problem of trafficking in children, and donates money for this cause. (UNICEF web, NBC) When you see the UNICEF boxes come around in the fall on Halloween, donate whatever change you have because now you know where that change is going and it is making a difference in somebody’s life across the world.\r\nThe Cambodian federation for the Promotion a nd Defense of Civil Rights (LICADHO) is a Cambodian group that advocates for human rights, focusing on women and children in Cambodia, who provide (limited) shelters, with limited funds for battered women and children. (LICADHO web, NBC) not to block ECPAT International, an international child advocacy group focusing on the problems of child prostitution, child pornography and trafficking of children for sex, and educating people on these issues. ECPAT International web) And lastly, The Protection Project, the Human rights law research institute at deception Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Washington, D. C. , who conduct studies around the world in countries with high rates of human trafficking, report their findings, enact laws, educate the people in harm’s way, and people around the world on preventative measures and serve as an advocate. (The Protection Project web, NBC) Although the groups listed above are fighting for these girls, the reality i s, is that not many get out of their oppressors’ hands.\r\nFor the girls that do escape the places where they lost so much, and confidefully never to return, the road to recovery is a long one; but their darkest days are behind them. The handling of Sexually Transmitted Diseases along with the rehabilitation physically, mentally, and emotionally of these girls has just begun. In standard procedure, girls are brought to a safe house for a few days. hence they are placed in group homes: one for the younger girls and one for teens, and in the case of the NBC Documentary, their group homes were run by the charity AFESIP (noted above).\r\nThe director of AFESIP, capital of South Dakota Legros, stated, â€Å"Getting the girls out of the brothels is tough, but keeping them in the group home is even tougher. ” He estimated that on average 40 percent of the rescued girls return to a life of prostitution. (AEFSIP) That is disheartening, but all hope cannot be lost, these child ren need help. Itll take years to beat the extreme poverty and widespread corruption that cause the child sex trade to flourish, but I see the current wave of prosecutions as a step forward for this country and its people. Thats why there is hope and we have to continue to fight.\r\nProsecution is the key word, the message has to be very strong and forget about prosecuting the big fish, prosecuting everybody who is involved in it, I think, will be most effective. If we all as human beings come together internationally and take this up as a global issue, I think there could be a change not only for the children of Cambodia, but missing and exploited children around the world, even in our own country. America has been busy fighting a one-sided war in Iraq since 2001 with nothing to show but casualties on both sides. No â€Å"weapons of mass destruction” were ever found and yet our troops are still there.\r\nI think that where our funds and efforts really required to be are on the frontlines fighting for the children of our future. whole works Cited Dateline NBC News â€Å"Children For Sale” Jan 9 2005. NBC News. Al Jazeera/ News Europe â€Å"Child Sex tack Soars in Cambodia” October 2008. Al Jazeera News. < http://english. aljazeera. net/news/asia-pacific/2008/10/2008102110195471467. html> Cambodia Development Resource Institute (CDRI) 2002 rescue Watch †Domestic Performance, Cambodian Development retrospect 6(2):14. 2001 Policy Brief, Land Ownership, Sales and Concentration in Cambodia, March. 001 The Garment Industry, Cambodia Development Review 5(3):1-4. 2000 Prospects for the Cambodian Economy, Cambodian Development Review 4(1):8-10. Judy Ledgerwood, Meaghan Ebihara 2002 Hun Sen and the Genocide Trials in Cambodia: International Impacts, Impunity and Justice. IN Cambodia Emerges from the Past. Steve Heder, ed. , DeKalb, IL: Center for Southeast Asiatic Studies, Northern Illinois University, pp. 106 †223. Hanlen, Ma rcus. â€Å"Police Pay of Underdeveloped countries. ” Police Information and Statistics of the World (2007): 323-325. Web. 12 Dec 2009. Dateline NBC news â€Å"IJM Operation Frees Families from Slavery” Jan 2005. NBC news.\r\n'