It's a place where
mothers sell their own daughters to child traffickers, who supply them
to brothels locally and across the country.
But how has such a perverse trade been able to take root, let alone flourish here?
Mark Capaldi, senior
researcher for Ecpat International, an organization committed to
combating the sexual exploitation of children, says several factors have
made Cambodia a prime destination for child sex offenders.
"Insufficiently enforced
laws, corruption, and the failure to address more overarching problems
such as poverty and the negative side effects of globalization have made
it a challenge for the country to shed the unenviable reputation as a
destination for child sex," he says.
The authors of a 2011
Ecpat International report identified a number of cultural and
sociological factors that made Cambodian children "particularly
vulnerable to adult predators." "It has been observed that Cambodian
children are indeed expected to abide by rules set forth by adults, and
saying 'no' to an adult is not easily tolerated," reads the report.
But what of the
acceptance and willing participation of so many locals, including
parents themselves, in the trade? For Don Brewster -- head of Agape
International Missions, which aids Cambodian child survivors of the sex
trade -- part of the answer as to why so many adults in Svay Pak are
able to abnegate their parental duty to protect may lie in Cambodia's
brutal recent past, which left behind a fractured society.
"What this country went
through was unique in history," says Brewster, of the Khmer Rouge's
systematic destruction of religious, educational and social structures
-- not least of which the family unit -- during its genocidal 1975-79
reign.
When Pol Pot's maniacal
experiment ended, 2 million people were dead, and society's institutions
almost erased. "You lost your educated people and the system of
educating them; you lost the moral compass that Buddhism provided," he
says.
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