Writers and commentators on the sex trade of Southeast Asia sometimes like to refer to the complicity of culture in driving the sex trade. Examples of female self-sacrifice for the good of the family can be found and a case made that not all sex tourism is entirely forced but can instead lie in a shady area created by economic pressure, filial piety and wider societal tolerance of misogyny.
But then there is this.
Sina is Vietnamese but was kidnapped at the age of 13 and taken to Cambodia, where she was drugged. She said she woke up naked and bloody on a bed with a white man – she doesn’t know his nationality – who had purchased her virginity.
After that, she was locked on the upper floors of a nice hotel and offered to Western men and wealthy Cambodians. She said she was beaten ferociously to force her to smile and act seductive… Sina mostly followed instructions and smiled alluringly at men because she would have been beaten if men didn’t choose her. But sometimes she was in such pain that she resisted, and then she said she would be dragged down to a torture chamber in the basement.
“Many of the brothels have these torture chambers,” she said. “They are underground because then the girls’ screams are muffled.”
Nick Kristof writes well but sometimes his gullibility makes him lose his grip on reality so he doesn’t check his facts. Some readers will remember his adventures a few years ago in which he bought Cambodian sex workers out of their debt bondage so others could take their place.
Basement dungeons? Can Kristof point out the location of a single Cambodian brothel with a basement? Cambodian brothels are usually wooden shacks built directly on cement on the ground or on stilts. Even brothels with ethnic Vietnamese sex workers in Phnom Penh don’t have basements. The rescue people must be putting one over on him.
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Kristof has a video up on the NYT website of a Cambodian slave who had her eye gouged out:
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/01/03/opinion/1194837193498/the-face-of-slavery.html
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Sex trafficking makes diseases control nearly impossible, so wide spread of HIV in this country is something inevitable. Hopefully the Cambodian government will realize their problem in time and address it in an appropriate way. Or else we will have another HIV hotspot to deal with, like we used to have in Africa.
BTW, Kristof’s sentiment is understandable. Brothels with or without basement dungeons make any difference! The girls could be tortured in any darken rooms misinterpreted as dungeons. Does it mean the whole story is a misunderstand too?
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Re: Phnom Penh’s basement dungeons. In the video cited above, the former slave Long Pross shows Kristof one of these. So yes, they do exist.
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Long Pross’ new minder does indeed show Kristoff some former underground rooms. Are they basement dungeons?
Kristof says: “sure there are many girls who work voluntarily in brothels”. He should talk with some of them to see how their lives have changed since the Cambodian government passed a new US sponsored antitrafficking law. This might restore his credibility.
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I saw the documentary Kristof made a few years ago as we follow him around the child brothels of Cambodia while he befriends some of the young prostitutes in an effort to “save” them by “buying them out” so they are free to go back to their impoverished rural villages.
On a return trip, he is then “surprised” and “disillusioned” to find that at least one of the girls he “bought out” has returned to her brothel, apparently of her own free will. We then watch her chatting with Kristof in a friendly, smiling and seductive way before excusing herself to go into the back with a regular “customer” who has arrived.
This story seemed very familiar and has played out many times in many bars, KTV’s and massage venues throughout SE Asia and there always seems to be a lurking ambiguity in the story’s subtext………..
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The United States, and perhaps a few other countries, have enacted laws, making it a crime for Americans to go to places like Cambodia, Thailand, etc., to partake of child prostitutes.
There was a well publicized case recently of an American who was chased around the globe before being captured. He had engaged the services of child prostitutes, and photographed himself doing so. Apparently to show to his friends back home:, “look what I did on my summer vacation”.
I personally find child prostitution to be evil. Those engaging in it, either as customers or procurers, should be killed, with all their assets given to the victims.
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“She said she was beaten ferociously to force her to smile and act seductive”….
Although I am not denying that there are cases where sex workers are subject to various forms of violence and coercion, I believe it is important to point out that given common psychological responses to trauma (withdrawal, extreme forms of anxiety, suicidal thoughts etc) it seems implausible that systematic torture is a conventional method used by brothel owners to enhance the marketability of sex workers.
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“Chris”:
About 10 years ago i did work on an extensive story on forced prostitution in Cambodia, and i have come across many such stories of torture, especially by electroshock (i did not come across tales of underground chambers though). Most of my interviews i did in brothels and not NGO centers. I have no doubt on the truth of these tales.
I also came across many former forced prostitutes that returned voluntarily to the brothels. One of the main reasons cited was that they were not accepted back into their village societies, and that after their experiences they felt themselves to damaged to return to a normal live.
Maybe some time in the future i should do a post here, with some of the photos i took there.
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Nick:
I am not doubting the brutal reality of Cambodia’s child prostitution business. What I found additionally disturbing in the Kristof documentary was the moral ambiguity of Kristof’s role and position in relation to the young girls he was “saving”.
His pretense of innocence in the face of the evil circumstances of the girls’ lives, a sort of sanctimonious Schadenfraude, with the security of that First Class ticket back to New York safely tucked in his back pocket along with an infinite ATM card……….
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Bee Low Growen – if imprisonment, electroshock and eye-gouging occurred in “underground rooms”, only a pedant would persist in insisting that these are not basement dungeons.
Given that Kristof has actually provided evidence to support his case, it is clearly not his credibility that needs to be restored.
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“Chris”:
I don’t really understand what you term there as moral ambiguity of Christoff’s role. I must admit that i do not remember the documentary you mentioned, i slightly remember that there was an issue about him having “bought” out several girls.
The problem is that investigating or reporting in such an environment is extreme by any means, and from a moral position, more than problematic.
What are you doing when interviewing a girl that is a slave? You go your way, and leave that girl in the awful position she is, or you “buy” her out, knowing that you can’t afford to buy every girl out, and that this money is going to be used to buy more girls.
How would you choose which girl to buy out, how would you deal with the responsibility such an interference now puts on you, that you will also now be responsible for making sure that she will have a better future and not be straight be sold back by the same people who sold her in the first place?
You do of course know that reporting might bring some awareness to the problem, and some action might be taken years down the line, but the people you interviewed will still be in a terrible situation, and reporting on them has the danger to have even worsened their situation.
This is a clear moral conundrum, especially in a country like Cambodia. Shall one report, or not, or how? No easy answer, i am afraid.
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Perhaps a closer fit to the “moral ambiguity” of the reporter’s role in such situations is the 1991 documentary, The Good Woman of Bangkok in which filmmaker Dennis O’Rourke’s initiative to film the Patpong prostitute (I believe she’s from Issarn) whose services he rents develops into a voyeuristic journey where O’Rourke remains off camera with only his voice entering in to prod the young lady into retelling her life story. Eventually O’Rourke purchases a farm for the young lady and her family in an effort to rescue her from her situation. He comes back a year or so later to find that she has returned to prostitution in Bangkok.
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Nick:
Your description of the reporter’s situation is very accurate I think and would seem to apply to Kristof as well.
But the additional layer with Kristof was how he was being treated by the girl in the documentary, smiling, seductive and pliant, as though he were just another type of “client”, not one who wanted to use her for sex but a more complicated client who wanted to “save her” and would pay far more money for the feeling of being “righteous” than her other clients paid for the “feeling” of sexual release.
A client who seemed to have an overwhelming need to be assured that his “intentions” were only “good” and that he was not like all the other clients in her brutal and Darwinistic life (not to speak of her mother, family, the brokers, the brothel owners, the Cambodia police and army).
None of this is to say a reporter should not be willing to journey into the darkness to get his or her story, but I find, for instance, your own journey into the darkness of Patpong that resulted in your powerful and penetrating book of photographs (PATPONG: BANGKOK’S TWILIGHT ZONE), far more illuminating and insightful than Kristof’s relatively superficial and sanctimonious journey into the much darker world of Cambodia’s child prostitution business.
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More about Kristof’s credibility and lack thereof, Alvin, in the Nonprofiteer. http://nonprofiteer.net/2009/01/07/lies-damn-lies-and-statistics/
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Child prostitution is, in itself, torture. Anyone who seriously believes that a child would consent to entering into the sex trade, or that the child sex trade is in any way OK, or that there are any benefits to the community that child has been removed from, is deluded. (A curly short of a pudenda, I’d say!)
I would go so far as to say that even the adult sex trade in S.E.Asia, in a very large number of cases, is evil. The notion that unmarried girls (and boys too) should be coerced into leaving rural villages in order to go to Bangkok brothels, for example, so that they can pay off their families’ debts & buy them 4-wheel drive vehicles is disgusting. Yes, some do get used to it & even marry European retirees, etc., who they often rob blind, but many finish with AIDS, drug and alcohol problems, and many also finish up dead from suicide, or murdered by drunken pimps.
Of course those who have been introduced into the industry as kids return to it after being ‘freed.’ Unless they are incredibly resilient, they no longer have a place in the world they came from, & in any case, it’s been shown beyond any doubt that children who have been introduced by adults to sex in any society, become addicted to sex (a very large percentage of paedophiles in developed countries themselves become paedophiles as adults). A large number of them also become alcoholics, drug addicts (or the victims of ‘protectors’ who are) and develop serious mental problems.
How can anyone imagine that any family has a right to pressure someone they brought into the world to adopt that kind of lifestyle, either as a child or a young adult?
So, yes: reporters should publicize these issues. And if their efforts are sometimes clumsy & seem to be ‘voyeuristic,’ mai pen rai. At least they are keeping it all in the public gaze. Dennis O’Rourke’s effort made me cringe. It was a real ‘bleeding heart’ effort, and as far as I can remember, led many to believe that the problem was created by farang sex-tourists. Let me assure anyone who believes it was, that there are acres of short-time hotels and massage parlours in every town in Thailand, as well as (perhaps less openly) in all the surrounding countries, and they cater to locals, as they have in various guises for centuries.
It’s a very well-established part of the cultures of this region. I am amazed at the number of times I have been invited, at the end of a pleasant evening of eating & carousing with male Thai friends (mostly married with kids, all ‘educated,’ and in responsible career positions, including academia.) to accompany them to a brothel. It’s absolutely normal behaviour here. I don’t, of course, make a big deal of it – they’d think I was a nutter – but I ease my way out of it, simply because I find the idea of buying a human body, even if only for an hour, repugnant. It’s a form of slavery, whether it seems to be ‘voluntary’ or not, & it’s demeaning to both sides of the transaction. Further, many older men prefer to have sex with under-age prostitutes, for various reasons (e.g. they may not be infected yet; they may confer ‘youthfulness,’ a common superstitious belief of older men) .
And please don’t accuse me of taking the ‘moral high ground.’ This is related to the whole ‘patronage’ element which is deeply enmeshed in these cultures, and which prevents almost everyone from having self-determination.
Interesting that the Minister for Commerce in This Month’s Government is a former madam.
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Bee Low Growen – The blog post you linked to does not refute the fact that Kristof proved the existence of the Phnom Penh basement dungeons.
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Like most of the posts here, I agree that child prostitution is a crime that should see perpetrators seriously pursued and hit with the full force of the law.
At the same time, and I know that this is tricky and will draw criticism, I think Kristof’s reporting does need to be scrutinised. He is a celebrity reporter and seems to take up some topics that encourage moral outrage (and many of them should – child prostitution, forced sex work, outrages in Darfur) but tends to individualise the problems – this approach grabs at heartstrings – without necessarily revealing much more than saying that these outrages occur.
Some might argue that it is fair enough to keep saying it and keep it on various agendas. However, there are other outrages (for me) that he treats rather differently. Recall his “Two cheers for sweatshops” article with WuDunn a few years ago. In some research works, sweatshops and prostitution seem to have interesting relationships, but Kristof essentially praised sweatshops.
And then there are some of the issues that others have raised here – the buying out a woman and having her run back to the brothel, for example. It is interesting to note that this story was not only in the NYT but on CNN and was one of those reporter-as-sleuth things which didn’t really dig into the story. After a number of articles and TV stories on sex work of various kinds mainly focused on Cambodia, wouldn’t you expect him to be getting beyond the sensational headline? Wouldn’t you want him to be showing some evidence of a growing understanding of the troubling issues that have been so divisive of feminists and NGOs working in the field? Wouldn’t you want him to look at the issues that bring together interesting political coalitions in, say, Washington? Should some questions be asked about why the Bush administration has funded so much trafficking work, much of it by fundamentalist Christian organisations, while not being interested and providing almost no funding for anti-AIDS work, related family planning initiatives and agencies that work directly with sex workers but do not toe the required trafficking and abstinence lines?
Some of this is shown in a rather good (IMHO) documentary – Trading Women – that was put together by David Feingold a couple of years ago. A very thought-provoking approach, which Feingold has also taken up in print.
And I guess another thing that would interest me about Kristof relates to his career as a public speaker, where he gets paid quite substantial amounts (I happened to have a minor part in an organising group for one of his campus talks a couple of years ago). I have no idea whether this money is put to good use in supporting the NGOs and others who assist him to do his reports in Cambodia and Darfur.
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Repetitive ranting and unimaginative point-scoring will not be entertained, Alvin. We are discussing the credibility of a celebrity reporter for America’s newspaper of record on an important Cambodian issue.
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Bee Low Growen – I do not think it is “ranting” or “point scoring” to point out the fact that Kristof has provided evidence for the existence of the basement dungeons – evidence which you have “repetitively” chosen to ignore.
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“Chris”:
Thanks for the nice comment about my book.
I don’t view my book as journalism anyhow, i believe that such a complex subculture cannot be sufficiently explained within the limitations of journalism, which by definition is more observant from the outside than participating and engaging.
But i would most definitely not want to be a participating part in this particular Cambodian scenery – that is a darkness that is too much for me. Just reporting on it in a journalistic way was more than i could take.
You are right though with your point of the sanctimonious nature of Kristof’s reporting – it is superficial in many ways, and explains little beyond we know already.
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If I may veer the conversation to a slight different topic, I would ask if the illegality of prostitution in Cambodia, and other places, contributes to the common use of violence by pimps to control sex workers.
When something is pushed into the underground economy, by definition, it comes in contact with the criminal sector, whose hallmarks are corruption and violence. If prostitution, a victimless crime when it involves two or more consenting adults, were regulated, decriminalized, and/or legalized. the normal regulations of trade and the protections (for both labor and consumer) that stem from them would help lessen, if not eliminate, such instances of forced prostitution.
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You’ve made a good point, L.S.S #22. That would be a beginning, but don’t forget that the sort of people (police, military & local ‘mafias,’ with networks extending very high) who own or control the venues would still have significant power. And who would oversee the regulation? In societies where even school administrators & Justice Department Officials are massively on the take, I can’t imagine that the workers or their clients would find it easy to demand “the normal regulations of trade and the protections (for both labor and consumer) that stem from them.”
But it would be a beginning.
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“Lleij Samuel Schwartz”:
I would rather say that legalizing prostitution makes very little difference in undeveloped countries such as Cambodia, where the law is in many areas of life quite irrelevant anyhow.
In my experience, roughly said, forced prostitution is the strongest in the cheapest brothels, less so in the more upmarket places, and affects women and families from the poorest and most disadvantaged sectors of society, and cross border trafficked women without any rights.
If one can eradicate poverty, than forced prostitution will automatically decrease.
But don’t forget that forced prostitution also exists in developed nations such as Japan and most countries in western Europe that have partly legalized prostitution. There most affected are cross border trafficked women from poor countries.
If you look at Thailand, Thai women inside Thailand are rarely forced into prostitution now compared to before, but choose themselves to enter the trade.
Forced prostitutes in Thailand are now mostly women from hill tribes without Thai ID, and women from neighboring countries. More often than not these women work in cheap local brothels most foreigners rarely enter.
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Prostitution is not a victimless crime.
There was an article several years ago dealing with this false assumption.
A woman in New York City was a prostitute. Her husband was a heroin addict. The husband contacted AIDS, which he then transmitted to his wife.
She, in turn, transmitted the AIDS virus to over sixty five men.
Several of these men then gave AIDS to their wives or girlfriends.
Lastly, several children got the virus from their mothers.
You might argue that without the AIDS virus added to the mix, there are no victims. But we don’t live in a world where we get to lay the ground rules. AIDS is out there.
Thus, prostitution is not a victimless crime.
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Kristof is now in the Age:
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/how-to-strike-at-the-heart-of-sex-slavery-20090112-7f6l.html?page=-1
While his cases may be true, the general western (christian) assumption about prostitution in Asia – or anywhere for that matter – that paid sex is the worst thing that can happen to a teenager or adult is often disingenuous. Anyone who has more than a passing familiarity with this trade knows that it is not as simple as it is usually presented. Outrage may sooth one’s conscience, but if there was as much outrage about starvation, forced labour, and preventable disease then lives might actually be improved on a large scale.
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“Steve”:
I cannot read the assumption of western ideas of prostitution and paid sex being “the worst” thing that can happen to a teenager in the article you cited.
He does condemn, and rightly so, forced prostitution. And that is maybe one of the worst forms of forced labor possible, especially when it does concern under aged girls as well, and involves tortures as cited by Kristof. And what he points out is no exaggeration – anyone who has researched this topic in Cambodia and similar countries can verify that easily.
But he also points out that poverty eradication and education is a way out, while he also shows that issues are not that simple, on the example of the one girl that he bought and and who returned to the brothels to feed her addiction.
For a journalistic article that is well done, and does not live on simplistic outrage.
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Dungeons?
http://www.newmandala.org/2012/05/25/whats-the-truth-behind-somaly-mam/
Truth will out.
Bee
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