Why Cambodia's sex workers don't need to be saved
Eyes gouged out for insolence, moms selling daughters to pimps, girls showered with maggots — if it happened in a Cambodian brothel, the story is never too shocking for Westerners to believe.

These tales, all propagated by fundraising charities in Cambodia, depict the nation’s sex trade as an otherworldly hellscape.

In the last decade, these groups have relied on such anecdotes to raise millions toward “saving” Cambodian women from prostitution. And in promoting this crusade, they’ve painted a picture of pitiful girls swallowed by an underground industry that is downright demonic.

Well, it turns out most of these women aren’t so clueless and weak, says a professor named Heidi Hoefinger.

Most women are not held at gunpoint or beaten into submission to do this work. In some cases, they are. I don’t want to sound naive. But this is much more about forces of capitalism and a lack of options.

If you’re a woman coming from the countryside, and you haven’t had a lot of education, your options are limited. You can stay in the countryside and work the rice fields. Or end up working in the garment factories, which have terrible working conditions.

Or you do domestic work, street trading — and most women I’ve spoken to have tried all those things already. They’ve ended up in the bars because it’s simply more lucrative.