Err ... since I am some distance from fair and lovely Poipet, all I did was send e-mails to the bleeding-legger and those weeping over his desperate plight and whining for baksheesh.

Answer came there none.

As to the American ninnies who are peddling this grotesque and nonsensical fund-raising tale about poor tragic trafficked "Sarah" (an odd and wholly implausible choice of name!) I already = about an hour ago - sent these people my opinion that they are shameless scamming fund-raisers or else simpletons taken in by a tale concocted by others.


To be honest, having read their site in detail, I incline to the former view. It is - perhaps - possible that they do selfless and sterling work "rescuing" teenage runaways in Colorado but they are 100% out of their depth here in Southeast Asia.

mammothboy2 wrote: poor tragic trafficked "Sarah" (an odd and wholly implausible choice of name!).

The whole thing is a psychologically tuned sales pitch, so her name being Sarah fits perfectly with their audience's knowledge of the bible (she was Abraham's wife in the books) and cultural sympathy triggers.



Lol @ 'in American" from that name meaning site

Ah... Fish bowls... Some nostalgia over another busted one by the NGOs... Chay Hour 2 when they had a shelter rebellion of the rescued girls wanting to escape their saviors

Barang_doa_slae wrote:Ah... Fish bowls... Some nostalgia over another busted one by the NGOs... Chay Hour 2 when they had a shelter rebellion of the rescued girls wanting to escape their saviors

The kicker was when Somaly recounted the story to a UN body saying that 8 ladies were shot dead by the military escaping "traffickers"...

...when the riot was by family members to free them from Somaly's custody.

CEOCambodiaNews wrote:"We met Sarah in a brothel in Cambodia.

There was a line of prostitutes behind a glass wall, a fishbowl they call it. They were sitting on high bar stools, with heavy make-up and short skirts, numbers pinned to their shoulders, displayed for the customers on the other side of the glass.

And then, they brought in Sarah. She was “fresh,” the pimp had told our lead investigator over the phone. Sarah was dressed in street clothes, head down, hands fiddling nervously with a napkin. She was 15 and had been sold by her mother in a neighboring country several days before to work off a debt which her mother owed. Sarah’s virginity had been sold three days prior for $600 USD.

Sarah could not speak the local language, was kept under close watch daily, and had no access to a cell phone or any communication from the outside world. She had been slipped illegally across borders by a system of traffickers that has become a global highway of modern day slaves.

With covert cameras, our investigators were able to record the sale of Sarah for the night, capturing valuable evidence that could be passed on to the trusted authorities in hopes of the pimp’s prosecution. Later, behind a closed door, our operative was able to call a social worker who spoke Sarah’s language. He explained that he was there to help her, not to hurt her, and that he could aid her escape if she wanted. Unfortunately, Sarah was too scared to run, too scared to trust a stranger, understandably.

The following day, our investigator returned to visit Sarah in the brothel, just blocks away from a crowded local market. She scribbled a note, “Please Rescue Me,” on a bill and slipped it to him..."

Continue reading on Exodus Road's blog.

wheres the video footage they claimed to have taken?

this story sounds a lot like the movie "Holly" (another very common Vietnamese name)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0419815/

Shot on location in Cambodia, including many scenes in actual brothels in the notorious red light district of Phnom Penh, HOLLY is a captivating, touching and emotional experience. Patrick, an American card shark and dealer of stolen artifacts, has been 'comfortably numb' in Cambodia for years, when he encounters Holly, a 12-year-old Vietnamese girl, in the K11 red light village. The girl has been sold by her impoverished family and smuggled across the border to work as a prostitute. Holly's virginity makes her a lucrative prize, and when she is sold to a child trafficker, Patrick embarks on a frantic search through both the beautiful and sordid faces of the country, in an attempt to bring her to safety. Harsh, yet poetic, this feature forms part of the 'K-11' Project, dedicated to raising awareness of the epidemic of child trafficking and the sex slavery trade through several film projects. The film's producers endured substantial hardships in order to be able to shoot in Cambodia ...

ot mien kampf wrote:Citation needed.

How many Sarahs are there in countries neighboring Cambodia?

I have been here 20 years and only come across Chinese girls with wstern type names such as Dorris Chen for example. However you might like to know that there are 339 professionals named Sarah Nguyen, who use LinkedIn, probably all from the US

While some NGO's get their income from ??????? others like Nicholas Kristof of the NY times get their income from writing stories , and of how they ''bought '' a girl, for $203 and even got a receipt to say the girl was now his,,, and a second one for $150 and never got charged with trafficking or any other crime.





Striking the Brothels’ Bottom Line





Nicholas Kristof JAN. 10, 2009


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POIPET, Cambodia

In trying to figure out how we can defeat sex trafficking, a starting point is to think like a brothel owner.

My guide to that has been Sok Khorn, an amiable middle-aged woman who is a longtime brothel owner here in the wild Cambodian town of Poipet. I met her five years ago when she sold me a teenager, Srey Mom, for $203 and then blithely wrote me a receipt confirming that the girl was now my property. At another brothel nearby, I purchased another imprisoned teenager for $150.

Astonished that in the 21st century I had bought two human beings, I took them back to their villages and worked with a local aid group to help them start small businesses. I’ve remained close to them over the years, but the results were mixed.

The second girl did wonderfully, learning hairdressing and marrying a terrific man. But Srey Mom, it turned out, was addicted to methamphetamine and fled back to the brothel world to feed her craving.
Photo

Striking the Brothels’ Bottom Line





Nicholas Kristof JAN. 10, 2009


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POIPET, Cambodia

In trying to figure out how we can defeat sex trafficking, a starting point is to think like a brothel owner.

My guide to that has been Sok Khorn, an amiable middle-aged woman who is a longtime brothel owner here in the wild Cambodian town of Poipet. I met her five years ago when she sold me a teenager, Srey Mom, for $203 and then blithely wrote me a receipt confirming that the girl was now my property. At another brothel nearby, I purchased another imprisoned teenager for $150.

Astonished that in the 21st century I had bought two human beings, I took them back to their villages and worked with a local aid group to help them start small businesses. I’ve remained close to them over the years, but the results were mixed.

The second girl did wonderfully, learning hairdressing and marrying a terrific man. But Srey Mom, it turned out, was addicted to methamphetamine and fled back to the brothel world to feed her craving.
Photo



Nicholas D. Kristof Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

I just returned again to Ms. Khorn’s brothel to interview her, and found something remarkable. It had gone broke and closed, like many of the brothels in Poipet. One lesson is that the business model is more vulnerable than it looks. There are ways we can make enslaving girls more risky and less profitable, so that traffickers give up in disgust.

For years, Ms. Khorn had been grumbling to me about the brothel — the low margins, the seven-day schedule, difficult customers, grasping policemen and scorn from the community. There was also a personal toll, for her husband had sex with the girls, infuriating her, and the couple eventually divorced bitterly. Ms. Khorn was also troubled that her youngest daughter, now 13, was growing up surrounded by drunken, leering men.





Then in the last year, the brothel business became even more challenging amid rising pressure from aid groups, journalists and the United States State Department’s trafficking office. The office issued reports shaming Cambodian leaders and threatened sanctions if they did nothing.

Many of the brothels are owned by the police, which complicates matters, but eventually authorities in Cambodia were pressured enough that they ordered a partial crackdown.
Photo



Two teenage girls in the room they share in a brothel run by Sav Channa. Credit Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times

“They didn’t tell me to close down exactly,” said another Poipet brothel owner whom I’ve also interviewed periodically. “But they said I should keep the front door closed.”

About half the brothels in Poipet seem to have gone out of business in the last couple of years. After Ms. Khorn’s brothel closed, her daughter-in-law took four of the prostitutes to staff a new brothel, but it’s doing poorly and she is thinking of starting a rice shop instead. “A store would be more profitable,” grumbled the daughter-in-law, Sav Channa.

“The police come almost every day, asking for $5,” she said. “Any time a policeman gets drunk, he comes and asks for money. ... Sometimes I just close up and pretend that this isn’t a brothel. I say that we’re all sisters.”

Ms. Channa, who does not seem to be imprisoning anyone against her will, readily acknowledged that some other brothels in Poipet torture girls, enslave them and occasionally beat them to death. She complained that their cruelty gives them a competitive advantage.
Photo



A group of girls in front of the brothel in which they work in Poipet, Cambodia. The toddler is the daughter of either the brothel-owner or of a prostitute. Credit Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times



Nicholas D. Kristof Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

I just returned again to Ms. Khorn’s brothel to interview her, and found something remarkable. It had gone broke and closed, like many of the brothels in Poipet. One lesson is that the business model is more vulnerable than it looks. There are ways we can make enslaving girls more risky and less profitable, so that traffickers give up in disgust.

For years, Ms. Khorn had been grumbling to me about the brothel — the low margins, the seven-day schedule, difficult customers, grasping policemen and scorn from the community. There was also a personal toll, for her husband had sex with the girls, infuriating her, and the couple eventually divorced bitterly. Ms. Khorn was also troubled that her youngest daughter, now 13, was growing up surrounded by drunken, leering men.





Then in the last year, the brothel business became even more challenging amid rising pressure from aid groups, journalists and the United States State Department’s trafficking office. The office issued reports shaming Cambodian leaders and threatened sanctions if they did nothing.

Many of the brothels are owned by the police, which complicates matters, but eventually authorities in Cambodia were pressured enough that they ordered a partial crackdown.
Photo




A group of girls in front of the brothel in which they work in Poipet, Cambodia. The toddler is the daughter of either the brothel-owner or of a prostitute. Credit Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times

But brutality has its own drawbacks as a business model, particularly during a crackdown, pimps say. Brothels that imprison and torture girls have to pay for 24-hour guards, and they lose business because they can’t allow customers to take girls out to hotel rooms. Moreover, the Cambodian government has begun prosecuting the most abusive traffickers.

“One brothel owner here was actually arrested,” complained another owner in Poipet, indignantly. “After that, I was so scared, I closed the brothel for a while.”





To be sure, a new brothel district has opened up on the edge of Poipet — in the guise of “karaoke lounges” employing teenage girls. One of the Mama-sans there offered that while she didn’t have a young virgin girl in stock, she could get me one.

Virgin sales are the profit center for many brothels in Asia (partly because they stitch girls up and resell them as virgins several times over), and thus these sales are their economic vulnerability as well. If we want to undermine sex trafficking, the best way is to pressure governments like Cambodia’s to organize sting operations and arrest both buyers and sellers of virgin girls. Cambodia has shown it is willing to take at least some action, and that is one that would strike at the heart of the business model.

Sexual slavery is like any other business: raise the operating costs, create a risk of jail, and the human traffickers will quite sensibly shift to some other trade. If the Obama administration treats 21st-century slavery as a top priority, we can push many of the traffickers to quit in disgust and switch to stealing motorcycles instead.




I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on , on page WK12 of the New York edition with the headline: Striking The Brothels’ Bottom Line. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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The Business of Brothels JAN. 10, 2009





















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Two teenage girls in the room they share in a brothel run by Sav Channa. Credit Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times

“They didn’t tell me to close down exactly,” said another Poipet brothel owner whom I’ve also interviewed periodically. “But they said I should keep the front door closed.”

About half the brothels in Poipet seem to have gone out of business in the last couple of years. After Ms. Khorn’s brothel closed, her daughter-in-law took four of the prostitutes to staff a new brothel, but it’s doing poorly and she is thinking of starting a rice shop instead. “A store would be more profitable,” grumbled the daughter-in-law, Sav Channa.

“The police come almost every day, asking for $5,” she said. “Any time a policeman gets drunk, he comes and asks for money. ... Sometimes I just close up and pretend that this isn’t a brothel. I say that we’re all sisters.”

Ms. Channa, who does not seem to be imprisoning anyone against her will, readily acknowledged that some other brothels in Poipet torture girls, enslave them and occasionally beat them to death. She complained that their cruelty gives them a competitive advantage.
Photo



A group of girls in front of the brothel in which they work in Poipet, Cambodia. The toddler is the daughter of either the brothel-owner or of a prostitute. Credit Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times

interesting read Duncan! cheers

As I recall the followup to the story in question, that same girl "bought" by Kristof returned voluntarily to her brothel almost immediately, as she didn't know what else to do with herself and was a comfortable there as anywhere. I'm all for giving the trafficked girls a chance to get out of bad situations if they want out and are being abused, but forcibly sticking them in a sewing class where they might earn $80 per month if they are lucky is apparently not an attractive option for some girls either. I don't blame Kristof or anyone for trying to help those girls, though. It's a messed up situation all around.

Rutiger wrote:As I recall the followup to the story in question, that same girl "bought" by Kristof returned voluntarily to her brothel almost immediately, as she didn't know what else to do with herself and was a comfortable there as anywhere. I'm all for giving the trafficked girls a chance to get out of bad situations if they want out and are being abused, but forcibly sticking them in a sewing class where they might earn $80 per month if they are lucky is apparently not an attractive option for some girls either. I don't blame Kristof or anyone for trying to help those girls, though. It's a messed up situation all around.

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