The reform of Svay Pak
Once the centre of child sex tourism in Cambodia, today Svay Pak is a drastically changed community due to efforts by authorities and NGOs in recent decades. But the industry, today eradicated from street corners, has adapted to the digital age
By Andrew Haffner and Allegra Mendelson
Additional reporting by Vuthtey Borin

Today, Svay Pak village is yet another piece of Phnom Penh’s growing urban sprawl, a bustling yet small community on the northern rim of the capital.

But at the turn of the century, this place was a horrorshow of child sexual abuse, rape and exploitation, driven by brothels openly prostituting children as young as five to a clientele of mostly foreign pedophiles. Documentary video captured in 2003 by the US television programme Dateline shows a village of dirt roads and hovels, and teenage pimps and hustlers working with a network of adults to sell pre-pubescent girls to the highest bidder.

Even the motodops and taxi drivers knew the open secret of the village once nicknamed Kilometer 11, due to its distance from the city centre. An interested patron had only to ask for young girls and would be taken north to Svay Pak.

Grainy footage of Dateline’s hidden cameras shows girls being offered to perform oral sex for as little as $30 by both family members and professional child procurers, a lineup of underworld characters including coiffed women who introduce themselves as “mama-san” and men in undershirts who haggle with tight lips around dangling cigarettes.

Most of the girls and women who were pressed into this world of commercial sex are believed to have been of stateless and migratory Vietnamese residents, a community that has historically been viewed by Cambodians with resentment and animosity.

The sale of children at Svay Pak and other child sex hubs around the country represented one of the most brazen periods in an era of international child sex tourism, in the hazy days of the late 1990s and early 2000s when pedophiles could meet online to plan itineraries and visit marginalised places like Svay Pak to buy children with impunity.

As brutal as the scenes from this era are, it’s hard to imagine them playing out today in Svay Pak. While sexual abuse of children may never be fully eradicated, all signs suggest that the open trade practiced in the village, as well as elsewhere in Cambodia, has been all but stomped out by ramped-up local law enforcement and international efforts to track sexual predators as they cross borders.
Screengrabs from the 2002 Dateline documentary on Svay Pak. Source

Svay Pak village is now crossed with paved roads and multi-story family homes, with front doors thrown open to the light. On a recent evening, families sat outside their homes to eat dinner in the cool air as children played in the streets, cruising past on light-up roller skates and laughing in the dusk.

Among long-term residents, the village’s nefarious history seems to have sunk into memory. Police raids and other law enforcement measures drove out the bulk of the pimps and madams, and many of those involved in the sex trade have long since moved away from the area, explain local residents today.

”It’s not a big thing anymore so people don’t normally talk about it. For younger generations, they don’t even know what happened,” says Hok, a 50-year old Cambodian driver who moved to Svay Pak, his wife’s hometown, about 15 years ago. “For those who live in this area now, it’s not that we have secrets, but whenever we travel outside of Svay Pak when they ask us where we are from, they discriminate against us because the town still has such a bad reputation.”
Full article: https://southeastasiaglobe.com/child-ex ... -cambodia/