Cambodia: Stolen Innocence
September 2002 – 25’05’’
Lloyd: In a country famed for its lack of law enforcement, this is a strange sight indeed.
Police: This is no ordinary operation.
Their target is an industry that’s more used to official protection than policing. For years the brothels of Cambodia have been operating without fear of interference.
They’ve redefined the limits of the world’s oldest profession, openly recruiting the very young for a clientele with an insatiable appetite for children.
Sochua: Cambodian, local men, believe that having sex with virgins, young children, boosts up their sexual appetite, their strength, their integrity.
Lloyd: Foreign paedophiles have also developed a taste for Cambodia’s children. Though they hide their faces today, they’ve made the country one of the world’s top destinations for sex tourism. And a broken society, struggling for survival, desperate for money, stands idly by while its young are sold for sex.
Lloyd: We’re driving through the outskirts of Phnom Penh on our way to Svey Pak, eleven kilometres up the road.
It’s the most notorious brothel district in Cambodia, open all day every day. We’re told that this is where Cambodian men go when they’re looking for sex with the very young. It’s also a popular destination with foreign paedophiles.
This squalid shantytown is no place for the ordinary tourist,
just those who come to pay for sex, met by those who want to sell it.
Lloyd: Just how young would be revealed within minutes inside one of Svey Pak’s many shop front brothels.
First to be paraded is a girl who claims to be 14, but looks younger. Next a ten year old, frightened and confused as her innocence is bargained away.
Girl: Thai massage. Yum yum massage.
Lloyd: “Yum Yum”, in the vernacular of Cambodia’s sex trade, is oral sex. The children repeat these words like a mantra.
Girl: Yum yum massage very good.
Lloyd: A few minutes later yet another 10-year-old, called in from the street to offer herself up. Although she’s tiny, the pimp assures me she understands what is expected and for ten dollars will perform oral sex.
In Svey Pak it’s a trade that goes on from morning to night. Tonight the children are already waiting. They swarm forward, competing with each other to offer themselves up.
The children squabble over who will go with the foreigner. This is an adult game. Money is the prize.
Eventually we make an excuse and leave alone.
Lloyd: To understand how girls as young as ten end up as prostitutes, journey into the poverty of village life. Sheer desperation for money makes children vulnerable, ready fodder for the sex industry. Leang's daughter sacrificed herself to ensure her family’s survival.
Leang: When she was first taken from here she was sold for $250 - but that wasn’t enough to pay the debt so she had to stay for another fifteen months.
Lloyd: It was the high cost of medical treatment for Leang’s dying husband that plunged the family into debt. When they fell behind in repayments, the loan shark suggested her daughter work as a prostitute to pay off the money.
Leang: I feel regretful and very unhappy. When she was born
I wanted her to have a normal married life, but it happened and there’s nothing I can do. It’s very regretful and hurtful.
Lloyd: It’s the untold tragedy of the Cambodian sex trade, how a mother can sell her own child.
Sochua: Obviously it’s because of poverty. But the Cambodian people were poor before, they didn’t sell their children.
So there must be other things that penetrate, negative factors that penetrate.
Lloyd: Cambodia’s Minister for Women’s Affairs, Mu Sochua, has been at the forefront of attempts to clean up Cambodia’s child sex industry.
Sochua: So you have traffickers that are very skilled to trick, you have pressure, you have the police who will not prosecute, you have the neighbours that do not want to intervene with the fear. And then all of a sudden you see these children in the big cities and they are lost until we can find them
So this is a safe house.
Lloyd: The lucky few are found. They are rescued and brought to live in the safety of compounds like this one in Phnom Penh.
It’s a second chance for girls like Sunremita. She had no say in becoming a child prostitute. That was a decision of her mother. Who, it turns out, had lied to her own daughter.
Sunremita: Everyone in our family was sick and we didn’t have any money. I said that I would do anything for her except being a prostitute. She said, let’s go and sing in karaoke - so I agreed to go to get money for the sick family. But instead I was taken to the brothel. My mother asked my step father to take me there. My mother stayed at home.
Lloyd: Sunremita was forced to work in a brothel where many customers refused condoms.
Sunremita: I said that “if you don’t use it I won’t have sex with you” - and that I would leave.
I told him I would ask the boss to change girls but he would not agree - and then he hit me, and kicked me and slapped me.
Lloyd: Remarkably Sunremita holds no grudge against her mother who, she believes, was coerced by her step-father.
Sunremita: I don’t think that way because we are very poor and we rent a house.
We do not have any income and she believes my step father because she loves him more than me. I’m not angry - nor do I hate my mother.
Lloyd: Cambodia’s sex trade is often portrayed as a service for foreign paedophiles. But the truth is it’s an industry that mainly serves Cambodian men. There are between 30 and 40 thousand sex workers across the country. Nearly half under 15.
Lloyd: Why are there so many brothels, why are they so full of young women?
Sochua: Because there is a demand out there and the men have no limits to their liberties.
Sochua: Five o’clock, right after work, men go out to drink. The drinks continue on, and onto the brothel. To the brothel and then from the brothel from one night to two nights.
Lloyd: Scratch the surface of the middle class Cambodian man - and you’ll find just why there is such a ready demand for child prostitutes.
Cambodian man 1: Most Cambodian people they would encounter virginity of woman only once time in one life but if they can have more they think I am lucky to have a virgin girl, now they will talk many times to their friend.
Cambodian man 2: That is really true, because the men like virginity and men would feel very proud that they had an encounter with a virgin because in our society more and more girls lose their virginity. So men give more value to the virgins - especially the Cambodian girls who come to the city from the country. Men like country girls.
Lloyd: And so the girls get younger and younger.
Sochua: The society has always treated young boys and men
as kings until the day they die. And do when these men cannot come out of their childhood at adolescence, when they grow old they grow physically old, but mentally emotionally they are still trapped in their childhood.
Lloyd: Cambodia is a product of its violent past. Attitudes have been shaped by brutal experience. The breakdown of the family unit was an objective under the mad rule of Pol Pot.
Sochua: 30 years of war, genocide, conflict, destruction totally changed Cambodia.
We have lost the soul of the family, the glue that brought us together.
Lloyd: Another institution that was destroyed was the machinery of law and order.
Our Camera was welcome on this raid. Whether it was staged for us is impossible to say. But the police commitment to a crackdown is dubious.
As ever, they’ve rounded up a small number of prostitutes. The real criminals; the customers, the pimps and the brothel operators are left in peace.
Lloyd: Why don’t police just go into Svey Pak and close every building and throw them all out?
Sokha: sometimes there this is the quick reaction to something. Not the solution. I think so. Not the right answer to this one.
Lloyd: Prum Sokha is one of the Ministers responsible for law enforcement.
Sokha: The law itself is not good. Even when you have a good law you have to have good police. Good trained police.
Lloyd: Do you have good police?
Sokha: We have good police. Not all are good police but we have good police.
Lloyd: But not all are good?
Sokha: No.
Lloyd: How often are police paid to keep brothels open?
Sochua: If brothels are operating every night, every day, 24 hours a day for every single hour that they operate the police are paid to let them free to operate.
Lloyd: Corruption in Cambodia goes way beyond the ordinary policeman. This is the southern port town of Sihanoukville setting for one of the most high publicised paedophilia cases in recent years. Disturbing not just for the allegations of torture and sex with under-aged boys but also for the scandal that surrounded the eventual court case.
A few years ago Pierre Guynot quit his job in children’s television in Paris and moved to Sihanoukville, where he invested in a go-cart business.
Guynot: The room we are building there ... trial for room around swimming pool... specific for families.
Lloyd: Guynot is a man with big plans but little to show for it. The go cart track is strangely deserted of customers. The development project he talks has never been completed.
Guynot’s explanation is that his life went off course.. when he was charged with multiple counts of sexual abuse with young boys, a group of eight employed to work and live at the track.
Lloyd: Did you have sex with the children?
Guynot: Never. Never.
Lloyd: But the boys tell a powerful and consistent story.
Boy: One night when I was at his and I was sleeping with my friend Cheat, he came in and he asked me to wear the shorts. Then he removed my pants and played with my private parts - and sucked it for about half an hour before he left. A few days later he asked to come to his room – so I asked my friend to come and sleep with me. I slept in the middle and because I was scared he might suck me again, I slept on my side. He stuck his his private parts into my bottom.
Lloyd: This boy was 13 when he went to live with Guynot. His friend was 15. They want to hide their identity because they are scared of repercussions and ashamed about their experience.
Boy: He used his hand to pump my private parts. And then he sucked me.
Lloyd: Investigators found thousands of pornographic photographs in Guynot’s possession. They included shots of the boys, who say Guynot ordered them strip naked when they went to the pool.
Lloyd: They were lying?
Guynot: Yes.
Lloyd: You say they are lying?
Guynot: More. It’d defamation. It’s misconduct. It’s everything.
Lloyd: Guynot had plans to set up his home as a tourist destination with a difference.
This website promoting it as the Sihanoukville dungeon savage men’s club.
But his scheme came to light quite by chance, at this Phnom Penh shelter, when another Frenchman, Sebastien Marot, made a terrible discovery.
Marot: My team found two kids on the street who were hurting in the genitals.
So they took them to the doctor here and they discovered that they had padlocks around the genitals. That were hurting them as they had been there for two or three days. I couldn’t believe it myself so I saw it. I saw padlocks. I had the welding teacher saw them off carefully.
Lloyd: Did you padlock boys testicles?
Guynot: No, of course not.
Lloyd: What do you think of someone who would do that?Guynot: It some else do it to someone else it’s a kind of torture, so it's crazy.
Lloyd: You think it crazy?
Guynot: Yes.
Lloyd: During Guynot’s trial the pictures and testimonies from each of the boys were presented in court. But the judge ruled that none was admissible and he found Pierre Guynot innocent.
Sochua: Over more than 10 children were brutalised, sexually brutalised, I saw the evidence.
I gave the evidence up high, we talked to the children. Can we say that more than 10 young children lied for all this time so that they can frame someone? I don’t think so. The testimonies of the children are were clear and simple. They were brutalised, they were sexually exploited and the only question to me is how can the judge with all the proof, evidence, physical material, equipment, the location of this operation and then at the end of the day the judge can say this man is free, this man can continue to live in Cambodia as a free man. What kind of message does it give to our children?
Lloyd: In a country where everything’s for sale, there’s a common belief that in the Guynot case the verdict too was bought - that the judge was bribed and that a boy was paid to change his evidence.
Lloyd: Did you pay any boy?
Guynot: Nothing to Nobody! My lawyer, my food, my everything but pay for people? Not a thing Not a riel, not a riel.
Lloyd: The judge?G
uynot: Not a riel, not a thing.
Lloyd: Did you pay the judge?
Guynot: No why? I have no money. Only small money.
Lloyd: Pierre Guynot’s case has galvanised campaigners. An appeal has been lodged. He will have to face another trial.
While it will be heard by a different judge many believe the outcome is still for sale.
Lloyd: How widespread is judicial corruption in Cambodia?
Sochua: Wide enough for every single Cambodian person in the street we talk to to say they don’t believe in getting justice without payment.
Sokha: We can’t say that we have no corruption. We have corruption.
Lloyd: We put the Guynot case to the man in charge of law enforcement -- Prom Sokha.
Lloyd: So is he an example of how the system fails?
Sokha: Not fails.
Lloyd: You don’t accept the failure of a system?
Sokha: No.
Lloyd: With so much evidence against him?
Sokha: If you think the Cambodian system fails then so does Australia, the U.S., even Sweden.
Lloyd: Cambodia is a sexual playground for those indifferent to the damage caused by their actions. A country where men abuse the vulnerable. A country that’s been reduced to a human sideshow. Where children are exploited, with little or no thought for the terrible consequences.
Oum: For me, I can’t even read - and I have no relatives….
so no one wants to know me because of this disease.
Lloyd: Oum is dying of AIDS. The illness is ravaging her body. It’s too late for medication to slow the progress.
Oum: It’s true when we get money we’re happy, but when I get this disease
it’s me who suffers - and everyone despise me.
Lloyd: Oum’s friend Neath is also dying of the disease that’s a time-bomb in Cambodia. She too was cheated of her freedom, tricked into working as a prostitute and now her life is slowly ebbing away.
Neath: I like to say to others not to take the same path as I did because it was wrong. Don’t believe others. I say don’t believe others and don’t go with others - and be really careful.
Lloyd: Cambodia is trying to act on behalf of those for whom it is not too late. These children are being schooled in the lessons of good old-fashioned “stranger danger”.
teacher: It’s important when you are going to or from school, if a stranger comes and asks you to follow for any reason, you must not go.
Lloyd: It’s an elementary course in trust. Who to believe, who to avoid.
But what hope is there in a country where the danger is everywhere, from foreigners and locals alike?
Sochua:: We are building a nation, a very young nation, we want our children to get the right start,
with hope in their eyes, with power in their hearts, with a clear mind to see a tomorrow.
Lloyd: For a lucky few tomorrow has arrived. Those rescued from the misery of sexual slavery are getting a second chance. Though they’ve been robbed of their childhoods but their future at least holds the promise of something better than the life they’ve left behind.
CAMBODIA CHILDREN
Reporter: Peter Lloyd
Camera: David Leland
Editor: Stuart Miller
Producer: Mary Ann Jolley
Research: Jim Pollard
September 2002 – 25’05’’
Lloyd: In a country famed for its lack of law enforcement, this is a strange sight indeed.
Police: This is no ordinary operation.
Their target is an industry that’s more used to official protection than policing. For years the brothels of Cambodia have been operating without fear of interference.
They’ve redefined the limits of the world’s oldest profession, openly recruiting the very young for a clientele with an insatiable appetite for children.
Sochua: Cambodian, local men, believe that having sex with virgins, young children, boosts up their sexual appetite, their strength, their integrity.
Lloyd: Foreign paedophiles have also developed a taste for Cambodia’s children. Though they hide their faces today, they’ve made the country one of the world’s top destinations for sex tourism. And a broken society, struggling for survival, desperate for money, stands idly by while its young are sold for sex.
Lloyd: We’re driving through the outskirts of Phnom Penh on our way to Svey Pak, eleven kilometres up the road.
It’s the most notorious brothel district in Cambodia, open all day every day. We’re told that this is where Cambodian men go when they’re looking for sex with the very young. It’s also a popular destination with foreign paedophiles.
This squalid shantytown is no place for the ordinary tourist,
just those who come to pay for sex, met by those who want to sell it.
Lloyd: Just how young would be revealed within minutes inside one of Svey Pak’s many shop front brothels.
First to be paraded is a girl who claims to be 14, but looks younger. Next a ten year old, frightened and confused as her innocence is bargained away.
Girl: Thai massage. Yum yum massage.
Lloyd: “Yum Yum”, in the vernacular of Cambodia’s sex trade, is oral sex. The children repeat these words like a mantra.
Girl: Yum yum massage very good.
Lloyd: A few minutes later yet another 10-year-old, called in from the street to offer herself up. Although she’s tiny, the pimp assures me she understands what is expected and for ten dollars will perform oral sex.
In Svey Pak it’s a trade that goes on from morning to night. Tonight the children are already waiting. They swarm forward, competing with each other to offer themselves up.
The children squabble over who will go with the foreigner. This is an adult game. Money is the prize.
Eventually we make an excuse and leave alone.
Lloyd: To understand how girls as young as ten end up as prostitutes, journey into the poverty of village life. Sheer desperation for money makes children vulnerable, ready fodder for the sex industry. Leang's daughter sacrificed herself to ensure her family’s survival.
Leang: When she was first taken from here she was sold for $250 - but that wasn’t enough to pay the debt so she had to stay for another fifteen months.
Lloyd: It was the high cost of medical treatment for Leang’s dying husband that plunged the family into debt. When they fell behind in repayments, the loan shark suggested her daughter work as a prostitute to pay off the money.
Leang: I feel regretful and very unhappy. When she was born
I wanted her to have a normal married life, but it happened and there’s nothing I can do. It’s very regretful and hurtful.
Lloyd: It’s the untold tragedy of the Cambodian sex trade, how a mother can sell her own child.
Sochua: Obviously it’s because of poverty. But the Cambodian people were poor before, they didn’t sell their children.
So there must be other things that penetrate, negative factors that penetrate.
Lloyd: Cambodia’s Minister for Women’s Affairs, Mu Sochua, has been at the forefront of attempts to clean up Cambodia’s child sex industry.
Sochua: So you have traffickers that are very skilled to trick, you have pressure, you have the police who will not prosecute, you have the neighbours that do not want to intervene with the fear. And then all of a sudden you see these children in the big cities and they are lost until we can find them
So this is a safe house.
Lloyd: The lucky few are found. They are rescued and brought to live in the safety of compounds like this one in Phnom Penh.
It’s a second chance for girls like Sunremita. She had no say in becoming a child prostitute. That was a decision of her mother. Who, it turns out, had lied to her own daughter.
Sunremita: Everyone in our family was sick and we didn’t have any money. I said that I would do anything for her except being a prostitute. She said, let’s go and sing in karaoke - so I agreed to go to get money for the sick family. But instead I was taken to the brothel. My mother asked my step father to take me there. My mother stayed at home.
Lloyd: Sunremita was forced to work in a brothel where many customers refused condoms.
Sunremita: I said that “if you don’t use it I won’t have sex with you” - and that I would leave.
I told him I would ask the boss to change girls but he would not agree - and then he hit me, and kicked me and slapped me.
Lloyd: Remarkably Sunremita holds no grudge against her mother who, she believes, was coerced by her step-father.
Sunremita: I don’t think that way because we are very poor and we rent a house.
We do not have any income and she believes my step father because she loves him more than me. I’m not angry - nor do I hate my mother.
Lloyd: Cambodia’s sex trade is often portrayed as a service for foreign paedophiles. But the truth is it’s an industry that mainly serves Cambodian men. There are between 30 and 40 thousand sex workers across the country. Nearly half under 15.
Lloyd: Why are there so many brothels, why are they so full of young women?
Sochua: Because there is a demand out there and the men have no limits to their liberties.
Sochua: Five o’clock, right after work, men go out to drink. The drinks continue on, and onto the brothel. To the brothel and then from the brothel from one night to two nights.
Lloyd: Scratch the surface of the middle class Cambodian man - and you’ll find just why there is such a ready demand for child prostitutes.
Cambodian man 1: Most Cambodian people they would encounter virginity of woman only once time in one life but if they can have more they think I am lucky to have a virgin girl, now they will talk many times to their friend.
Cambodian man 2: That is really true, because the men like virginity and men would feel very proud that they had an encounter with a virgin because in our society more and more girls lose their virginity. So men give more value to the virgins - especially the Cambodian girls who come to the city from the country. Men like country girls.
Lloyd: And so the girls get younger and younger.
Sochua: The society has always treated young boys and men
as kings until the day they die. And do when these men cannot come out of their childhood at adolescence, when they grow old they grow physically old, but mentally emotionally they are still trapped in their childhood.
Lloyd: Cambodia is a product of its violent past. Attitudes have been shaped by brutal experience. The breakdown of the family unit was an objective under the mad rule of Pol Pot.
Sochua: 30 years of war, genocide, conflict, destruction totally changed Cambodia.
We have lost the soul of the family, the glue that brought us together.
Lloyd: Another institution that was destroyed was the machinery of law and order.
Our Camera was welcome on this raid. Whether it was staged for us is impossible to say. But the police commitment to a crackdown is dubious.
As ever, they’ve rounded up a small number of prostitutes. The real criminals; the customers, the pimps and the brothel operators are left in peace.
Lloyd: Why don’t police just go into Svey Pak and close every building and throw them all out?
Sokha: sometimes there this is the quick reaction to something. Not the solution. I think so. Not the right answer to this one.
Lloyd: Prum Sokha is one of the Ministers responsible for law enforcement.
Sokha: The law itself is not good. Even when you have a good law you have to have good police. Good trained police.
Lloyd: Do you have good police?
Sokha: We have good police. Not all are good police but we have good police.
Lloyd: But not all are good?
Sokha: No.
Lloyd: How often are police paid to keep brothels open?
Sochua: If brothels are operating every night, every day, 24 hours a day for every single hour that they operate the police are paid to let them free to operate.
Lloyd: Corruption in Cambodia goes way beyond the ordinary policeman. This is the southern port town of Sihanoukville setting for one of the most high publicised paedophilia cases in recent years. Disturbing not just for the allegations of torture and sex with under-aged boys but also for the scandal that surrounded the eventual court case.
A few years ago Pierre Guynot quit his job in children’s television in Paris and moved to Sihanoukville, where he invested in a go-cart business.
Guynot: The room we are building there ... trial for room around swimming pool... specific for families.
Lloyd: Guynot is a man with big plans but little to show for it. The go cart track is strangely deserted of customers. The development project he talks has never been completed.
Guynot’s explanation is that his life went off course.. when he was charged with multiple counts of sexual abuse with young boys, a group of eight employed to work and live at the track.
Lloyd: Did you have sex with the children?
Guynot: Never. Never.
Lloyd: But the boys tell a powerful and consistent story.
Boy: One night when I was at his and I was sleeping with my friend Cheat, he came in and he asked me to wear the shorts. Then he removed my pants and played with my private parts - and sucked it for about half an hour before he left. A few days later he asked to come to his room – so I asked my friend to come and sleep with me. I slept in the middle and because I was scared he might suck me again, I slept on my side. He stuck his his private parts into my bottom.
Lloyd: This boy was 13 when he went to live with Guynot. His friend was 15. They want to hide their identity because they are scared of repercussions and ashamed about their experience.
Boy: He used his hand to pump my private parts. And then he sucked me.
Lloyd: Investigators found thousands of pornographic photographs in Guynot’s possession. They included shots of the boys, who say Guynot ordered them strip naked when they went to the pool.
Lloyd: They were lying?
Guynot: Yes.
Lloyd: You say they are lying?
Guynot: More. It’d defamation. It’s misconduct. It’s everything.
Lloyd: Guynot had plans to set up his home as a tourist destination with a difference.
This website promoting it as the Sihanoukville dungeon savage men’s club.
But his scheme came to light quite by chance, at this Phnom Penh shelter, when another Frenchman, Sebastien Marot, made a terrible discovery.
Marot: My team found two kids on the street who were hurting in the genitals.
So they took them to the doctor here and they discovered that they had padlocks around the genitals. That were hurting them as they had been there for two or three days. I couldn’t believe it myself so I saw it. I saw padlocks. I had the welding teacher saw them off carefully.
Lloyd: Did you padlock boys testicles?
Guynot: No, of course not.
Lloyd: What do you think of someone who would do that?Guynot: It some else do it to someone else it’s a kind of torture, so it's crazy.
Lloyd: You think it crazy?
Guynot: Yes.
Lloyd: During Guynot’s trial the pictures and testimonies from each of the boys were presented in court. But the judge ruled that none was admissible and he found Pierre Guynot innocent.
Sochua: Over more than 10 children were brutalised, sexually brutalised, I saw the evidence.
I gave the evidence up high, we talked to the children. Can we say that more than 10 young children lied for all this time so that they can frame someone? I don’t think so. The testimonies of the children are were clear and simple. They were brutalised, they were sexually exploited and the only question to me is how can the judge with all the proof, evidence, physical material, equipment, the location of this operation and then at the end of the day the judge can say this man is free, this man can continue to live in Cambodia as a free man. What kind of message does it give to our children?
Lloyd: In a country where everything’s for sale, there’s a common belief that in the Guynot case the verdict too was bought - that the judge was bribed and that a boy was paid to change his evidence.
Lloyd: Did you pay any boy?
Guynot: Nothing to Nobody! My lawyer, my food, my everything but pay for people? Not a thing Not a riel, not a riel.
Lloyd: The judge?G
uynot: Not a riel, not a thing.
Lloyd: Did you pay the judge?
Guynot: No why? I have no money. Only small money.
Lloyd: Pierre Guynot’s case has galvanised campaigners. An appeal has been lodged. He will have to face another trial.
While it will be heard by a different judge many believe the outcome is still for sale.
Lloyd: How widespread is judicial corruption in Cambodia?
Sochua: Wide enough for every single Cambodian person in the street we talk to to say they don’t believe in getting justice without payment.
Sokha: We can’t say that we have no corruption. We have corruption.
Lloyd: We put the Guynot case to the man in charge of law enforcement -- Prom Sokha.
Lloyd: So is he an example of how the system fails?
Sokha: Not fails.
Lloyd: You don’t accept the failure of a system?
Sokha: No.
Lloyd: With so much evidence against him?
Sokha: If you think the Cambodian system fails then so does Australia, the U.S., even Sweden.
Lloyd: Cambodia is a sexual playground for those indifferent to the damage caused by their actions. A country where men abuse the vulnerable. A country that’s been reduced to a human sideshow. Where children are exploited, with little or no thought for the terrible consequences.
Oum: For me, I can’t even read - and I have no relatives….
so no one wants to know me because of this disease.
Lloyd: Oum is dying of AIDS. The illness is ravaging her body. It’s too late for medication to slow the progress.
Oum: It’s true when we get money we’re happy, but when I get this disease
it’s me who suffers - and everyone despise me.
Lloyd: Oum’s friend Neath is also dying of the disease that’s a time-bomb in Cambodia. She too was cheated of her freedom, tricked into working as a prostitute and now her life is slowly ebbing away.
Neath: I like to say to others not to take the same path as I did because it was wrong. Don’t believe others. I say don’t believe others and don’t go with others - and be really careful.
Lloyd: Cambodia is trying to act on behalf of those for whom it is not too late. These children are being schooled in the lessons of good old-fashioned “stranger danger”.
teacher: It’s important when you are going to or from school, if a stranger comes and asks you to follow for any reason, you must not go.
Lloyd: It’s an elementary course in trust. Who to believe, who to avoid.
But what hope is there in a country where the danger is everywhere, from foreigners and locals alike?
Sochua:: We are building a nation, a very young nation, we want our children to get the right start,
with hope in their eyes, with power in their hearts, with a clear mind to see a tomorrow.
Lloyd: For a lucky few tomorrow has arrived. Those rescued from the misery of sexual slavery are getting a second chance. Though they’ve been robbed of their childhoods but their future at least holds the promise of something better than the life they’ve left behind.
CAMBODIA CHILDREN
Reporter: Peter Lloyd
Camera: David Leland
Editor: Stuart Miller
Producer: Mary Ann Jolley
Research: Jim Pollard