Half the Sky Page 6

  The last couple of times Nick visited Svay Pak, girls were not openly on display and the front gates of the brothels were chained. Brothel owners, imagining him to be a customer, nervously whisked him inside the back entrances and brought out a few prostitutes, but there seemed to be at most only one tenth as many as there had been. And when Nick asked to see young girls or virgins, the owners said they were out of stock and would have to make arrangements to bring one in for an appointment a day or two later. This is a sign that meaningful progress is possible. Some degree of prostitution will probably always be with us, but we need not acquiesce to widespread sexual slavery.

  Rescuing Girls Is the Easy Part

  We became slave owners in the twenty-first century the old-fashioned way: We paid cash in exchange for two slave girls and a couple of receipts. The girls were then ours to do with as we liked.

  Rescuing girls from brothels is the easy part, however. The challenge is keeping them from returning. The stigma that the girls feel in their communities after being freed, coupled with drug dependencies or threats from pimps, often lead them to return to the red-light district. It’s enormously dispiriting for well-meaning aid workers who oversee a brothel raid to take the girls back to a shelter and give them food and medical care, only to see the girls climb over the back wall.

  Our unusual purchase came about when Nick traveled with Naka Nathaniel, then a New York Times videographer, to an area in northwestern Cambodia notorious for its criminality. Nick and Naka arrived in the town of Poipet and checked in to an $8-a-night guesthouse that doubled as a brothel. They focused their interviews on two teenage girls, Srey Neth and Srey Momm, each in a different brothel.

  Neth was very pretty, short and light-skinned. She looked fourteen or fifteen, but she thought she was older than that; she had no idea of her actual birth date. A woman pimp brought her to Nick’s room, and she sat on the bed, quivering with fear. She had been in the brothel only a month, and Nick would have been her first foreign customer. Nick needed his interpreter present in the room as well, and this puzzled the pimp, who nevertheless accommodated.

  Black hair fell over Neth’s shoulders and onto her tight pink T-shirt. Below, she wore equally tight blue jeans, and sandals. Neth had plump cheeks, but the rest of her was thin and fragile; thick makeup caked her face in a way that seemed incongruous, as if she were a child who had played with her mother’s cosmetics.

  After some awkward conversation through the interpreter, as Nick asked Neth about how she had grown up and about her family, she began to calm down. She stopped trembling and mostly looked in the direction of the television in the corner of the room, which Nick had put on to muffle the sound of their voices. She responded to questions briefly and without interest.

  Srey Neth at the entrance to her home, right after we took her back to her family from the brothel (Nicholas D. Kristof)

  For the first five minutes, Neth claimed that she was selling her body of her own volition. She insisted that she was free to come and go as she pleased. But when it became clear that this wasn’t some sort of test by her pimp, and that she wouldn’t be beaten for telling the truth, she recounted her story in a dull monotone.

  A female cousin had taken Neth from their village, telling the family that Neth would be selling fruit in Poipet. Once in Poipet, Neth was sold to the brothel and closely guarded. After a check by a doctor confirmed that her hymen was intact, the brothel auctioned her virginity to a Thai casino manager, who locked her up in a hotel room for several days and slept with her three times (he later died of AIDS). Now Neth was confined to the guesthouse and was young enough and light-skinned enough to rent for top rates.

  “I can walk around in Poipet, but only with a close relative of the owner,” Neth explained. “They keep me under close watch. They do not let me go out alone. They’re afraid I would run away.”

  “So why not escape at night?” Nick asked.

  “They would get me back, and something bad would happen. Maybe a beating. I heard that when a group of girls tried to escape, they locked them in the rooms and beat them up.”

  What about the police? Could the girls go to the police for help?

  Neth shrugged uninterestedly. “The police wouldn’t help me because they get bribes from the brothel owners,” she said in her robotic way, still staring at the television.

  “Would you want to leave here? If you were set free, what would you do?”

  Neth suddenly looked away from the television, a flash of interest in her eyes.

  “I’d go back home,” she said, and she seemed to be gauging whether the question was serious. “Back to my family. I’d like to try to open a little shop to make money.”

  “Do you really want to leave?” Nick asked. “If I were to buy you from the brothel and take you back to your village, are you absolutely sure that you wouldn’t come back to this?”

  Neth’s listlessness abruptly disappeared. She turned completely away from the television, and the glaze slipped away from her eyes. “This is a hell,” she snorted, speaking with passion for the first time. “You think I want to do this?”

  So, quietly and carefully, Nick schemed with Neth to buy her from the brothel owners and take her back to her family. After some dickering, Neth’s owner sold her for $150 and gave Nick a receipt.

  In a different brothel, we met Momm, a frail girl with oversized eyes who had been pimped for five years and seemed near to cracking from the strain. One moment Momm would laugh and tell jokes, and the next she would dissolve into sobs and rage, but she pleaded to be purchased, freed, and taken back to her home. We negotiated with Momm’s owner, who eventually sold her for $203 and filled out the receipt.

  Momm in her room in the brothel in Poipet (Nicholas D. Kristof)

  We took the girls out of town and back to their families. Neth’s home was closer, and we left her money to open a little grocery store in her village. Initially it thrived. American Assistance for Cambodia agreed to look after her and help her. Neth had been away for only six weeks, and her family accepted her story that she had been selling vegetables and welcomed her home without suspicion.

  Momm lived all the way across Cambodia, and with every passing mile of our long drive, she became more anxious about whether her family would accept or reject her. It had been five years since she had run away and then been sold into a brothel, and she had had no communication with her family. Momm was bouncing up and down nervously as we finally approached her village. Suddenly she screamed and, although the car was still moving, yanked open the door and leaped out. She hurtled over to a middle-aged woman who was staring wonderingly at the vehicle, and then the woman, Momm’s aunt, was screaming as well and they were embracing and crying.

  A moment later, it seemed as if everybody in the village was shrieking and running up to Momm. Momm’s mother was at her stall in the market a mile away when a child ran up to tell her that Momm had returned. Her mother started sprinting back to the village, tears streaming down her cheeks. She embraced her daughter, who was trying to drop to the ground to beg forgiveness, and they both tumbled down. It was ninety minutes before the shouting died away and the eyes dried, and then there was an impromptu feast. Family members may have suspected that Momm had been trafficked, but they didn’t press her when she said vaguely that she had been working in western Cambodia. The family decided that Momm would sell meat in a stall in the market right next to her mother, and Nick left some money to finance the project. American Assistance for Cambodia agreed to monitor Momm and assist her transition, and in the next few days Momm phoned repeatedly with updates.

  “We’ve rented the stall right next to my mom’s, and I’ll be working there tomorrow,” she told us. “Everything is going great. I’ll never go back to Poipet.”

  A week later, an excruciating e-mail arrived from Lor Chandara, our interpreter:

  Very bad, bad news. Srey Momm has voluntarily gone back to the Poipet brothel, according to her father. I asked the father if anyo
ne beat or blamed her but he told me that nothing bad had happened to her. She left the village at 8 a.m. on Monday without telling her family. Srey Momm left her phone with the family, and she called them last night to tell them that she is in Poipet.

  Momm, like many brothel girls, had become addicted to methamphetamines. Often the brothel owners give girls meth to keep them compliant and dependent. In her village, the craving had overwhelmed her, and she was consumed by the need to go back to the brothel and get some meth.

  As soon as she had gotten her fix, Momm wanted to leave the brothel. Bernie Krisher of American Assistance for Cambodia set her up in Phnom Penh twice more, but each time she ran away after a few days, desperate to get back to her meth supply. Momm is by no means a “hard woman”—she’s sweet, even a bit cloying, and is always buying gifts for her friends and praying at the Buddhist altar for divine intervention on their behalf. She yearned to leave the brothel behind, but she could not overcome her addiction.

  The next time we visited Poipet, a full year had passed. When Nick walked into Momm’s brothel, she saw him and dashed away in tears. After she had composed herself, she came out and kneeled on the floor and begged forgiveness.

  “I never lie to people, but I lied to you,” she said forlornly. “I said I would not come back, and I did. I didn’t want to return, but I did.”

  Neth and Momm underscore that many prostitutes are neither acting freely nor enslaved, but living in a world etched in ambiguities somewhere between those two extremes. After her return, Momm was bound to the brothel by drugs and debts, but the owner let her leave freely with customers, and Momm could easily have escaped if she had wanted to do so.

  Over the years, as she grew older, Momm’s price to customers dropped to just $1.50 per session. She was assigned a roommate to share her cubicle in the brothel, except when either was entertaining a man. The new roommate, Wen Lok, was a sixteen-year-old who had run away from home after the family’s motorcycle was stolen from her; she couldn’t bear to face her father’s wrath and fled. A trafficker promised her a job as a hotel maid in Poipet and then sold her to Momm’s brothel, where she was beaten until she accepted customers. Momm became the new girl’s minder, ensuring that she did not escape.

  Momm had been brutalized for years in the brothels, but now she seemed to be slipping into a managerial role; if that continued, she would be breaking young girls into the business—or beating them, just as she herself had been beaten. The slave was becoming the overseer.

  Yet that fate did not come to pass—and it was a crackdown on the brothels that ended Momm’s managerial trajectory. Momm’s brothel was owned by a middle-aged woman named Sok Khorn, who was always complaining about the business. “It’s only barely profitable, and it’s a huge amount of work,” she would moan as she sat in the foyer of the brothel (which was also her family home). “Plus those drunken men—they’re often so unpleasant—and the cops always have their hands out.” Sok Khorn’s disillusionment arose in part because her husband never did any chores in the brothel but constantly had sex with the girls, outraging her; they finally divorced. In addition, her daughter had reached the age of thirteen, and Sok Khorn worried about her as she did her homework in the foyer, with drunken men barging in and reaching out for anything female. The final straw came in 2008, when the Cambodian authorities reacted to growing Western pressure by cracking down on sex trafficking. That raised the cost of new girls, and the police began to demand larger bribes from the brothel owners. Any cop in the neighborhood would drop by and demand $5. At that point, about half the brothels in Poipet folded. Sok Khorn announced in disgust that she would try something else as well. “It wasn’t making money, so I gave up and thought I’d open a little grocery shop,” she said.

  None of the other brothels was buying girls, so Momm suddenly found herself free. It was a giddy but scary feeling. She hurriedly married one of her customers, a policeman, and they settled down together in his house. Over Christmas vacation 2008, we took our family to Cambodia—including our three children—and had a joyous meeting with Momm in Poipet. “I’m a housewife now,” she told us, beaming with pride. “I don’t have any customers now. I’ve left that life forever.”

  As for Neth, her new grocery shop initially did a booming business, since there was no other store in the village. She and her family were thrilled. But when other villagers saw Neth’s business flourishing, they opened their own shops. Soon the village had a half-dozen stores. Neth found her sales faltering.

  Worse, Neth’s family continued to regard her as a foolish little girl with no rights. So any man in the family who needed something took it from Neth’s store—sometimes paying, sometimes not. When a Cambodian festival rolled around, the men in Neth’s family didn’t have enough money to buy food for a feast, so they came to raid her shop. Neth protested.

  Her mother recalled later: “Neth got mad. She said we [the family] had to stay away, or everything would be gone. She said she had to have money to buy new things.” But in a Cambodian village, nobody listens to an uneducated teenage girl. The feast went ahead, the store was emptied. Afterward, Neth had no money to replenish her inventory. Four months after the shop had opened, her business plan had collapsed.

  Mortified that her capital was gone, Neth began to discuss with a few girlfriends the idea of seeking jobs in a city. A trafficker promised to get the girls jobs as dishwashers in Thailand. But the girls would have to pay $100 to be smuggled there, money they didn’t have, so they would have to go into debt to the trafficker. That’s a classic means of gaining leverage over girls: The debts mount with exorbitant interest rates, and when girls can’t repay the loans, the trafficker sells them to a brothel.

  Neth fretted about the risks but was desperate to make money. Her father had tuberculosis and was coughing up blood, and there was no money for treatment. So she decided to brave the risk and go to Thailand. Just as Neth and her girlfriends were about to leave, an aid worker from American Assistance for Cambodia dropped by to see how she was getting on. The aid worker, wary of the trafficker’s enticements, persuaded Neth not to take the risk. But what could Neth do instead?

  Bernie Krisher of American Assistance for Cambodia tried another approach. He arranged for Neth to move to Phnom Penh and study hairdressing at Sapor’s, the best beauty shop in the city. Neth lived in the American Assistance compound and studied English on the side, while working full-time in the beauty shop, learning to cut hair and give manicures. She placed third in a competition to apply makeup, and she lived sedately and quietly, pouring all her energy into her studies.

  “I’m happy with Srey Neth,” the owner, Sapor Rendall, said at the time. “She studies hard.” Sapor said she had just one problem with Neth: “She doesn’t want to do massage. I’ve talked to her about it many times, but she’s very reluctant.” Neth never dared explain to Sapor the reason for her timidity about massages. In a respectable beauty shop like Sapor’s, they are not sexual, but for a girl with Neth’s past, the notion of administering any kind of massage conjured horrible memories.

  Over time, Neth mellowed. She had always been very thin and a bit somber, but she put on a bit of weight and became relaxed, sometimes even vivacious and giggly. She was acting the way a teenager should, and boys noticed. They flirted with her. She ignored them.

  “I stay away from them,” she explained dryly. “I don’t want to play around with boys. I just want to learn hairdressing, so that I can open my own salon.”

  Neth decided that after completing her course she would work as a beautician in a small beauty shop, to get experience in managing a business. Then, after a year or so, she would open her own shop in the provincial town of Battambang, near her village. That way she could look after her father, as well as raise money to get him medical treatment.

  Then Neth’s health began to decline. She suffered inexplicable fevers and headaches that persisted for months, and she lost some of the weight she had recently put on. She went to a clinic in Batta
mbang, and the staff gave her a routine AIDS test. Half an hour later, they handed her a slip of paper: The test was positive for HIV.

  Neth was shattered. She walked out of the clinic with the paper scrunched up in her hand. In rural Cambodia, an HIV diagnosis felt like a death sentence, and Neth didn’t think she had long to live. She spent days crying, and she couldn’t sleep at night. Neth was not one to confide in others or to express emotion, but the pressure built inside her, and she finally shared her bad news with us. American Assistance for Cambodia tried to get her medical treatment, but Neth thought it was hopeless. She was taut with denial and rage, and she drifted back to her village so she could die near her family. A young man named Sothea began courting her. He was a catch for a peasant girl like her: a college-educated man who spoke some English. Tall and scholarly, he was older and more mature, but thrilled to have found such a beautiful woman. She curtly fended him off, but he wouldn’t listen.

  “When I fell in love with Srey Neth, she discouraged me,” Sothea said. “She told me: ‘I am poor. I live near Battambang [he is from Phnom Penh]. Don’t love me.’ But I told her that I still loved her and would love her to the end.”

  Neth found herself falling for him. Soon he asked her to marry him. She agreed. Neth told him that she had worked in Poipet and was friends with an American journalist, but she balked at acknowledging that she had been a prostitute—or that she had tested positive for HIV. Her secret nagged at her constantly, but she never dared confide.