It is this aspect of Cambodia's appalling child sex trade that Don Brewster, a 59-year-old American resident of the neighborhood, finds most difficult to countenance. "I don't know what to do now, because we cannot move back to the past." "It was because of the debt, that's why I had to sell her," she says. Like other local mothers CNN spoke to, she blames poverty for her decision to sell her daughter, saying a financial crisis drove her into the clutches of the traffickers who make their livelihoods preying on Cambodian children.
Mira Sorvino details going behind the scenes of this illicit trade. Karaoke bars are a common front for child prostitution. "Selling my daughter was heartbreaking, but what can I say?" says Kieu's mother, Neoung, in an interview with a CNN crew that travelled to Phnom Penh to hear her story. When she learned her mother was planning to sell her again, this time for a six-month stretch, she realized she needed to flee her home. When she returned home, her mother sent her away for stints in two other brothels, including one 400 kilometers away on the Thai border.
She was kept there for three days, raped by three to six men a day. She says she returned home from the experience "very heartbroken." But her ordeal was not over.Īfter the sale of her virginity, her mother had Kieu taken to a brothel where, she says, "they held me like I was in prison."
"I did not know what the job was," says Kieu, now 14 and living in a safehouse. The girl, Kieu, was taken to a hospital and examined by a doctor, who issued her a "certificate of virginity." She was then delivered to a hotel, where a man raped her for two days. When a poor family in Cambodia fell afoul of loan sharks, the mother asked her youngest daughter to take a job.
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