WE PRESENT TO YOU OUR FORTY-THIRD

WOMAN OF COURAGE 

Somaly Mam

“I’ve written this book because I know that I will be killed and I don’t want to go without leaving a trace.”

At great risk to her own life, one woman takes on the illegal sex trade in Cambodia

In spite of being the target of death threats, Somaly Mam has not relinquished her campaign against the spread and causes of child prostitution and slavery in her home country of Cambodia.

Cambodia is one of the poorest countries of the world. Some families’ situations are so dire that they are forced to sell off their daughters, sometimes as young as five years old, for little more than a hundred US dollars. Some are sold into domestic slavery, but the majority are taken far away to the brothels of the capital or the tourist centers.

Somaly Mam, today 34-years-old, has lived this grueling experience firsthand. Orphaned at a young age, her grandparents sold her into slavery. Her childhood was spent being passed from hand to hand at the whim of her abusive masters until she was finally sold to a brothel at the age of 16. By that stage she had already been raped at least seventy times. After eight years of submitting to the threats of her mama-san, “madam” and the demands of a steady flow of Cambodian and foreign clients, she eventually found a way out with the help of the international community in Phnom Penh. The emotional scars ran much deeper than the physical ones, and it would be years before Somaly would learn to trust a man.

Since finding her freedom, Somaly has been haunted by the fact that thousands of girls are currently living the nightmare she was subjected to. In 1997, together with her husband, she founded a Cambodian NGO which helps young women caught in this violent underworld and campaigns against the brothel owners and the corrupt government officials who allow the illegal activities to prosper.

Somaly regularly conducts raids in Trorlaok bek, “Road of Lost Innocence,” where brothels are plentiful. Here, hundreds of pre-adolescent and adolescent girls live in squalid conditions and are forced to prostitute themselves, dressed in skimpy white tops and mini skirts, exposed at all hours of the day behind a glass wall. Following a raid, Somaly can return to the safe house with more than 80 girls.

But often the girls are so traumatized, and fearful for the safety of their family members, that only a handful successfully enter the rehabilitation program. Official estimates gauge that there are circa 20,000 minors still working in the thriving sex industry throughout Cambodia.

In The Road of Lost Innocence, Somaly retraces her own life story and interweaves the testimonies and the tragic destinies of the young girls she has encountered through her work.

Somaly Mam founded AFESIP, an organization aimed at improving the status of women in society in 1996 and strives to end the exploitation and enslavement of women and girls in Cambodia. Her work on trafficking and HIV/AIDS has earned wide recognition and support, as has her perseverance when AFESIP’s work was challenged.

http://www.world-citizenship.org/