PHNOM PENH—Bopha (not her real name) is a 15-year-old girl, and the first-born in her family. Her parents work in the farm.
One day a man named Sok Son came to visit her parents, offering them
a job for Bopha (not her real name) and promising them 100 U.S. dollars
a month. He would provide everything their daughter wanted, he said:
earrings, a necklace.
All Bopha needed to do was to cook and clean the house of a relative in
Phnom Penh and her parents would lead an easy life.
It was not hard to persuade the girl's parents, because two days later, Sok Son got what he wanted. Bopha's parents had agreed to his plan to have their daughter live with his relative in the city, trusting that nothing untoward would happen to her.
Unfortunately, Bopha was raped by Sok Son in a guest house in Phnom Penh. Later, and not unexpectedly, he sold her into prostitution in a brothel in Sihanoukville in Cambodia's southern tip.
Bopha tried to refuse to have sex with clients, but she was tortured—through electric shock and a hot iron—whenever she did. Sok Son even ordered a thug to beat her up, and sometimes she went without food.
Bopha attempted to escape from the brothel but it was surrounded
by an electric fence and thugs who kept watch.
One day, one of her customers noticed that she had many marks on her
skin from the hot iron and beatings. Seeing this, he filed a complaint
with a centre for protection of prostitutes nearby.
Fortunately, the centre, in cooperation with the police, forwarded
this document to the provincial judge, who ordered the three offenders—the brothel owner, the pimp and gangster—arrested.
After finding hard evidence of a crime, the court ordered the brothel
owner to be imprisoned for six years, the pimp seven years, and the gangster five years. It also ordered them to pay Bopha 5,000 U.S dollars, or else
they would receive physical punishment in prison and have to undergo hard
labour while in jail.
Though they have helped put the offenders behind bars, lawyers are not
quite confident the law will be on their side all the time. Their main
concern, they say, is corruption.
"If the brothel's owner pays a bribe to anyone who works in the jail, (they) can be released," says one lawyer.
(Em Chan Makara, 17, is chairperson of the Children's Committee in Phnom
Penh a first-year university student who wants to become a lawyer.)
