One day, when I was about ten or eleven I was called into one of the villager’s huts and introduced to an older man who was said to be from the same place as my father. The man said he was my grandfather and would take me to find my family. At first I was happy to go with this man. I thought perhaps he really was my grandfather and he would take me to find the people who loved me. Unfortunately, that was a lie. The man used me as his personal slave and then sent me to be raped to satisfy a debt.
When I was around fifteen or sixteen this man took me to the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, and sold me into a brothel. This was a filthy place: a room with rotting grass pallets and mosquito nets. In the corner there was a bed concealed by sarongs. Shortly after I arrived, a man entered, spoke to the brothel owner, and then went behind the sarongs. I was told to go in there with him. I refused, and the brothel owner hit me on the head. “Yes, or no,” she said, “You will do it.”
So I went behind the sarongs where the man raped me twice. He said he would come back that night. Then another man came and hit me with his belt buckle, then smashed me with his crutch—he’d lost a foot in the war—and raped me. Then the brothel’s two guards did too. Every day was like this. Sometimes a man would come and take one or more of us girls to a room where there would be ten to twenty men and we had to go in with them. If not, we were beaten. Many times we were beaten anyway. We had to do whatever the men wanted, and they were not nice men.
I often resisted, and for that I was punished—which meant being put in a dark cellar with snakes and scorpions. It smelled of sewage. Some girls were said to have died there because they were so terrified. I wasn’t terrified. I cried because I had no parents, because I’d been raped and beaten, because I felt helpless, and because I was hungry and exhausted and had no hope of a way out. That is why I am so determined to help other girls; I know what their lives are like.
My life went on like this for years until I met a French aid worker. I told him I wanted to get out of prostitution, but I had no money and few skills. He said he would help me, and he did. Later we married and he helped me to start my first NGO (non–governmental organization), AFESIP, which translates from French as “Acting for Women in Distressing Situations.” We chose a name that wouldn’t stigmatize the girls who came to live with us. Today, AFESIP Cambodia is a grant partner of the Somaly Mam Foundation.
Our work was very difficult. Funds to help prostitutes didn’t seem to be at the top of anyone’s priority list, so in the early days our work was funded entirely by my husband’s salary as a foreign aid worker. I visited the brothels, bringing condoms and health information, and taking sick girls to clinics. Sometimes they came to live with us in our tiny apartment. Obviously, we couldn’t take in very many girls.
Gradually, we were able to move into a larger home—a house with a garden and a fence around it—and by 1996 we had about a dozen girls living with us. But now the brothel owners knew me and wouldn’t let me in to speak with their girls. Plus I began to receive threats.
Fortunately, good people were also getting to know me. A French journalist made a film about our work. When his film aired in 1998, he brought me to France to speak about it, and as a result we were able to receive some funding from the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid Office and from UNICEF. Eventually, we started receiving awards and recognition from others—The Prince of Asturias Award, CNN Heroes, Glamour, Anderson Cooper 360, and others.
In 2007, two young Americans—Jared Greenberg and Nicholas Lumpp—helped me create a U.S.-based organization to combat sex trafficking—the Somaly Mam Foundation. Today the Somaly Mam Foundation is dedicated to eradicating the trafficking and sexual exploitation of women and girls in Cambodia, and empowering survivors as part of the solution. In 2010, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn included us in their book, Half the Sky. Now many people know of us, and we are very grateful, but our work continues.
The MOON: In your book you’ve described the chilling callousness of parents towards children—beatings as a matter of right; forced labor; even selling children into slavery and prostitution. Granted, these parents are motivated by poverty, yet as you point out, a loving parent might sell herself as a prostitute, rather than her child. Will you please talk about how and why this kind of callousness toward children is accepted and tolerated? Are attitudes changing over time?
Mam: Children are often devalued in countries stricken by poverty because they are seen as a burden: another expense to the family. Female children are especially devalued in cultures that see girls as less capable of growing up to be leaders or earning real money. The Khmer Rouge brought about a complete breakdown of civil society, with a large segment of the population systematically murdered, starved, and traumatized. The Khmer Rouge also intentionally destroyed the country’s infrastructure because they wanted to return Cambodia to an agrarian society. The Cambodian people are still recovering from thirty years of war, catastrophe, living without rule of law, without basic necessities, and in extreme poverty. This kind of trauma takes its toll on the psyche and can result in behaviors such as domestic violence and abuse, even of family members. You can’t destroy a people, a culture, for a generation or more and not expect there to be long-lasting consequences.
Today, child labor of all forms is widespread—due to financial necessity and to the social expectation that children are obligated to support their parents. I think it is also worth remembering how recently the use of physical punishment of students by teachers was accepted in schools in developed countries, and in some homes physical violence against children was an accepted form of parental discipline. Cambodia is still a developing country and has a long way to go in terms of child rights, non-violent conflict resolution, and promotion of the value of women and girls in society.
The MOON: Even short of selling children into slavery, what about the apparently common practice of beating women and children as if by right, whether the woman or child has “done” anything to “deserve” the beating, or not? Is this still common practice?
Mam: I cannot speak for all Cambodians; however I do know that due to the war many Cambodian people were trained to be obedient. It has been a very hierarchical society. Oftentimes, men, too, are obedient to their parents and to other men in positions of authority. When they feel their masculinity is compromised by submitting to other men, it is not uncommon for some of them to order their wives and children around at home and use physical violence if they encounter resistance.
Gender equality has slowly been improving, bit by bit, day by day. However, even today, women and children in Cambodia are often taught to be subordinate. As I write in my book, “There is one law for women: silence before rape and silence after.” When we’re little, we’re taught to be like the silk cotton tree: deaf and dumb. Blind is good, too. Also, Cambodian parents expect their daughters to look after them because that’s their duty.
As a result, girls lack access to education and are more likely to suffer from the effects of poverty and exploitation. In some cases, they are sold and beaten and abused for others’ pleasure. I don’t think there’s any way to justify that, yet because it is so commonplace Cambodians don’t react strongly to it. There is a Cambodian poem that goes: “the lamplight in your house is lighted in your house.” That means people don’t talk to each other about what is happening within their households. If you talk about something shameful, you not only shame yourself, you shame the person who hears you. So people keep quiet.
The MOON: Yes, that troubled me too. Throughout your memoir you describe the personal and cultural silence that you say characterizes Cambodians. Americans are very loud by comparison. Do you think silence was a reaction to the terror of the Pol Pot regime, or does it pre-date it? Now that a generation of children has come to adulthood with no memory of that regime, is Cambodian culture changing?
No comments yet.