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Photo of Svay Pak by Ngy Thanh

This post is by Katie Palmer, a recent graduate from the University of Toronto where she earned an MA degree in Geography.  She just returned home from a month-long investigate trip to Southeast Asia to conduct research on the red-light districts of Pattaya, Phnom Penh, and Pakse. (See more photos here.)  Before she begins either her PhD or MJ in 2011, she plans on working for an NGO in the areas of women and development.  In her spare time, she enjoys traveling, rollerblading, going out for dinner with friends, and having coffee with her favourite and inspiring professor!

Sex trafficking and sex tourism are hot news topics these days.  Who doesn’t enjoy reading about the arrests of dirty pimps and perverts and learning about the highly dangerous undercover raids of brothels and nightclubs in red-light districts across the world? It’s like CSI meets INTERPOL in real time. Yet what often does not make international headlines is the aftermath of the arrests and raids. How many of us assume that raids clean up red-light districts and it’s a happily-ever-after kind of fairytale ending?
Let’s turn to the case study example of Svay Pak—a red-light district 11-km outside of Phnom Penh, Cambodia—in an effort to probe the efficacy of raids as the sole solution to sex tourism.

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This article is cross-posted at AWID.org.

A Pageant for Amputees

In 2007, with funding from the government of Norway, Norwegian theater director Morten Traavik arrived in Cambodia with a goal: staging a beauty pageant for girls and women from all over the country who had lost limbs in landmine explosions. With the assistance of the Cambodian Disabled People’s Organization (CDPO), a local NGO, twenty prospective participants were identified among those already taking part in CDPO’s rehabilitation programs. Contestants were selected from each of Cambodia’s provinces, made over with pageant-style clothing and makeup, photographed and entered in a contest to select ‘Miss Landmine Cambodia.’ The winner would receive a custom-made prosthetic limb and some cash.

Billing the project as a combination of “arts and public service,” in which contestants are “fellow artists in a campaign,” Traavik had already staged a similar pageant in landmine-ridden Angola and wanted to carry over “the need for and joy of being seen, appreciated [and] taken seriously” in the Cambodian context [1].

Supporting People with Disabilities

Estimates of the number of people in Cambodia who have lost limbs in landmine explosions vary, with some sources, including the BBC, reporting that at least 40,000 people are chon pika, or amputees. Making basic life tasks accessible, creating suitable, non-exploitative work opportunities and integrating people with disabilities in Cambodia – much like everywhere else in the world – remains a formidable task. Read the rest of this entry →

Global Feminist Profiles highlights feminist leaders all over the world who are creating change and empowering their countrywomen to demand equality.

Image Credit: Mu Sochua National Website, Mu Sochua waves at supporters

I strongly believe in people’s participation and in giving women a fair share of development. This can only happen when the government demonstrates a strong political will to develop and implement policies that create special measures and opportunities for women to gain a fair share of development. Discrimination and violence against women can be addressed when society as a whole values women as human beings and as equal partners. As a woman leader I lead with the strong belief that women bring stability and peace, at home, in their communities and for the nation. I feel most satisfied when the women’s networks move together, create a critical mass and gain political space.

In 2005, Mu Sochua was one of 1,000 women nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and she has received numerous awards for her human rights work.  In 1998, Mu Sochua became a member of her parliament, after having returned in 1989 from 18 years of exile. She was only 1 of two women in power there.

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Wear a short skirt and nothing else matters

A small group of Cambodians recently gathered in Phnom Penh to demand that female students not be permitted to wear short skirts. The Director of Khmer Teachers’ Association, and organizer of the protest, Seang Bunheang, tried to explain his actions

I had the idea to organise the campaign because I want to improve Khmer culture [and retain the culture] that we had many years ago – some Khmer women change their manner by copying other cultures and do things such as wearing short skirts or sexy clothes in schools and public places.

The Deputy Director of the Ministry’s Informal Education System Department and the Secretary of State of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, a man and a woman respectively, also approved of the protest. Secretary San Arun provided the now all but expected correlation between short skirts and rape:

Wearing short skirts and sexy clothes is a reason to cause rape cases to occur because all men, when they see white skin, they feel like having sex with [women].

I audibly sighed after reading this story. It’s not nearly the most offensive, shocking, or violent story I’ve read this week. (In fact it’s pretty tame in comparison to some of the accounts from victims of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests.) It does concern, however, arguably the biggest red herring in the fight for gender equality: the short skirt.

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Cambodia/www.un.org

The Cambodian government is placing a temporary freeze on marriages between Cambodian women and South Korean men. The goal of the policy, announced last weekend, is to block the practice of “matchmakers” or brokers who lure women into paying to be married off to men in South Korea. The ban comes after a Cambodian woman was recently sentenced to 10 years in prison for convincing 25 women to pay her $100 each for arranged marriages with South Korean men.

Cambodia has developed a human trafficking problem of epidemic proportions in recent years, due to its crashing economy, an increase in sex tourism, and a lack of education and employment especially in rural areas. This marriage ban, which officials say they will lift after they establish procedures intended to ensure that South Korean marriages are legitimate, is not a new step in the country’s uphill struggle against trafficking in its various forms. Read the rest of this entry →

The Perpetrators: Sporich, Peeters, Boyajian

Sporich, known as the “Pied Piper of the Pedophiles” by the police for his molestation of an epic 500 boys at summer camps, was the most flagrant violator of all.  Upon his release after 9 years in American prison, he went straight to Cambodia, where he drove through poor towns throwing candy and luring children to his pleasure den of water slides and video games. He is accused with having had sex with three boys aged 9 to 13.

It seems that the U.S. laws requiring the registration of sex offenders has made American neighborhoods safer, but at the expense of other nations. In other words, sexual criminals of America can go find fresh children in disadvantaged countries  to violate with impunity.

The street boys of Cambodia: The next victims of Western sex offenders?

So in fact, no disparaging remark is adequate to describe these dirty old men. Yet, they are not the only ones; they are simply the first to have been caught for international violations in this new law enforcement collaboration between  U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the FBI, and Cambodia’s own police force. Read the rest of this entry →