Child Sex Workers
Svay Pak is internationally infamous for its collection of shanties, brothels, and karaoke bars that exploit young Vietnamese and Cambodian women, and children as young as five. Despite claims that child prostitution has been shut down in Svay Pak, Dateline NBC has made several trips there in the 2000s and has proved that child prostitution is still rampant in Svay Pak, reports include footage of alleged child prostitutes. The story resulted in an undercover sting and several arrests, but many pimps did not cooperate with undercover cops and the Svay Pak brothels still exist.
While a majority of adult sex workers came to Svay Pak voluntarily, children make up most of the population of sex workers that came to Svay Pak involuntarily. Sold by families or neighbors in severe poverty, kidnapped off the streets, tricked into working in the sex trade, children are the shame as well as financial pride of Svay Pak. Brothels are able to get away with abusing the children and keeping all of their earnings in order to pay for the cost of taking care of them. Children are serviced out to customers for many days at a time for a fee and are usually not given a choice in regards to safe sex. Some child sex workers have reported being gang-raped and mentally abused at the hands of their clients. Those that are lucky enough to escape are in a limbo about what to do next. Many are too ashamed to return home or cannot return home because they have no evidence of nationality (Vietnamese victims). Others see their salvation in marrying the foreigners they had sex with. They write love letters to their clients in hopes that one day they will return and give them social, economic, and physical security.
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Famous quotes containing the words child and/or workers:
“A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In former times and in less complex societies, children could find their way into the adult world by watching workers and perhaps giving them a hand; by lingering at the general store long enough to chat with, and overhear conversations of, adults...; by sharing and participating in the tasks of family and community that were necessary to survival. They were in, and of, the adult world while yet sensing themselves apart as children.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)