Yesterday, I told the story of how NY Times reporter, Nicholas Kristof, had a personal encounter with under age girls who had been trafficked. He had the opportunity to buy their freedom. Would he do it? In his words:
“The first purchase, of Srey Neth, went smoothly.
I woke up her brothel’s owner at dawn, handed over $150, brushed off demands for ”interest on the debt” and got a receipt for ”$150 for buying a girl’s freedom.” Then Srey Neth and I fled before the brothel’s owner was even out of bed.
I woke up her brothel’s owner at dawn, handed over $150, brushed off demands for ”interest on the debt” and got a receipt for ”$150 for buying a girl’s freedom.” Then Srey Neth and I fled before the brothel’s owner was even out of bed.
But at Srey Mom’s brothel, her owner announced that the debt was not $70, as the girl had thought, but $400.
”Where are the books?” I asked. A ledger was produced, and it purported to show that Srey Mom owed the equivalent of $337. But it also revealed that the girls were virtually A.T.M.’s for the brothels, generating large sums of cash that the girls were cheated out of. After some grumpy negotiation, the owner accepted $203 as the price for Srey Mom’s freedom.
At the last minute Srey Mom ran into her room and locked the door, crying hysterically. Her friends begged her to go, even the brothel owner pleaded with her to leave. After hours of coercing, she finally came out. She admitted that she was afraid of going back to her village where she would be shamed because of what happened to her. In Kristof’s words, the conclusion of the rescue:
Finally, Srey Mom said goodbye to ”Mother,” the owner who had enslaved her, cheated her and perhaps even helped infect her with the AIDS virus — yet who had also been kind to her when she was homesick, and who had never forced her to have sex when she was ill. It was a farewell of infinite complexity, yet real tenderness.
“So now I have purchased the freedom of two human beings so I can return them to their villages. But will emancipation help them? Will their families and villages accept them? Or will they, like some other girls rescued from sexual servitude, find freedom so unsettling that they slink back to slavery in the brothels? We’ll see.”
So what will the families of these two girls do when they show up at the village? The story continues in the next post.
Read Previous Post
