Over a dinner of Thai food on Thursday night, students presented their experiences as part of a delegation to Cambodia sponsored by the Office of Religious Life from Aug. 26 through Sept. 9, 2011. The students were chosen to participate in the trip via an application process in February 2011.
The delegation met with non-governmental organizations, communities and the U.S. Embassy to discuss the “causes of human trafficking, the rescue and integration of trafficked persons and the welfare of children,” according to the Office of Religious Life’s website.
Vivienne Chen ’14 began the presentation with a summary of Cambodia’s current social and political climate. Elina Sarkisova GS then explained that Cambodia is a “source country” in the world of human trafficking because of its “huge young population ... all looking for work.” Most of the clientele at Cambodian brothels, she added, are native Cambodians.
Meanwhile, the current “destination country” for human trafficking is Malaysia due to its aging population, Sarkisova said.
She explained that women in Malaysia end up not only in sex work but also in domestic work — an industry that has “exploded in Asia” in the past few years.
Cheap and easy access to domestic workers has transformed Malaysia’s middle class, Sarkisova said, as more women have been able to enter the workforce with the availability of domestic help. The price of employing a maid is well worth it for most Malaysians, who typically pay a maid only $100 a month for working seven days a week, 15 hours a day — a tenth of the average Malaysian salary of $1,000 a month.
Many domestic workers begin the process of finding work as “a legitimate thing” through a recruiting agency, Sarkisova said. But administrative costs, as well as the workers’ flights to Malaysia, are paid for by the recruiting agencies, which then encourage families to take away the women’s passports to ensure that they will be forced to pay off the debts.
Meanwhile, Shirley Gao ’13 described the difficulties of prosecuting sex trafficking, explaining that sex slavery tends to take place behind closed doors. Though police have recently been cracking down on traditional brothels, the model has been changing so that sex slavery takes place “behind a facade of a karaoke bar or beer garden,” she said.
“The sex and abuse occurs off premise,” Gao said, noting that it is then “up to the girl to get back home.”
She added that rampant corruption in Cambodia exacerbates the problem of difficult prosecution of such crimes. “A lot of the people who own these businesses are friends with government ... The legal system is shot,” she said.
Much of this corruption is due to a lack of education in Cambodia, Colleen McCullough ’12 explained.
“It’s a huge problem in Cambodia, especially because of the legacy of the Khmer Rouge genocide,” she said, noting that half the judges in Cambodia in 2000 didn’t have law degrees because the more educated population was killed in the genocide. High school graduation rates are also low at 2.7 percent, she said, because teachers are paid “very, very little” and thus often request bribes from their students.
But while Cambodia faces many social problems, Rachael Baitel ’14 said that there is still hope for the country through the “amazing work” put forth by emerging social enterprises and NGOs.
“They have something we really haven’t seen before, which is ‘eat for a cause’, ‘shop for a cause’,” she said.
Baitel also noted the good spirits of the Cambodian people despite their dire situation.
“I was surprised at how optimistic the general population of Cambodia was,” she said.
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