Cambodia kids easy flesh-trade bait

Svay Pak is a brothel village, a cluster of brick and concrete shophouses where immigrant prostitutes from Vietnam offer ‘‘boom-boom’’ — sex — and ‘‘yum-yum’’ — oral sex — for $5 a time in cramped, clammy rooms and makeshift plywood cubicles.

Similar brothel villages can be found all over Cambodia. Many prostitutes are trafficked from Vietnam, but most are ethnic Khmers, the majority race in Cambodia. Recent surveys have estimated more than a third are under 18. ‘‘Many thousands of children are still being abused in Cambodia’s sex industry,’’ said Laurence Gray, regional co-ordinator for development agency World Vision’s programme for children at risk.

World Vision works with some 300 sexually exploited children in Phnom Penh. Nearly 60 per cent are malnourished, 46 per cent have sexually transmitted diseases and 18 per cent have HIV. The mental scars are less quantifiable but no less real.

Dozens of women stand in doorways waving and blowing kisses at customers arriving in the village. Others crowd around foreign men drinking in ramshackle beer bars, sweating in the afternoon sun.

Most of the women are aged 16 to 20. But visitors who have come looking for even younger girls only have to wait. Soon the whispering starts. ‘‘You want a young girl? Very good for you,’’ says ‘‘Luc’’, a 12-year-old Vietnamese boy pimping girls no older than he is.

In curtained-off alcoves in the brothels, customers can sit drinking chilled beer and choose from a selection of underage girls. Many brothels have some for sale. Brothel managers bring a selection of girls in their early teens, telling them to lift their skirts and T-shirts to show prospective clients their bodies.

Sex with a girl aged 10 to 13 costs about $30. Younger girls cost more. A virgin costs a few hundred dollars. Many foreigners who come to Svay Pak prefer younger girls, partly in the hope of avoiding disease.

But disease is everywhere. Up to half of Cambodia’s prostitutes are estimated to be infected with HIV.

Local authorities across the country were told to shut down brothels. The government said the crackdown would end the trafficking of women and the sexual exploitation of children. However, Svay Pak still operates openly, and still sells sex with children. Cambodia’s reputation as a haven for paedophiles is still intact. ‘‘The crackdown has not had a great deal of impact on child prostitution, but I don’t think that was ever its main intention,’’ Gray said.