Free at Last
In an excerpt from Half the Sky, a pair of Pulitzer-winning journalists describe why liberating girls from brothels is 'the easy part'
By Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
We became slave owners in the twenty-first cenury the old-fashioned way: we paid cash in exchange for two slave girls and a couple of receipts. The girls were then ours to do with as we liked.
Rescuing girls from brothels is the easy part, however. The challenge is keeping them from returning. The stigma that the girls feel in their communities after being freed, coupled with drug dependencies or threats from pimps, often lead them to return to the red-light district. It's enormously dispiriting for well-meaning aid workers who oversee a brothel raid to take the girls back to a shelter and give them food and medical care, only to see the girls climb over the back wall.
Our unusual purchase came about when Nick traveled with Naka Nathaniel, then a New York Times videographer, to an area in northwestern Cambodia notorious for its criminality. Nick and Naka arrived in the town of Poipet and checked into an $8-a-night guesthouse that doubled as a brothel. They focused their interviews on two teenage girls, Srey Neth and Srey Momm, each in a different brothel.
Neth was very pretty, short and light-skinned. She looked fourteen or fifteen, but she thought she was older than that; she had no idea of her actual birth date. A woman pimp brought her to Nick's room, and she sat on the bed, quivering with fear. She had been in the brothel only a month, and Nick would have been her first foreign customer. Nick needed his interpreter present in the room as well, and this puzzled the pimp. Black hair fell over Neth's shoulders and onto her tight pink T-shirt. Neth had plump cheeks, but the rest of her was thin and fragile; thick makeup caked her face in a way that seemed incongruous, as if she were a child who had played with her mother's cosmetics.
After some awkward conversation through the interpreter, as Nick asked Neth about how she had grown up and about her family, she began to calm down. She recounted her story in a dull monotone.
A female cousin had taken Neth from their village, telling the family that Neth would be selling fruit in Poipet. Once in Poipet, Neth was sold to the brothel and closely guarded. After a check by a doctor confirmed that her hymen was intact, the brothel auctioned her virginity to a Thai casino manager, who locked her up in a hotel room for several days and slept with her three times (he later died of AIDS). Now Neth was confined to the guesthouse and was young enough and light-skinned enough to rent for top rates.
"I can walk around in Poipet, but only with a close relative of the owner," Neth explained. "They keep me under close watch."
"So why not escape at night?" Nick asked.
"They would get me back, and something bad would happen. Maybe a beating. I heard that when a group of girls tried to escape, they locked them in the rooms and beat them up."
What about the police? Could the girls go to the police for help?
Neth shrugged uninterestedly. "The police wouldn't help me because they get bribes from the brothel owners," she said in her robotic way.
"Would you want to leave here? If you were set free, what would you do?"
Neth suddenly looked up. "I'd go back home," she said, and she seemed to be gauging whether the question was serious. "Back to my family. I'd like to try to open a little shop to make money."
"Do you really want to leave?" Nick asked. "If I were to buy you from the brothel and take you back to your village, are you absolutely sure that you wouldn't come back to this?"
Neth's listlessness abruptly disappeared. The glaze slipped away from her eyes. "This is a hell," she snorted, speaking with passion for the first time. "You think I want to do this?"
So, quietly and carefully, Nick schemed with Neth to buy her from the brothel owners and take her back to her family. After some dickering, Neth's owner sold her for $150 and gave Nick a receipt.
In a different brothel, we met Momm, a frail girl with oversized eyes who had been pimped for five years and seemed near to cracking from the strain. One moment Momm would laugh and tell jokes, and the next she would dissolve into sobs and rage, but she pleaded to be purchased, freed, and taken back to her home. We negotiated with Momm's owner, who eventually sold her for $203 and filled out the receipt.
We took the girls out of town and back to their families. Neth's home was closer, and we left her money to open a little grocery store in her village. Initially it thrived. American Assistance for Cambodia agreed to look after her and help her. Neth had been away for only six weeks, and her family accepted her story that she had been selling vegetables and welcomed her home without suspicion.
Momm lived all the way across Cambodia, and with every passing mile of our long drive, she became more anxious about whether her family would accept or reject her. It had been five years since she had run away and then been sold into a brothel, and she had had no communication with her family. Momm was bouncing up and down nervously as we finally approached her village. Suddenly she screamed and, although the car was still moving, yanked open the door and leaped out. She hurtled over to a middle-aged woman who was staring wonderingly at the vehicle, and then the woman, Momm's aunt, was screaming as well and they were embracing and crying.
A moment later, it seemed as if everybody in the village was shrieking and running up to Momm. Momm's mother was at her stall in the market a mile away when a child ran up to tell her that Momm had returned. Her mother started sprinting back to the village, tears streaming down her cheeks. She embraced her daughter, who was trying to drop to the ground to beg forgiveness, and they both tumbled down. It was ninety minutes before the shouting died away and the eyes dried, and then there was an impromptu feast. Family members may have suspected that Momm had been trafficked, but they didn't press her when she said vaguely that she had been working in western Cambodia. The family decided that Momm would sell meat in a stall in the market right next to her mother, and Nick left some money to finance the project. American Assistance for Cambodia agreed to monitor Momm and assist her transition, and in the next few days Momm phoned repeatedly with updates.
"We've rented the stall right next to my mom's, and I'll be working there tomorrow," she told us. "Everything is going great. I'll never go back to Poipet."
A week later, an excruciating e-mail arrived from Lor Chandara, our interpreter:
Very bad, bad news. Srey Momm has voluntarily gone back to the Poipet brothel, according to her father. I asked the father if anyone beat or blamed her but he told me that nothing bad had happened to her. She left the village at 8 a.m. on Monday without telling her family. Srey Momm left her phone with the family, and she called them last night to tell them that she is in Poipet.
Momm, like many brothel girls, had become addicted to methamphetamines. Often the brothel owners give girls meth to keep them compliant and dependent. In her village, the craving had overwhelmed her, and she was consumed by the need to go back to the brothel and get some meth.
As soon as she had gotten her fix, Momm wanted to leave the brothel. Bernie Krisher of American Assistance for Cambodia set her up in Phnom Penh twice more, but each time she ran away after a few days, desperate to get back to her meth supply. Momm is by no means a "hard woman"—she's sweet, even a bit cloying. She yearned to leave the brothel behind, but she could not overcome her addiction.