When she was quite young, the old man came to her village and took her away with promises of reuniting her with her parents. No one cared for the small orphan, and very likely no believed his promises, but no one interfered. She was taken away and became the slave of the old man, whom she was to respectfully call grandfather. He was an inveterate gambler, a wastrel and young Somaly had to work hard carrying morning wash water and doing other tasks to earns coinage to feed "her" grandfather, who never worked. When Somaly became a teenager, and started growing breasts, the old man began touching her and Somaly did all she could to escape his attentions by quickly doing her household duties and then fleeing the tiny hut. One day grandfather sent her to a merchant to buy some oil, but in hindsight she realized that she was to repay her grandfather's gambling debts by giving the merchant her virginity. This was the first rape of many, and she was only about twelve.
She had no one to really turn to, because her "maternal uncle" was trumped by the "grandfather". Her "uncle" who she now calls "father" explained to her that there is much suffering in life, and no matter how much life hurts, one must remain silent. This seems to be strong Khmer philosophy. His advice was, "If you want to stay alive, grow a dam kor tree in front of your house." The dam kor is the silk-cotton tree, but the word, kor, also means mute. To survive, you must remain silent.
When she was about 14, she was married by her grandfather to a soldier in his mid-20s, a surly aggressive man who raped her violently multiple times on their wedding night and every night afterwards when he wasn't fighting. She hated marriage. Marriage put women in a prison. Her husband was particularly violent, slamming her head again and again against the hut structure, gashing her face with a fingernail kept intentionally long, abusing her in any way if the food she prepared wasn't to his liking or anything at all didn't strike him like he wanted. He started taking shots at her with his military rifle, but in all this, she learned that to the Khmer you must not let the fire that is outside come inside your house, and the hearth fire must not be allowed outside. You don't talk about what happens in your household.
When her husband was away, she worked at a clinic to bring in some coins. She worked at night for 30 pounds of rice every month, a high wage. All she wanted was work, she wasn't frightened of the dead, she lived with a husband who was worse. The hospitals were notorious for "killing" people. No one was a proper nurse or a trained doctor; treatments were on trial and error basis and washing hands was not a habit. Treatments were based on traditional belief: young mothers hemorrhaged on the inside and developed fever (puerperal fever) but this was interpreted as a dead person has used the labor to enter the body and perform a dance. If the young mothers survived, custom dictated that they drink a glass of a boy's urine and lay a coal fire under their beds as well as eat a lot of pepper to regain their energy and lighten their skin.
When she was fifteen she got her period for the first time. Another "nurse" explained to her what this meant. Her husband was away fighting but the doctors at the clinic preyed on the young women and there was nothing they could do but submit. Again, though being raped was not her fault, she lived in fear of her husband finding out because in Cambodia, if a married woman has sex with another man, it is believed she should kill herself. Somaly did try. She swallowed a lot of Russian sleeping drops but only woke the next day stunned and bleary.
She only remained married a few months and then her husband no longer returned from fighting. Her grandfather however came for her and took her to Phnom Penh where he sold her into prostitution to feed his gambling habit. The first day when she refused to service a patron, she was raped by the owner's husband and beaten violently with his crutch and then raped by both of the brothel guards. The next day she didn't refuse a patron ... there was just no choice.
Many parents or relatives sell their daughters to a brothel and the price depends on their freshness and beauty, their cleverness and their connection to the seller. Today some girls are kidnapped into prostitution, but that didn't happen so much when Somaly was young. The girls in the brothels were bought on a kind of downpayment and once the girls worked it off, they could go free. Often however parents would continue to take out new debts on their "working girls" keeping their daughters in perpetual servitude. Even if the girls did work off their debt, the word for prostitute in Cambodia is srey kouc, "broken woman", and broken things cannot be mended and nobody wants people to know they have a prostitute in their family. The girl can never return home. Prostitution is their lot for life.
Somaly was often beaten by the customers, beaten by the owner's husband and the guards, put into the punishment room and while tied covered with snakes and left overnight. Cuts and welts were common things. But what Somaly suffered in prostitution and what young girls suffer now is vastly different. Now, girls have nails driven into their heads, girls are beaten with chains and electric cables, and girls are violenced in ways supposedly inconceivable but in ways which are influenced by the popular Chinese films full of torture scenes, movies favored by pimps nowadays.
Nowadays also the girl are taken at much earlier ages because in Cambodia men will pay thousands of dollars to rape a virgin for a week. Always a virgin because sex with a virgin is supposed to give a man strength, to lengthen a man's life span and even lighten his skin. Brothels, to ensure bona fide virgins, even sell girls as young as five and six years old. But after the first week is over, they sew the girl inside (without anesthetic) and quickly sell her again. A virgin is supposed to scream and bleed, and this way the girl will scream and bleed. They do this maybe three or four times. Another reason the virgin market in prostitution has taken off is that people believe that sex with a virgin will protect against illness, or even be a cure for AIDS. The little girls tear much more easily than women, likewise they get AIDS more easily too, but men are to be served; girls are to be obedient and subservient in all things.
After a time, Somaly paid off her debt and, because she didn't know anything else, she continued servicing men as a prostitute. However, she began servicing foreign expats, and eventually married one and moved to Paris. The year in Paris was difficult for both her husband and herself, and after a year they returned to Cambodia, but Somaly returned as a Cambodian married to a foreigner, who had foreign living experiences, was viewed as having improved herself, and indeed she had. She returned matured and having a new sense of confidence, and her heart bled for the girls trapped like she had been in prostitution, and so she began encouraging girls to leave, finding places where they could be trained as seamstresses for $100/mth, and finding medical aid for the girls who were sick and unable to get treatment. Her husband Pierre never complained about the expenses she incurred with her rescue attempts and eventually they opened a tiny home for prostitutes to run to and get shelter. Until that time her home was opened to these girls.
Near her home was a center for brothels called the "Broken Coconut", and "coconut" in Khmer is another word for a woman's secret place. Because of her home's position, she was easily able to help fleeing and desperate girls, but she was also an easy target for the growing power of the prosittution rings, which was quietly supported by many policemen. There were some big-hearted policemen but they were hard to find, and her home was stormed one night, making her flee for her life.
Early in 1996 Somaly and Pierre started a charity to fund a proper center to help prostitutes. They chose the name AFESIP which translates from French as Acting for Women in Distressing Situations, a name that carried no label of prostitution. Getting recognized was a struggle but in August 1996, a big conference on the sexual exploitation of children took place in Sweden, and several journalists wrote about Cambodia. After that, large international agencies seemed more interested in AFESIP and a big UN agency promised funds.
Over time, Somaly expanded the center in size and in skills taught. Her "mother" had joined her as a type of housemother to the prostitutes to love them and nurse them and teach them skills before finding them suitable jobs so more girls could be taken in. While her mother stayed at the center, Somaly could expand her work and she approached the Ministry of Defense and made it clear that the country needed sex education and girls needed to be given something beyond shame and ignorance of their bodies. She explained why it was important to discuss rape, and respect of women, the true circumstances of AIDS, and how it is most easily contracted, and therefore the need for the use of condoms. Since AIDS was epidemic, her proposal was accepted and she began sex education lectures in police stations, military camps and other places.
Over the years (book written in 2008) AFESIP has helped more than 5,000 victims of prostitution to get back on their feet. In Thailand, Laos and Vietnam AFESIP has helped an additional 1,000 victims. But reintegration is a long process. Some girls can be self-sufficient after only 10 months, but others that have been gravely psychologically damaged take months to build up trust and confidence before they can even be taught a skill, and it takes 1 1/2 years to train a woman to take the test for the government's hairdressing certificate. Therefore, AFESIP needs on-going donations, government support, government delegation, police protection, and volunteers to help these girls become confident, self-sufficient women. The prostitution business is worth $500 million/yr, almost as much as the annual budget for the government, so there is much resistance against AFESIP and Somaly herself.
Somaly says that even this many years away from being a prostitute and being repetitively raped day after day, she still suffers. After 15 years she still feels dirty. So she washes like a madwoman, puts cream on and covers herself in eau de toilette to mask the stench that pursues her. At home she has a cupboard full of perfume. She spends money to blot out a smell that only exists in her imagination. And she seeks to purge the stench of prostitution by her undying efforts in saving as many as she can. She is seeking to change the misguided thinking placed in the saying "Don't try to bend the sroleuw tree, don't try to change a whore" based on the belief that all whores are deceitful and dishonest, hard and intractable, when in fact they are often honest girls from the countryside, who have suffered and cannot express their suffering and anger and people interpret their anger and suffering emotions incorrectly. She seeks change.
Somaly has visited many countries as a speaker and advocate for the women of Cambodia, and worldwide, trapped in the machinations of prostitution. In Sweden she was awarded the World Children's Prize for the Rights of the Child. In Germany AFESIP was awarded he Roland Berger Award for Human Dignity. In Washington D.C. she was honored at the Vital Voices 2009 Global Leadership Awards, but no matter the awards and distinctions for her human rights work, dignity lost is hard to recapture. Somaly still works to regain her dignity and the dignity of those she represents.
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