Prostitution in Cambodia 

The children in Gucci shoes 
Nov 20th 2003 | KRONG KOH KONG 
From The Economist print edition


The grisly results of human trafficking

THE United States classifies countries that allow human trafficking into three “tiers”. Cambodia is in tier two, which means pretty nasty. It is unlikely that the teenage prostitutes in the town of Krong Koh Kong in southern Cambodia are aware that bureaucrats in Washington may be concerned for them. Their world is very small: a row of shacks on a dusty road at the outskirts of the town, with red lights outside to advertise their business. The girls' knowledge of the hazards of their trade seems even smaller. 
A Vietnamese girl, aged 17, has lesions on her skin, a symptom of AIDS. She traces them with her fingertips and says they are the result of a disease caused by the local water. She and others who have similar markings use a local traditional medicine to try, without success, to clear them up.
Krong Koh Kong, it has to be said, is at the lower end of the sex trade. But when a number of brothels in Phnom Penh, the capital, were raided after complaints about human trafficking, the sex bosses moved some of their business out into the provinces. Krong Koh Kong, whose respectable business is fishing, seems to be unpoliced, and the porous Thai and Vietnamese borders makes things even worse.
The town attracts custom from a wide area because sex there is cheaper than in Phnom Penh, and very much cheaper than in neighbouring Thailand. The girls, some of them children aged only 14 but looking older in their heavy make-up and fake Gucci sandals, charge the equivalent of $2 or $3, half of which goes to their boss. A girl can make about $25 a week, a relatively big sum in an area of widespread poverty and unemployment. Traffickers seem to have no trouble finding staff, often offered as debt repayment.
It is human trafficking of a most cynical sort. The girls will be discarded when they become too ill to work. During their short working lives many will be spreading AIDS. The United Nations says that in 2001 170,000 people in Cambodia had HIV. About 2.7% of adults were infected.
Some observers say that the United States has been soft with Cambodia over trafficking. Employing young girls in the sex business amounts to slave labour, they claim. Under America's trafficking law, it is argued, Cambodia should be reclassified in tier three—very nasty. Countries in tier three can be punished under American law with sanctions. Politics seems to have played a part here. 
The countries now in tier three, such as North Korea and Myanmar, are already in trouble with America. But some Asian countries thought to be soft on trafficking, among them Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, are anti-terrorist allies of America and as a result may have slipped the noose of sanctions into tier two. In America's most recent human-trafficking report, published in June, Cambodia and Thailand were given an apparent pat on the back. “The governments recognise the problem,” the report mumbled.