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Nary (1) is a template for the patterns of trafficking. Now 17, she has been trafficked or sexually abused five times.
The first time she was only 15. The last time she pressed charges.
Born into a poor and unstable family in Bantay Meanchey, she was the
last of her mother’s children before her father left to marry again,
taking Nary with him.
“My father had lots of mistresses,” remembers Nary, “but
my stepmother was the last. I never saw my mother’s face, only her
photo.”
Her father and stepmother had seven more children
together, often moving house because they did not own any land. When
she was 13, Nary left school and started to look for work. She says it
was her decision.
“I saw my father working so hard as a labourer, but
often we would only have one meal a day. I felt sorry for him so I
stayed home to wash clothes, earning around 20 baht a day.”
She gave everything she earned to her stepmother, with
nothing left over to buy new clothes, return to school or find a better
job. She says she was embarrassed by how they lived.
“Because my stepmother wanted me to work and my father
didn’t, they would argue about me. Other families who had money, they
didn’t argue like that. My stepmother also beat me, and when she told
my father I had gone out at night instead of going to work, he beat me
badly with a stick. That was when I decided to run away.”
Passing through the village was a “windblower”, one of
many migration recruiters who earn their living in Cambodia visiting
poor communities with offers of better work. Some of them have
legitimate paid jobs to offer but many of them make their money feeding
the illegal but lucrative industry of human trafficking.
A child like Nary, unhappy at home, ambitious for a
better life and money for the future, would be extremely vulnerable to
the promises they make.
“I wanted to buy my own land,” Nary says simply. “Then my stepmother would treat me differently.”
This windblower made an illegal border crossing with Nary into
Thailand. Once on the other side, with no papers, no friends and no
Thai language, Nary realised how bad her situation now was.
“She told me she was going to sell me to a business man
in Thailand and I would have to go,” she remembers. “I was so lucky
that a girl stopped her, a girl who had been trafficked by the same
woman years before.”
The girl paid the trafficker’s fee and even gave Nary
enough money to return to Cambodia to her family. Though she was
frightened to use the border crossing, she had no choice this time. But
the border officer was kind to her.
“He asked what I’d been doing in Thailand, and I said,
working. Then he asked would I go back and I said, no, never. He told
me that was sensible, that girls my age were often exploited across the
border. He also let me keep my money, though I saw other children
handing over everything they had saved to the police.”
“So I arrived home with some presents for the house,
some money for my brothers’ and sisters’ school, but my stepmother was
very angry with me. She told me even if I owned a huge villa she would
not stoop so low as to live in it. Once the money had gone, the
beatings started again.”
After only two weeks at home Nary ran away again, this time on her own and heading for Phnom Penh.
“On the road I met a woman who told me she could find me a job there. I
don’t know why I trusted her. I should have known better by now – but
her voice was so soft and comforting.”
The woman took her straight to a brothel. She never saw
her again, but the brothel owner told her she had been sold to him. She
remembers her first client, a Japanese man, and doing as she was told,
stunned and frightened. After that the stories begin to blur – rather
than remembering the men, she remembers the beatings if she said no.
Nary was there a month before she appealed to an NGO
worker, who came to the brothel to distribute condoms, to get her out.
Together they coerced the brothel owner into letting her go. Payment
didn’t work but the threat of police action did – and Nary was on her
way home again.
Things were worse now at home; her family knew what had
happened to Nary and wanted nothing to do with her. Soon she left
again. “This time I just walked,” she said. “I didn’t even know what
direction I was going in.”
A woman gave her a lift to Battambang and left her, in
exchange for payment, at a brothel. She ran away the same night but the
woman, furious that she had been forced to return her windblower money,
came after her, overpowered her and took her to a brothel in another
town, Bovil.
It took her much longer this time to escape; she
submitted to her brothel life, even made friends there. Though she is
not sure how much she was worth in any of these transactions, her
self-worth was by now extremely low.
Seeing a chance to run away, she took it, and returned
home determined that she would not take any risks like that again. She
did not live with her stepmother this time. Instead she took a job in a
karaoke bar to support herself.
“One of the other girls asked me to visit her
grandfather. I thought she was being friendly. But she took me to a
private garden with many men in it and drugged me with wine. Then I was
raped by those men, violently, till I fainted.”
Something had changed for Nary in the morning, after
this final abuse of her trust. She reported the girl and the rapists to
the police, identified them, and asked for shelter. The main offender
was arrested, tried and successfully prosecuted, while she moved into
Rapha House (2), a shelter in Battambang for trafficked or sexually
abused girls.
She has lived there now for one year, learning everything she can so she can avoid such a thing happening to her again.
”I need multiple skills – I can’t depend on just one. So I’m learning
tailoring, hairdressing and agriculture here. Some of the other girls
say 'Why are you so ambitious?' But I’m not, I just want to have some
choices in life.”
Nary has also learned about child rights at the shelter
and is starting to understand properly what she missed out on that made
her so vulnerable to further exploitation – basic rights such as
education, protection and a loving family.
“I realised all the things were missing in my
childhood,” she says. “If my parents had stayed together, I might not
have been through all this.”
(1) Nary’s name has been changed to protect her identity.
(2) Rapha House is operated by ARM International with funding support from World Vision
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