TRACEY SHELTONSex workers wait for customers at a karaoke bar in Toul Kork, Phnom Penh, prior to a nationwide crackdown on brothels this year that has driven prostitutes from organized establishments onto the streets. Written by Cat Barton
Friday, 16 May 2008
Courtesy of Phnom Penh Post at http://www.phnompenhpost.com
A lone, razor-thin girl shivering in the rain underneath a streetlight and a man selling condoms are some of the only remaining reminders of a teeming red light district at the far end of Phnom Penh’s Street 70 that flourished until recently, when a government crackdown put the country’s sex industry under siege.
Country-wide brothel closures and raids on dark parks where working girls and their customers gather are hallmarks of the effort to tackle rampant prostitution in Cambodia ahead of a key assessment next month of the Kingdom’s anti-trafficking efforts by the US State Department.
But advocates say that new legislation enacted in February to curb trafficking and sexual exploitation has really only given authorities a license to rape and rob – evidenced by the spiraling number of reported abuse cases at the hands of police rousting former brothel workers from their perches in parks and on street sides.
“What is happening is that the police are confiscating property – chairs, tables – from outside karaoke bars, they’re taking everyone’s jewelry,” said one source who did not want to be named but who has repeatedly visited public places where prostitutes gathered to monitor the nightly raids by the authorities.
Worse still, allegations and first-hand accounts are piling up that prostitutes are being arrested and some raped before being forced to pay money in exchange for their release, the source said.
At the heart of the problem, advocates say, is a flawed law that equates all commercial sex work with human trafficking, what Cheryl Overs of the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers (APNSW) calls a “conflation of prostitution and trafficking.”
“It assumes that sex work is inherently degrading and therefore that you cannot consent to it – like you can’t consent to slavery – so all sex workers become victims of trafficking,” she told the Post.
Critics of Cambodia’s “Law on the Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation” said it is so broad and open to interpretation by authorities that even those unwittingly associating with sex workers can be arrested for trafficking.
For example, a mototaxi driver carrying a prostitute to work or a bar owner whose establishment is being used as a rendezvous could theoretically be prosecuted and risk having their property seized.
Offering one’s sexual services for money is now also illegal for the first time, whereas in the past only pimping and procurement could be prosecuted.
This zero-sum approach, with its arrests and mass brothel closures, also does little more than drive prostitutes deeper underground – more vulnerable to trafficking and further away from the legion of public health groups who have been instrumental in curbing Cambodia’s HIV/Aids epidemic.
The Ministry of Health’s National Center for HIV/Aids, Dermatology and STD Control has reported a recent 26 percent reduction in the number of women seeking diagnosis and treatment for sexually transmitted infections at their family health clinics.
Implementation of the law is “having serious negative public health consequences and threatens Cambodia’s remarkable success in cutting HIV prevalence from 2.0 percent in 1998 to 0.9 percent in 2007,” said a United Nations, donor and civil society position statement released May 5.
The statement only underscores the infighting caused by the controversial legislation that has hobbled the UN agencies and health NGOs who are meant to be monitoring its implementation.
UNICEF funding and support helped create the legislation but other world body agencies including the UN’s Inter-agency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP) have reservations about how it will be enforced and say that without strict implementation, the legislation does more harm than good.
“At all the agencies, the anti-trafficking wing of one is working against the other – this is more than one hand not knowing what the other is doing, they are actively working against each other,” said Overs.
“The Cambodian government itself mirrors that lack of cohesion at the UN level.” One Cambodian institution that is fully behind the new legislation is the police, according to the force’s head of anti-trafficking, Bith Kim Hong, who dismissed concerns over the law’s impact on the control of HIV/Aids.
“NGOs that work with HIV/Aids think differently from the police,” he told the Post on May 13.
“Stopping [brothels] from existing is better than having brothels … when there are no brothels HIV/Aids cannot spread to other people,” he added.
Kim Hong denied reports from groups like the Women’s Network for Unity (WNU) that large numbers of prostitutes were being rounded up under the law’s soliciting clause, only to emerge from jail stripped of their money and possessions, or showing signs of physical and sexual abuse.
“It is not true police are using this law to arrest and extort money from the suspects. We never arrest prostitutes but rather we save them from brothels,” he said.
“We hand them over to the social ministry to take care of them. It is no problem for [prostitutes] when brothels are closed. They can learn different professions from the ministry and local NGOs.”
However, this support from either the government or NGOs is rarely forthcoming, say groups like the WNU, leaving these women little choice but to continue taking more risks.
“When orderly organized venues are being closed, it becomes a buyers market,” said Overs.
Cambodia’s new trafficking law and the ensuing sex industry crackdown serves as a backdrop to next month’s reassessment of the country’s anti-trafficking efforts by the US with significant amounts of funding at risk should the country be downgraded.
Cambodia in 2006 was elevated from the list’s lowest designation, Tier 3, and has remained on Tier 2 Watch since then. In an interview with the Post on May 8, US Ambassador to Cambodia Joseph Mussomeli said “it’s a very close call” as to whether Cambodia is a Tier 2 country or not.
“The issue is, are they doing this just to keep the Americans off their back or are they doing this because they are concerned about their people.
“My view is at the highest levels of government there is a genuine concern for the people of Cambodia that they should not be trafficked,” he said.
(Additional reporting by Thet Sambath)
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