Confronting a great evil

Prime Minister should put issue on the agenda for next year's G8 summit

Oct 31 2009

(Posted by CAAI News Media)

What can an individual do when faced by a great evil organized on a global scale? This is the essential question posed by Joy Sumyi Lee in a recent report for the Centre for the Study of Democracy on child sex-trafficking in Cambodia.

Sumyi Lee is a Toronto teacher and dancer who volunteered to join a Cambodian mission organized by the Ratanak Foundation and its founder, Brian McConaghy, a former RCMP forensic scientist. Ratanak sponsors rehabilitation facilities in Cambodia, training for victims of trafficking, and foster care for girls and boys it helps rescue from brothels.

Rahab's House in Svay Pak, a rural slum outside Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh, is "a light in a very dark place," in the words of Sumyi Lee. McConaghy describes Svay Pak as a "dangerous and hostile criminal business community. Its commodity – the children."

Rahab's House was once a notorious brothel. A year ago it was renovated by volunteers from a Vancouver church to become a place where the community finds medical care and where children go for safety. One small pink "cell" with fingerprints still on the walls has been kept as a memorial for a little girl who was raped to death there.

The Canadian team also worked at Daughters Cambodia, a transition life-skill centre. Young women leave the brothels during their off hours and learn skills such as hair dressing. Sumyi Lee led a dance class that brought some joy to blighted lives. Bob Marley's "No Woman, No Cry" was the special song that ended the day with children and teachers laughing and holding hands for a brief time before the girls left to return to their sad duties.

The Centre for the Study of Democracy has written many reports on the global evil of human trafficking, now the third-largest grossing centre of organized crime after drugs and arms. Women and children comprise 88 per cent of all victims and 800,000 people are trafficked across borders annually – a third of those victims come from Southeast Asia.

Yet one cannot grasp what the statistics mean until you read a firsthand report like Sumyi Lee's. It is heartbreaking because she describes a 5-year-old girl "whose happy innocence is so beautiful" living in a garbage field, or an 11-year-old accepted into foster care but with her parents resisting because she is too valuable a commodity. Yet it is hopeful because, in the midst of poverty and depravity, Canadian and Cambodian volunteers could still make abused children smile.

"What can we do as a nation, or as an individual?" asks Sumyi Lee. "Will there be redemption for all this injustice?"

Personal witness, as she has done, is one answer. Supporting organizations like the Ratanak Foundation is another. But there is something we can do as a nation, too.

In 2010, Canada will host the G8 summit in Muskoka. Hosts of such summits have the ability to put issues on the agenda. Then prime minister Jean Chrétien, for example, used his chairmanship at the Kananaskis summit in 2002 to get world leaders to focus on African poverty. Prime Minister Stephen Harper should use this opportunity to place human trafficking first and foremost on the 2010 agenda. It is a global issue. It is an enormous problem, affecting even more individuals than the 19th-century slave trade.

But most of all it is about protecting innocent children and vulnerable women. It is, writes Sumyi Lee quoting Mother Teresa, "doing something beautiful for God."

The reports of Joy Sumyi Lee can be found at www.queensu.ca/csd/