by Lincoln Brown, PJ Media:
There are moments when a range of emotions collide within you to create a situation in which you are rendered incapable of speaking or even thinking. It has not happened often in my life, but I remember the last time it happened. It was in Cambodia.
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One day we arrived at the compound where the girls were housed and rehabilitated. There they are treated for illness, disease, and injuries, and given counseling and job training. Normally, one associates human trafficking with “ladies of the night,” or older teens. I was not ready to see the girls of all ages who had found refuge there. Some were as young as four or five. Little girls. That was a bit too much to handle, I admit. I said to one of the people in charge that surely children so young could not have been sold for sex. She informed me that they had.
At that moment I wanted to cry. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to deck someone. I turned away, sobbing and at the same time shaking with rage.
Later, I met another girl, all of twelve. She had been trafficked for slave labor at an early age. She was too small and too weak to work. Her captors injected her with a substance that destroyed her near-muscular systems. She was then placed on a blanket with a cup to beg. When she was rescued she was given a wheelchair. She died in that wheelchair, decades before her time.
Being a writer, I was taking notes throughout the trip, which I later turned into a book. The book stumbled along on Amazon for a while, but nobody read it so I took it off the site. Toward the end of the trip, we were in Siem Reap, which is the home of Angkor Wat and a very active human trafficking industry. I was told by another member of the organization that if I really wanted something to write about, I should walk the streets of Siem Reap after dark. I did, with my wife and one of our guides following at a distance. The first girl emerged from a doorway. She could not have been more than sixteen or seventeen. She was wearing a cocktail dress and heavy makeup. She looked at me and said, “You be with me tonight?’” I declined and I remember that she laughed as I hurried away. It was one of the saddest sounds I had ever heard. I had gone about ten steps when the second girl appeared. She was not wearing anything special. She looked like she had just come from soccer practice. She may have been anywhere from twelve to fourteen. She didn’t say a word. She just smile sweetly and made a grab for my crotch. By the time I had spun around to make an escape and reached the end of the block, I had seen enough.
How did these girls end up in these situations? In Cambodia, they may be taken. They may be sold by their families, or they may be lured into the trap by the promise of a good-paying job in the city. Once in the hands of the traffickers, their names may be replaced by numbers. They are beaten and abused and often addicted to drugs to keep them dependent on their pimp.
