She’s 6 years old and pretty, living in the slums of Phnom Penh. Her mother asked her to help the family. She sells her daughter. The mother picks up the monthly salary at the brothel where her daughter is forced to sell her body for sex. Men come to take her. The girl whose body appears younger than 6 years, and has been sold three separate times to different pimps.
Taken involuntarily daily for 4,000 riel = 1 USD each time. She’s told there’s no other way. One day it may become merely a source of income. One day she might buy a pretty barrette with the little sum she sees. One day she may accept this as the only way to survive. Her mother conceives another child. Instead of putting her to work in the kitchen or fields, she puts her to work on the harsh streets of the lustful city.
Cambodia has the most child sex trafficking of all SE Asia. Unfortunately the government and the Russian mafia are in cahoots to fuel this grotesque machine of perversion. Men from all over Asia come with malignant prepositions. With parents from the slum areas eager to survive in seemingly hopeless conditions, they are quick to sell their children as sex slaves for money. We don’t hear about this depravity too often in the U.S., but I inform you with a sinking heart. I had the opportunity to spend time with children at risk for sex trafficking from the slums. In fact, many of their own sibling have already been sold. Their clothes were stained, their hands covered with filth and their heads with lice, but they still laughed, played and sang songs. Thrilled with seeing a picture of themselves, they jumped and grabbed some more new friends and told me in Khmer to “look, look, take another picture!”. It’s not often that they see the shape and features of their faces.
There is hope among all the bleak statistics and backdrops. In a country where child trafficking is rampant, there are glimpses of hope. It really can only take place on a small, inconspicuous scale; the deliverance of their body, soul and mind from the nefarious engine of greed. So it’s one life at a time that things can change and will change. There are stories of children being rescued and healed. Where girls come out of the sex trade and grow into women with sound minds and dignified jobs. I had no idea this was happening. I wonder how the fall of man has reached this depth of atrocity. And although I understand that sin is sin and that this sort of aberration has been occurring for centuries upon centuries, a strong sense of justice rises up in me and says that this is should NOT be! We are designed to be loved and to love with the purest of love that comes from Christ. It shouldn’t take such extreme perversion of our design or use thereof to see that without God’s law of moral rectitude and more importantly without God as our first love, we corrupt our design and drown devastatingly in sin.
