2002-2006 Phnom Penh

[Bear Foxtrot]

Lizard,

Thanks for your help.

But what's wrong with old/ugly girls? It seems to me they would be cheaper and try harder to please, not to mention the experience they bring to the table.

[Globotto]

latest news k11 svay pak is that there are some reports of guys getting busted for pulling **** girls including those at pre-pubescent ages. the fine is $5000 bucks and you won't be allowed back in the country and you may face prosecution in your country of origin.

wsg does not promote sexual activity with girls under the age of 18 and ****philia.

a tell-tale sign of such activity happens when you walk into a house in k11 where flat chested little girls run out pulling you by the arm offering yum yum.

check out the back side of the free phnom penh 3d map for a ad that says sex with children is a crime. more than 500 offenders have been arrested and prosecuted.

[Virgo]

Word from others in the know tell me that Svay Pak is not where you want to go right now after the recent national broadcast of the sick kiddie stuff on NBC/USA. They say the doors are open more but Barangs are absent as everyone is paranoid. Cops are taking money to catch people but its mostly locals right now. Any foriegners around stands out big time at the moment so go at your own risk. (as always).

There are many p4p options in cambodia. Please stay away from any sick kiddie stuff and be careful.

[The Lizard]

Cookie and Alexios,

The short answer: simply forget it.

SP is almost closed and too dangerous for tourists.

At Tuol Kork white westeners are not welcome anymore (they spot you and close the doors).

Bars in Phnom Penh? The girls are old/ugly with an attitude.

My advice: Try to find other countries.

[Cookie49]

Any problems in PP these days? Was there a year ago and had no problems in town and at Svay Pak.

Would appreciate recent experiences.

Thanks

[Bear Foxtrot]

OK, let's get to the point, shall we?

Has anyone heard any of the latest news, or anything about the current situation in Svay Pak or Tuol Kork? Availability, pricing, tourist conditions? Anything?

[Macgoo]

mongers,

perhaps many of you saw the piece on the new york times web site, but if you haven't, you should.

will not be available for more than a few more days, i think! www.nytimes.om

"freeing sex slaves", in cambodia

i will reserve comments. the video and voice over was very well done, great if you have highspeed.

ez

[Plugger]

Mr Z,

Good for you. On reading your post again, I don't know why I jumped to the conclusion she was a bar girl. No offence intended. So she's adapted to the western way of living, no problems? I've always had girlfriends from thailand but their strong sense of family makes it extremely difficult for them to relocate. Good to see you've worked it out. :-)

[Mr Z Man]

Plugger:

I'd love to report otherwise but ours is not the elusive bar girl/expat love affair that made it back home.

She was a Hottie who worked at Thai Farmers bank. I was an expat working for a Fortune 500 firm. I had the patience and the time to make it work, unlike most short timers.

I'm sure there are countless bar girls who have made the transition to the straight life. Thailand is full of girls who hook only because of the lack of education they are able to receive, and the inability to find a decent paying job.

Thailand only educates until the six grade, so unless your family has money you will never get off the merry-go-round of poverty.

Keep looking your hero is out there.

BTW I didn't pay a ransom to mama only a promise that I'd take care of her daughter and love her forever.

[Admin]

Gentlemen,

I've moved the reports regarding the latest discussions of child prostitution into a new section titled "Child Prostitution" in the Opinions section of the Forum.

From now on, please post news reports and your opinions regarding child prostitution in this new section.

Thanks,

Jackson

[Plugger]

Hey Mr Z,

So you married a Thai bar girl huh? All going well? Maybe you can be a prime example to people like Samus Aran who think that it's impossible to end up happy with a Thai girl.

[That Asshole]

That the missionaries would receive kickback from the police while possible, I wouldn't think is a great issue.

All of the missionaries earn the equivalent of western wages and to them a couple of hundred bucks wouldn't matter much. However the continuation of their employment and enviable lifestyle would weigh a lot more.

To a local cop earning $100 a month of course a couple of hundred bucks equal a jackpot (that he can blow in Svay Pak or Tuol Kork naturally).

Let's do some calculations here:

Pay 19 year old girl $50 to say she is 15
Pay $50 for false birth certificate
Pay local cops $100
Pay judge $200
_________________
TOTAL:$400

That's the price of a foreigner's head. Let's take just 5 shots a year, the the figure's still only $2000p.a.

If there are just 10 mission officials sharing this cost then it's still only $200 each in investment per year that yields them $50,000 p.a jobs each!

They got their quota. Upheld the morals in this "barbarian" country. Kicked the ass of some inmoral rotten criminals. Satisfied their donors who are ready to give again the next year even more.

Look back in history: Any guesses where the term "missionary position" comes from? This is not a joke.

It originated from so called religious fanatics who were cast out from their own countries so they went to spread the WORD among other things like their seed, to the "barbarians" in Africa and America. I would be most amazed if this has changed a lot since.

OPEBO:
Wanna do some business? How about making some serious cash? Why don't we set up a charity mission in Cambodia to help local exploited sex-workers, handing out free condoms, advocating the great wonders of westernisation.

Let's call it "Mission Opexander" (from Opebo+Alexander)
We contact all the womens magazines, collect donations in Europe, North America, Australia.

Meanwhile we bust a few asses from among these mongering WSG members and live like kings. Just from three or four successful busts a year we could live very well, drawing a salary of at least $30,000each++. (Can we write off the bribes as tax deduction?)

Sounds like too inmoral? Don't like it?
Then how about another idea, we could set out to uncover the shit (I feel a big smelly rat buried there somewhere), the set-ups, bribes, etc. Let's go sniffing around busting the asses of missionaries.

Only problem with that is that very soon one or both of us would be found one nice morning in the gutters, laying face down in a pool of blood with a headshot.

I believe that one sliced-off head costs around $250 in Bangkok. Given the number of guns around and the general living standards that would somewhere be near $50 in Phnom Penh.

About the young reporters story again: Any figures how much $$ does he get for this? He got published in the New York Times. They don't pay chicken-shit.

In any case the monies he paid for the girls didn't come out of his own lifesavings but from the money received for the "great" article. Plus "he got published in this grand newspaper". His carerer is set up for life. Any comments about "unselfishness"? Doesn't it sound that the girls were a mere utility assisting his carreer? Is he committed to the or to the 'cause' or rather to $$$$, popularity, etc?

Sorry, I just suffer from 'hero-diarrhoea'. Heroes are coming out of my arse at every step. It's quite inconvenient. Hero Superman, hero Spiderman, hero Matrixman, hero Policeman, hero Doctor, hero Fireman, so on and on... One more hero, I cannot cope with. Hero Newspaper Journalist Mister Sir, no,no,no.!

[Opebo]

El Ricardo,

My apologies for doubting your authenticity. But this second installment you just posted clearly shows its all a lie. If the girl were really in such dire straights she wouldn't be worried about her cell phone and jewelry. If true, its all clearly just another stratagem to get money out of this soft-hearted (and sof-headed) foreigner. This girl is a great actor, and this guy is a fool. She'll probably split this 'freedom purchase' price with the owners, and go right back to her lucrative job after the foreigner leaves. They never question how she got a cell phone and jewelry in the first place if she's some kind of slave who has her earnings taken from her do they?

Though of course its also quite possible this 'journalist' is just as much a fake as the typical NGO, and is enjoying the girls like any normal male before writing this twaddle.

Also, rather than cluttering up the board with this kind of junk, maybe you could just post a link?

[El Ricardo]

Hi Everybody,
I appreciate all the comments. While I am not a crusader, I would like to believe I am dealing with sex workers who are doing this by choice and that I am not contrubuting to someones misery. So I'm intrigued by Kristof's actions. Here's yesterday's installment of his saga from the New York Times:

POIPET, Cambodia — Srey Neth and Srey Mom were stunned when I proposed buying their freedom from their brothel owners.

"It's unbelievable," Srey Mom said, smiling with an incandescence that seemed to light the street. "There's no problem with taking pictures and telling my story. I want to tell it. But I'm a little afraid that if my mother sees it, she'll be heartbroken."

After I decided to buy the two teenage prostitutes, as recounted in my column on Saturday, I swore them to secrecy for fear that the brothel owners would spirit them away, rather than let them tell their stories. But the first purchase, of Srey Neth, went smoothly.

[For an explanation on how I chose Srey Neth and Srey Mom read my post in the Kristof Reponds forum.]

I woke up her brothel's owner at dawn, handed over $150, brushed off demands for "interest on the debt" and got a receipt for "$150 for buying a girl's freedom." Then Srey Neth and I fled before the brothel's owner was even out of bed.

But at Srey Mom's brothel, her owner announced that the debt was not $70, as the girl had thought, but $400.

"Where are the books?" I asked. A ledger was produced, and it purported to show that Srey Mom owed the equivalent of $337. But it also revealed that the girls were virtually A.T.M.'s for the brothels, generating large sums of cash that the girls were cheated out of. After some grumpy negotiation, the owner accepted $203 as the price for Srey Mom's freedom. But then Srey Mom told me that she had pawned her cellphone and needed $55 to get it back.

"Forget about your cellphone," I said. "We've got to get out of here."

Srey Mom started crying. I told her that she had to choose her cellphone or her freedom, and she ran back to her tiny room in the brothel and locked the door.

In my last column, I described the sex trafficking in places like Cambodia as a modern form of slavery, and I believe that. But the scene that unfolded next underscored the moral complexity of a world in which some girls are ambivalent about being rescued and not all brothel owners are monsters. Some brothel owners use beatings and locked rooms to enslave their girls, but most use debts and ostensible kindness to manipulate them — and the girls are often so naïve, so stigmatized by everyone else and so broken in spirit that this works.

With Srey Mom sobbing in her room and refusing to be freed without her cellphone, the other prostitutes — her closest friends — began pleading with her to be reasonable. So did the brothel's owner.

"Grab this chance while you can," the owner begged Srey Mom. But the girl would not give in. After half an hour of hysterics about the cellphone, I felt so manipulated that I almost walked out. But I finally caved.

"O.K., O.K., I'll get back your cellphone," I told her through the door. The tears stopped.

"My jewelry, too?" she asked plaintively. "I also pawned some jewelry."

So we went to get back the phone and the jewelry — which were, I think, never the real concern. Srey Mom later explained that her resistance had nothing to do with wanting the telephone and everything to do with last-minute cold feet about whether her family and village would accept her if she returned. The possibility of rejection by her mother was almost as frightening as the idea of finishing her life in the brothel.

On our return with the phone and jewelry, the family of the brothel's owner lighted joss sticks for Srey Mom and prayed for her at a Buddhist altar in the foyer of the brothel. The owner (called "Mother" by the girls) warned Srey Mom against returning to prostitution.

Finally, Srey Mom said goodbye to "Mother," the owner who had enslaved her, cheated her and perhaps even helped infect her with the AIDS virus — yet who had also been kind to her when she was homesick, and who had never forced her to have sex when she was ill. It was a farewell of infinite complexity, yet real tenderness.

So now I have purchased the freedom of two human beings so I can return them to their villages. But will emancipation help them? Will their families and villages accept them? Or will they, like some other girls rescued from sexual servitude, find freedom so unsettling that they slink back to slavery in the brothels? We'll see.


ER

[The Lizard]

Thanx for this report Alexander. It is actually impossible to tell the real age of a Vietnamese girl. They have very slim bodies and to Westeners they look very young . Many of them are of course malnourished. It is not unusual that a 20 or 21 year old Vietnamese girl looks like 14 or 15. Of course they are all illegal in Cambodia and they do not have any form of identification.

Khmer girls do NOT look that young (so here you have to be careful)- a Khmer girl who looks like 15 IS probably 15. But even here you could run into a NGO setup because Khmer have as many as 3 identifications (with different names and ages of course). Therefore it could happen that you get a 19 year old Khmer girl who looks like 19 and you find yourself at the police station (yes, the girl has an ID saying that she is 14). Bingo - you pay - and you pay a lot. Police gets money, NGO's get money (yes, they take bribes) and then they publish your name in the news and make money again. All this shit happen here actually daily and that's the reason why you MUST be extremely careful when getting a girl in Cambodia.