Sex slavery or Wage Slavery?

Somaly Mam ran an NGO called Afesip (Agir Pour Les Femmes en Situation Précaire, Helping Women in Danger), a Cambodian organisation that prides itself on helping sex-trafficking victims recover from trauma while learning new trades such as sewing and hairdressing. She has been the celebrated face of anti-human trafficking efforts in Cambodia as a former child sex slave, rubbing shoulders and trading hugs with Hollywood stars such as Susan Sarandon and Meg Ryan. CNN dubbed her a "hero" in 2007. Glamour Magazine made her a "woman of the year" honoree in 2006. The  then-US secretary of state Hillary Clinton visited an Afesip shelter and later spoke about her moving encounter with Long Pross, a former sex slave who said her eye was gouged out by a brothel-keeper.Queen Sofia of Spain has for years promoted Mam’s cause.  New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, has been one of Mam's strongest supporters. Mark Zuckerberg’s former PR guru, Brandee Barker, whom The New York Times recently described as “perhaps the most sought-after image consultant in the startup world,” is a board member for the Somaly Mam Foundation, and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is an advisory board member. Mam has raised millions with a hectic schedule of meetings all over the globe with the good, the great and the super-rich—from the U.N.’s Ban Ki-moon to the pope.  In 2005, she published her autobiography, The Road of Lost Innocence, which became an international best-seller. Mam was one of Time’s 100 most influential people in 2009 and has over 400,000 followers on Twitter.

At the end of May, Newsweek ran a story exposing her falsehoods. Mam was not an orphaned trafficking victim and she coached the girls at her shelters to lie about their past, too. Long Pross, who said her eye had been gouged out by a brothel-keeper, lost her eye to a tumor, verified by her medical records, and was sent to Afesip for vocational training. Meas Ratha, was told by Mam to say she had been trafficked when in fact she was sent to Afesip by an impoverished farming family, desperate to give their daughter and her sister a better start in life.

Srey Mao, 28, and two friends were "rescued" and taken to a shelter run by Afesip. There was just one problem: The women claim they hadn't actually been trafficked. Instead, the women said they were willing sex workers who had been rounded up off the street during a police raid and sent to Afesip. They said they were confined there for months as purported victims of sex trafficking. Srey Mao claimed that she, her friends and a number of other sex workers in the centre were instructed by a woman to tell foreign visitors they had been trafficked.
"I was confined against my will," Srey Mao explained. The person she said instructed her and others to lie was Somaly Mam. Srey Mao said she became a prostitute because she believed it was the best option to support her aging parents and young daughter. Months in the Afesip shelter did not change her mind. She claims that after she arrived at the shelter, she was not given access to anti-retroviral drugs for five days or allowed to see her family. Instead, she was enrolled in a yearlong sewing course, entailing eight hours a day of study or garment work. "I was not happy to be there ... Very often, during our short break for lunch, Afesip staff and sometimes Mam Somaly came to us and told us to tell donors and foreigners who would come to visit shelters that we were victims of human trafficking." Seven months into her stay at the shelter, Srey Mao ran away and returned to life as a prostitute.

In 2011, Mam told an interviewer that there were 80,000 to 100,000 prostitutes in Cambodia, 58 percent of whom were trafficked. In a 2010 Somaly Mam Foundation video, Hollywood actress Lucy Liu solemnly intoned in a voiceover that "the low-end estimate for the number of sex slaves in Cambodia alone is over 40,000". The source for these numbers is unclear, and according to some, wrong.

Sebastien Marot, founder of the nongovernmental organisation Friends International, which works with street children and other vulnerable populations, has lived in Cambodia since 1994. In all his years in the country, he said he has encountered only a handful of what he considers clear-cut cases of sex slavery, despite the lavish funding and massive attention from celebrities that the cause attracts. He explains  “A large number of organizations get sucked into using children to raise funds: making them talk about the abuse they survived in front of a camera, having their picture in a pitiful situation published for everyone to see. In worst cases, the truth is distorted or the stories invented to attract more compassion and money. The impact on the lives of these children is terrible: If they come from an abusive situation, such a process re-traumatizes them and in any case it stigmatizes them forever.”

A study published in 2011 by the UN Inter-Agency Project on Trafficking based on data collected in 2008 stated that the number of sex trafficking victims in Cambodia is 1,058 at most, including 127 children, six of whom were under the age of 13. The majority of these cases involved women who had fallen into debt to their brothels, or prostitutes under the age of 18. These are both abhorrent and illegal, but they are a far cry from the extreme scenarios Mam often invoked - girls put in cages, tortured with electricity, having their eyes gouged out by pimps. "We never encountered any such thing, and we certainly looked for it," the study's author, Thomas Steinfatt, said this week. "We couldn't find any instances of that ... In terms of people tortured, I think they've been watching too many movies."  He is the only researcher to have systematically canvassed Cambodia seeking out brothels and collecting data on the women and girls inside. "Sex trafficking is actually one of the smaller portions of trafficking," he said. "Much more trafficking goes on in labour or domestic work. It's quite literally the 'sexiest' topic, and it's something that really bothers people - which it should, but it's not the largest."

In an interview for Euronews in 2012, Mam said girls as young as 3 are being held in Cambodian brothels. Experts in the field say that is almost unheard-of. Patrick Stayton, who formerly ran the Christian, faith-based International Justice Mission (IJM) in Cambodia, says, “They may have had a supply of younger girls between the age of 14 and 17,” but adds, “We’ve never seen prepubescent girls, or very, very rarely.”

Helen Sworn, the founder of anti-trafficking coalition Chab Dai, noted that other researchers have disputed Steinfatt's findings and methodology, though added that Steinfatt's estimate "was the best available number" before laws introduced in 2008 and 2009 that caused "a significant shift underground of incidents, which was not addressed in the previous research". A draconian anti-human trafficking law was passed by Cambodia's parliament in 2008 and some ramped up police abuses against sex workers.

"Abolitionist" NGOs such as Afesip take the position that sex work is by definition coercive, and that it is impossible to choose to be a prostitute. The term "trafficking" leaves out a whole spectrum of complex choices made by the participants in the sex industry, and often erases women's agency entirely. The majority of sex workers enter the industry due to mitigating circumstances and economic motives which incline them to choosing sex work. The majority of women initially see their work as something temporary, usually a quick solution to economic difficulties. Sex workers has long been criticized and stigmatised by society viewed as immoral and degrading to women yet some including many feminists will argue that sex work is essentially just work, and that it is not necessarily harmful to women. They present a case that under circumstances sex work should be accepted, and sex workers protected and granted the same rights as any other labourer. To sell sex is to sell oneself and that sadly is the situation for every other wage slave.

Adapted from here