The Unfinished Abolition

By Allison Schwartz

The Oxford dictionary defines a slave as, "a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them", so, why i
s slavery two hundred years ago considered more legitimate than slavery is today? Millions of people around the world, mostly women and children, are sold as sex slaves, and Cambodia is a center of this human rights violation. 

Forced prostitution in Cambodia is a common and disgusting process. When a family needs money, they often sell their daughter to a brothel where she is sold to many men a night and tortured if she doesn't sell or if she resists. 
Nicholas Kristof interviewed a former Cambodian sex slave named Srey Pov who was able to recount her painful experience. She was sold into a brothel by her family at the age of six. “Some 20 customers raped her nightly, she remembers. And the brothel twice stitched her vagina closed so that she could be resold as a virgin.”(Kristof, Nicholas. The Face of Modern Slavery.) She had tried to escape, (which many girls don’t do because they feel worthless and ashamed,) but she as most others failed. She was taken down to be tortured, which is very common of brothels. Her particular brothel used beatings and electric shocks to tame her. They also would put her in an underground cell for up to a week torturing her by locking her up in the darkness naked inside a bucket of sewage with vermin and scorpions.
It is also a popular practice to sell a young girl’s (often under ten's) virginity. They often sew up her vagina afterwards so that they can sell her as a virgin multiple times. Most police are involved with the brothels as customers or owners, making it almost impossible for these atrocities to stop, so most improvements made are slow coming.
According to the U.S. State Department’s estimations, 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders a year (Kristof, Nicholas. Cambodia, Where Sex Traffickers Are King.), and that number is dwarfed by the amount trafficked within a country. Most of these people are female and are in the sex trade, being held against their will. On top of that, these brothels were disease-ridden. in 1998 up to 40% of Cambodians prostitutes had HIV (Jill, Peter S. and Thay Ly, Heng. Women are Silver, Women are Diamonds). HIV has become an epidemic in Cambodia, and a large piece of the problem is that it is given to these hopeless prostitutes who are raped by more men and therefore spread it further. The emotional trauma these girls endure from these gross conditions is irreparable and this flourishing industry must be stopped immediately.

Much of the human trafficking problem is due to the Cambodian attitude towards women. Girls are taught to always be unquestioningly obedient and to never speak up for what they believe in. This statement from the Cambodian government embodies their stance on women’s rights:

"If we send [an] inferior woman,it means we don't give importance to the meeting...They [women] are used to sitting in the back row. If we put them in the front row and ask them to make a speech,take notes and answer questions,I think they would be unable to manage as they have little experience." (Hill, Peter S. and Thay Ly, Heng. Women are Silver, Women are Diamonds) To them, women are puppets who should not be given a voice, so women feel like they have no right to object to the violence they are subjected to. By not standing up to this issue because they don’t feel like they should say anything, they are tricked into stifling their own voices further.

Fortunately, one former sex slave was able to break out of the system and work change it, and her name is Somaly Mam. She wrote an autobiography entitled "The Road of Lost Innocence" telling her terrifying experience as a sex worker and how she cleverly escaped her brothel by cleverly forming relationships with foreigners. She goes on to tell how she began helping girls escape from local brothels and how she slowly turned her operation worldwide by creating her charities, AFESIP and The Somaly Mam Foundation. By turning transforming herself from a slave into one of the most recognized female humanitarians in the world, she has shown that a sex slave is not just a meaningless body, but a human being that could have a tremendous influence on the world if given the opportunity. By just reading her book and donating to her charities (which are lacking in funds) a normal-day Western teen can do their part in changing a problem that otherwise seems untouchable.

As you read this article, countless girls are being raped and tortured in brothels with no easy way out, and not nearly enough people listening to them. According to Nicholas Kristof’s calculations, “at least 10 times as many girls are now trafficked into brothels annually as African slaves were transported to the New World in the peak years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade,”so why is the world currently treating sex trafficking like it’s a fraction less severe? There has to be larger initiatives taken against slavery, which our country claims to have abolished in the nineteenth century.

Allison Schwartz is a sixteen year old New Yorker. She attends Frank McCourt High School in Manhattan as a Sophomore.