tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68857498181734794842024-03-05T18:37:10.052-08:00The Next Top Beauty Model Of American, Germany and IndonesiaThe show takes the form of a modeling competition whose winners typically receive a contract with a major modeling agency and a cover shoot and fashion photo spread in a fashion magazineAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02736009893839164762noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6885749818173479484.post-83566316578885402632009-01-11T05:02:00.000-08:002011-02-06T13:40:16.330-08:00More on Kristof's battle against the brothels<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjulSvM-Ihq-BpKX7_XR4UazjRfp-KTik8WDHIJOjJjTAUHHbdkK-Qk4xM55cRt6IgCHDYcagdkz2IuoGbGH_XTt1t5nDft6cW2CTAnkiRd3VF83Nwo01Usqp7KlosoxXjxhg3Dlb1X2A4/s1600-h/brothellarge.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjulSvM-Ihq-BpKX7_XR4UazjRfp-KTik8WDHIJOjJjTAUHHbdkK-Qk4xM55cRt6IgCHDYcagdkz2IuoGbGH_XTt1t5nDft6cW2CTAnkiRd3VF83Nwo01Usqp7KlosoxXjxhg3Dlb1X2A4/s320/brothellarge.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5290021700976720082" border="0" /></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:85%;" >Two teenage girls in the room they share in a brothel run by Sav Channa.<br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Photo: Nicholas Kristof/New York Times<br /></span></div><br /><hr size="1" align="left"> <div class="timestamp">January 11, 2009</div> <div class="kicker"><nyt_kicker>Op-Ed Columnist</nyt_kicker></div> <h2><nyt_headline version="1.0" type=" "> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/opinion/11kristof.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink">Striking the Brothels’ Bottom Line </a></nyt_headline></h2> <nyt_byline version="1.0" type=" "> <div class="byline">By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF</div> </nyt_byline> <p>POIPET, Cambodia</p> <p>In trying to figure out how we can defeat sex trafficking, a starting point is to think like a brothel owner.</p> <p>My guide to that has been Sok Khorn, an amiable middle-aged woman who is a longtime brothel owner here in the wild Cambodian town of Poipet. I met her five years ago when she sold me a teenager, Srey Mom, for $203 and then blithely wrote me a receipt confirming that the girl was now my property. At another brothel nearby, I purchased another imprisoned teenager for $150.</p> <p>Astonished that in the 21st century I had bought two human beings, I took them back to their villages and worked with a local aid group to help them start small businesses. I’ve remained close to them over the years, but the results were mixed.</p> <p>The second girl did wonderfully, learning hairdressing and marrying a terrific man. But Srey Mom, it turned out, was addicted to methamphetamine and fled back to the brothel world to feed her craving.</p> <p>I just returned again to Ms. Khorn’s brothel to interview her, and found something remarkable. It had gone broke and closed, like many of the brothels in Poipet. One lesson is that the business model is more vulnerable than it looks. There are ways we can make enslaving girls more risky and less profitable, so that traffickers give up in disgust.</p> <p>For years, Ms. Khorn had been grumbling to me about the brothel — the low margins, the seven-day schedule, difficult customers, grasping policemen and scorn from the community. There was also a personal toll, for her husband had sex with the girls, infuriating her, and the couple eventually divorced bitterly. Ms. Khorn was also troubled that her youngest daughter, now 13, was growing up surrounded by drunken, leering men.</p> <p>Then in the last year, the brothel business became even more challenging amid rising pressure from aid groups, journalists and the United States State Department’s trafficking office. The office issued reports shaming Cambodian leaders and threatened sanctions if they did nothing.</p> <p>Many of the brothels are owned by the police, which complicates matters, but eventually authorities in Cambodia were pressured enough that they ordered a partial crackdown.</p> <p>“They didn’t tell me to close down exactly,” said another Poipet brothel owner whom I’ve also interviewed periodically. “But they said I should keep the front door closed.”</p> <p>About half the brothels in Poipet seem to have gone out of business in the last couple of years. After Ms. Khorn’s brothel closed, her daughter-in-law took four of the prostitutes to staff a new brothel, but it’s doing poorly and she is thinking of starting a rice shop instead. “A store would be more profitable,” grumbled the daughter-in-law, Sav Channa.</p> <p> “The police come almost every day, asking for $5,” she said. “Any time a policeman gets drunk, he comes and asks for money. ... Sometimes I just close up and pretend that this isn’t a brothel. I say that we’re all sisters.”</p> <p>Ms. Channa, who does not seem to be imprisoning anyone against her will, readily acknowledged that some other brothels in Poipet torture girls, enslave them and occasionally beat them to death. She complained that their cruelty gives them a competitive advantage.</p> <p>But brutality has its own drawbacks as a business model, particularly during a crackdown, pimps say. Brothels that imprison and torture girls have to pay for 24-hour guards, and they lose business because they can’t allow customers to take girls out to hotel rooms. Moreover, the Cambodian government has begun prosecuting the most abusive traffickers.</p> <p> “One brothel owner here was actually arrested,” complained another owner in Poipet, indignantly. “After that, I was so scared, I closed the brothel for a while.” </p> <p>To be sure, a new brothel district has opened up on the edge of Poipet — in the guise of “karaoke lounges” employing teenage girls. One of the Mama-sans there offered that while she didn’t have a young virgin girl in stock, she could get me one.</p> <p>Virgin sales are the profit center for many brothels in Asia (partly because they stitch girls up and resell them as virgins several times over), and thus these sales are their economic vulnerability as well. If we want to undermine sex trafficking, the best way is to pressure governments like Cambodia’s to organize sting operations and arrest both buyers and sellers of virgin girls. Cambodia has shown it is willing to take at least some action, and that is one that would strike at the heart of the business model.</p> <p>Sexual slavery is like any other business: raise the operating costs, create a risk of jail, and the human traffickers will quite sensibly shift to some other trade. If the Obama administration treats 21st-century slavery as a top priority, we can push many of the traffickers to quit in disgust and switch to stealing motorcycles instead. </p> <nyt_author_id><div id="authorId"><p>I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/ontheground">On the Ground</a>. Please also join me on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/kristof">Facebook</a>, watch my <a href="http://www.youtube.com/nicholaskristof">YouTube videos</a> and follow me on <a href="http://twitter.com/nytimeskristof">Twitter</a>.<br /></p><p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/opinion/11kristof.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink">View source article</a><br /></p></div></nyt_author_id>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6885749818173479484.post-25596864283206726122009-01-01T12:56:00.000-08:002011-02-06T13:40:16.499-08:00Kristof: The Evil Behind the Smiles<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVl-G5TiV4cv46CLV64AqE1HMEBxYsgrgenHRmwa2iqLlNjok1hWMw9MiY1XopmrPLAhnPrmltO8wgoWJfbXSSm8yRQfZuY-MH4nAslfdESfmQ4f7e5ta0kDMEKpy6PulxlTYtNIUCXBo/s1600-h/Sina+Vann+former+pros.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 190px; height: 306px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVl-G5TiV4cv46CLV64AqE1HMEBxYsgrgenHRmwa2iqLlNjok1hWMw9MiY1XopmrPLAhnPrmltO8wgoWJfbXSSm8yRQfZuY-MH4nAslfdESfmQ4f7e5ta0kDMEKpy6PulxlTYtNIUCXBo/s320/Sina+Vann+former+pros.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5286803939976825634" border="0" /></a><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sina Vann</span><br /></div><div class="timestamp"><br />January 1, 2009</div> <div class="byline">By <nyt_kicker>NY Times Op-Ed Columnist </nyt_kicker><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/nicholasdkristof/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More Articles by Nicholas D. Kristof">NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF</a></div> <nyt_byline version="1.0" type=" "> </nyt_byline> <p>PHNOM PENH, Cambodia</p> <p>Western men who visit red-light districts in poor countries often find themselves surrounded by coquettish teenage girls laughingly tugging them toward the brothels. The men assume that the girls are there voluntarily, and in some cases they are right.</p> <p>But anyone inclined to take the girls’ smiles at face value should talk to Sina Vann, who was once one of those smiling girls.</p> <p>Sina is Vietnamese but was kidnapped at the age of 13 and taken to Cambodia, where she was drugged. She said she woke up naked and bloody on a bed with a white man — she doesn’t know his nationality — who had purchased her virginity.</p> <p>After that, she was locked on the upper floors of a nice hotel and offered to Western men and wealthy Cambodians. She said she was beaten ferociously to force her to smile and act seductive.</p> <p>“My first phrase in Khmer,” the Cambodian language, “was, ‘I want to sleep with you,’ ” she said. “My first phrase in English was” — well, it’s unprintable. </p> <p>Sina mostly followed instructions and smiled alluringly at men because she would have been beaten if men didn’t choose her. But sometimes she was in such pain that she resisted, and then she said she would be dragged down to a torture chamber in the basement.</p> <p>“Many of the brothels have these torture chambers,” she said. “They are underground because then the girls’ screams are muffled.” </p> <p>As in many brothels, the torture of choice was electric shocks. Sina would be tied down, doused in water and then prodded with wires running from the 220-volt wall outlet. The jolt causes intense pain, sometimes evacuation of the bladder and bowel — and even unconsciousness. </p> <p>Shocks fit well into the brothel business model because they cause agonizing pain and terrify the girls without damaging their looks or undermining their market value. </p> <p>After the beatings and shocks, Sina said she would be locked naked in a wooden coffin full of biting ants. The coffin was dark, suffocating and so tight that she could not move her hands up to her face to brush off the ants. Her tears washed the ants out of her eyes.</p> <p>She was locked in the coffin for a day or two at a time, and she said this happened many, many times.</p> <p>Finally, Sina was freed in a police raid, and found herself blinded by the first daylight she had seen in years. The raid was organized by Somaly Mam, a Cambodian woman who herself had been sold into the brothels but managed to escape, educate herself and now heads a foundation fighting forced prostitution. </p> <p>After being freed, Sina began studying and eventually became one of Somaly’s trusted lieutenants. They now work together, in defiance of death threats from brothel owners, to free other girls. To get at Somaly, the brothel owners kidnapped and brutalized her 14-year-old daughter. And six months ago, the daughter of another anti-trafficking activist (my interpreter when I interviewed Sina) went missing.</p> <p>I had heard about torture chambers under the brothels but had never seen one, so a few days ago Sina took me to the red-light district here where she once was imprisoned. A brothel had been torn down, revealing a warren of dungeons underneath. </p> <p>“I was in a room just like those,” she said, pointing. “There must be many girls who died in those rooms.” She grew distressed and added: “I’m cold and afraid. Tonight I won’t sleep.”</p> <p>“Photograph quickly,” she added, and pointed to brothels lining the street. “It’s not safe to stay here long.” </p> <p>Sina and Somaly sustain themselves with a wicked sense of humor. They tease each other mercilessly, with Sina, who is single, mock-scolding Somaly: “At least I had plenty of men until you had to come along and rescue me!”</p> <p>Sex trafficking is truly the 21st century’s version of slavery. One of the differences from 19th-century slavery is that many of these modern slaves will die of AIDS by their late 20s. </p> <p>Whenever I report on sex trafficking, I come away less depressed by the atrocities than inspired by the courage of modern abolitionists like Somaly and Sina. They are risking their lives to help others still locked up in the brothels, and they have the credibility and experience to lead this fight. In my next column, I’ll introduce a girl that Sina is now helping to recover from mind-boggling torture in a brothel — and Sina’s own story gives hope to the girl in a way that an army of psychologists couldn’t.</p> <p>I hope that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will recognize slavery as unfinished business on the foreign policy agenda. The abolitionist cause simply hasn’t been completed as long as 14-year-old girls are being jolted with electric shocks — right now, as you read this — to make them smile before oblivious tourists. </p> <nyt_author_id><div id="authorId"><p>I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/ontheground">On the Ground</a>. Please also join me on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/kristof">Facebook</a>, watch my <a href="http://www.youtube.com/nicholaskristof">YouTube videos</a> and follow me on <a href="http://twitter.com/nytimeskristof">Twitter</a>.<br /></p><p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/opinion/01kristof.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink">View source article</a><br /></p></div></nyt_author_id>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0