Clarification: The headline of this article was updated on July 25 to more accurately reflect the content of the piece, which refers to girls of Vietnamese descent who were victims of sex trafficking in Cambodia. Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what's happening in the world as it unfolds. More Videos Sex trafficking victims in Cambodia speak out She was taken to a hospital, issued a certificate confirming her virginity, and then taken to a hotel room where a she was raped for days.
She was returned home after three nights. Sephak grew up in Svay Pak, a poor fishing village on the outskirts of the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. It's a community that has become notorious as a place to buy child sex. With money-lenders threatening her, Ann took up an offer from a woman who approached her promising big money for her daughter's virginity. But after Sephak's return, her mother began pressuring her to work in a brothel. Ann said she regrets her decision and that if she had known then what she knows now, she would never have sold her daughter.
The CNN Freedom Project first spoke with Sephak in , along with other child trafficking victims, as part of a documentary on sex trafficking in Cambodia. Now a woman, she works alongside other survivors in a factory run by AIM, earning money making bracelets and clothing. Not a lot of stability, but enough," says Sephak.
I really want other people to have the kind of work that I have. A former pastor, he says the organization has so far rescued more than people. Canada's stolen daughters: Sex traffickers target indigenous Canadians. Most of his efforts are focused in Svay Pak. It's a place where the poverty is overwhelming, with many families scraping by on less than a dollar a day. The residents are mostly undocumented Vietnamese migrants, many of whom live in ramshackle houseboats on the Tonle Sap River, eking out a living farming fish.
But Brewster has warned that although children are no longer being sold in brothels here, trafficking is now taking place in hotels, where it is harder to detect, and harder to prevent. The US Department of State's Trafficking in Person's report says Cambodia does not fully meet minimum standards for eliminating trafficking, but notes that the Cambodian government has made significant efforts to fight human trafficking, including increasing the number of trafficking convictions.
