Mothers as Sex Traffickers

Ngao, Ann and Neoung live amid poverty in the Cambodian fishing village of Svay Pak. When faced with a financial crisis, each made the extraordinary decision to sell their adolescent daughter to sex traffickers.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia (CNN)

When a poor family in Cambodia fell afoul of loan sharks, the mother asked her youngest daughter to take a job. But not just any job.

The girl, Kieu, was taken to a hospital and examined by a doctor, who issued her a “certificate of virginity.” She was then delivered to a hotel, where a man raped her for two days.

Kieu was 12 years old.

“I did not know what the job was,” says Kieu, now 14 and living in a safehouse. She says she returned home from the experience “very heartbroken.” But her ordeal was not over.

After the sale of her virginity, her mother had Kieu taken to a brothel where, she says, “they held me like I was in prison.”

She was kept there for three days, raped by three to six men a day. When she returned home, her mother sent her away for stints in two other brothels, including one 400 kilometers away on the Thai border. When she learned her mother was planned to sell her again, this time for a six-month stretch, she realized she needed to flee her home.

“Selling my daughter was heartbreaking, but what can I say?” says Kieu’s mother, Neoung, in an interview with a CNN crew that traveled to Phnom Penh to hear her story.

Like other local mothers CNN spoke to, she blames poverty for her decision to sell her daughter, saying a financial crisis drove her into the clutches of the traffickers who make their livelihoods preying on Cambodian children.

“It was because of the debt, that’s why I had to sell her,” she says. “I don’t know what to do now, because we cannot move back to the past.”

It is this aspect of Cambodia’s appalling child sex trade that Don Brewster, a 59-year-old American resident of the neighborhood, finds most difficult to countenance.

“I can’t imagine what it feels like to have your mother sell you, to have your mother waiting in the car while she gets money for you to be raped,” he says. “It’s not that she was stolen from her mother — her mother gave the keys to the people to rape her.”

Sephak’s mother Ann (left), and Kieu’s mother Neoung, are cousins and live nearby each other. Like many mothers in Svay Pak, when times were tough for their families financially, they saw selling their daughters’ virginity as a way to make money. Both say they now regret the decision.

Brewster, a former pastor, moved from California to Cambodia with wife Bridget in 2009, after a harrowing investigative mission trip to the neighborhood where Kieu grew up — Svay Pak, the epicenter of child trafficking in the Southeast Asian nation.

“Svay Pak is known around the world as a place where pedophiles come to get little girls,” says Brewster, whose organization, Agape International Missions (AIM), has girls as young as four in its care, rescued from traffickers and undergoing rehabilitation in its safehouses.

In recent decades, he says, this impoverished fishing village – where a daughter’s virginity is too often seen as a valuable asset for the family – has become a notorious child sex hotspot

“When we came here three years ago and began to live here, 100% of the kids between 8 and 12 were being trafficked,” says Brewster. The local sex industry sweeps up both children from the neighborhood — sold, like Kieu, by their parents – as well as children trafficked in from the countryside, or across the border from Vietnam. “We didn’t believe it until we saw vanload after vanload of kids.”

Global center for pedophiles

Weak law enforcement, corruption, grinding poverty and the fractured social institutions left by the country’s turbulent recent history have helped earn Cambodia an unwelcome reputation for child trafficking, say experts.

UNICEF estimates that children account for a third of the 40,000-100,000 people in the country’s sex industry.

Svay Pak, a dusty shantytown on the outskirts of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, is at the heart of this exploitative trade.

As one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in one of Asia’s poorest countries – nearly half the population lives on less than $2 per day — the poverty in the settlement is overwhelming. The residents are mostly undocumented Vietnamese migrants, many of whom live in ramshackle houseboats on the murky Tonle Sap River, eking out a living farming fish in nets tethered to their homes.

Svay Pak, an impoverished neighborhood on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, is the epicenter of Cambodia’s child sex trade. Many of its residents are undocumented Vietnamese migrants, living in a community of ramshackle houseboats connected by rickety walkways.

Most residents here are fish farmers. Beneath the platform on which the ducks are resting is a net teeming with fish, which will be fattened up to maturity over the course of months to provide what is often the family’s sole source of income.

It’s a precarious existence. The river is fickle, the tarp-covered houseboats fragile. Most families here scrape by on less than a dollar a day, leaving no safety net for when things go wrong – such as when Kieu’s father fell seriously ill with tuberculosis, too sick to maintain the nets that contained their livelihood. The family fell behind on repayments of a debt.

In desperation, Kieu’s mother, Neoung, sold her virginity to a Cambodian man of “maybe more than 50,” who had three children of his own, Kieu says. The transaction netted the family only $500, more than the $200 they had initially borrowed but a lot less than the thousands of dollars they now owed a loan shark.

So Neoung sent her daughter to a brothel to earn more.

“They told me when the client is there, I have to wear short shorts and a skimpy top,” says Kieu. “But I didn’t want to wear them and then I got blamed.” Her clients were Thai and Cambodian men, who, she says, knew she was very young.

Don Brewster, a former pastor from California, is the founder and director of Agape International Missions, an organization dedicated to rescuing and rehabilitating the victims of child trafficking in Cambodia and smashing the networks that exploit them. He moved to Cambodia with his wife in 2009 after a harrowing investigative mission trip to the neighborhood.

“When they sleep with me, they feel very happy,” she says. “But for me, I feel very bad.”

The men who abuse the children of Svay Pak fit a number of profiles. They include pedophile sex tourists, who actively seek out sex with prepubescent children, and more opportunistic “situational” offenders, who take advantage of opportunities in brothels to have sex with adolescents.

Sex tourists tend to hail from affluent countries, including the West, South Korea, Japan and China, but research suggests Cambodian men remain the main exploiters of child prostitutes in their country.

Mark Capaldi is a senior researcher for Ecpat International, an organization committed to combating the sexual exploitation of children.

“In most cases when we talk about child sexual exploitation, it’s taking place within the adult sex industry,” says Capaldi. “We tend to often hear reports in the media about pedophilia, exploitation of very young children. But the majority of sexual exploitation of children is of adolescents, and that’s taking place in commercial sex venues.”

The abusers would often be local, situational offenders, he says. Research suggests some of the Asian perpetrators are “virginity seekers,” for whom health-related beliefs around the supposedly restorative or protective qualities of virgins factor into their interest in child sex.

Whatever the profile of the perpetrator, the abuse they inflict on their victims, both girls and boys, is horrific. Trafficked children in Cambodia have been subjected to rape by multiple offenders, filmed performing sex acts and left with physical injuries — not to mention psychological trauma — from their ordeals, according to research.

In recent years, various crackdowns in Svay Pak have dented the trade, but also pushed it underground. Today, Brewster says, there are more than a dozen karaoke bars operating as brothels along the road to the neighborhood, where two years ago there was none. Even today, he estimates a majority of girls in Svay Park are being trafficked.

Virgins for sale

Kieu’s relative, Sephak, who lives nearby, is another survivor. (CNN is naming the victims in this case at the request of the girls themselves, as they want to speak out against the practice of child sex trafficking.)

Sephak was 13 when she was taken to a hospital, issued a certificate confirming her virginity, and delivered to a Chinese man in a Phnom Penh hotel room. She was returned after three nights. Sephak says her mother was paid $800.

“When I had sex with him, I felt empty inside. I hurt and I felt very weak,” she says. “It was very difficult. I thought about why I was doing this and why my mom did this to me.” After her return, her mother began pressuring her daughter to work in a brothel.

Toha listens to her mother explain how she came to sell her to sex traffickers. She no longer lives with her family, opting instead to live in a residence for trafficking survivors run by Brewster’s organization — but still provides her family some financial support from her new job.

Not far away from Sephak’s family home, connected to the shore via a haphazard walkway of planks that dip beneath the water with each footfall, is the houseboat where Toha grew up.

The second of eight children, none of whom attend school, Toha was sold for sex by her mother when she was 14. The transaction followed the same routine: medical certificate, hotel, rape.

About two weeks after she returned to Svay Pak, she says, the man who had bought her virginity began calling, requesting to see her again. Her mother urged her to go. The pressure drove her to despair.

“I went to the bathroom and cut my arms. I cut my wrists because I wanted to kill myself,” Toha says. A friend broke down the door to the bathroom and came to her aid.

Mothers as sex traffickers

CNN met with the mothers of Kieu, Sephak and Toha in Svay Pak to hear their accounts of why they chose to expose their daughters to sexual exploitation.

Kieu’s mother, Neoung, had come to Svay Pak from the south of the country in search of a better life when Kieu was just a baby. But life in Svay Pak, she would learn, wasn’t easy.

When her husband’s tuberculosis rendered him too sick to properly maintain the nets on the family’s fish pond, the family took on a $200 loan at extortionate rates from a loan shark. It has now ballooned to more than $9,000. “The debt that my husband and I have is too big, we can’t pay it off,” she says. “What can you do in a situation like this?”

“Virginity selling” was widespread in the community, and Neoung saw it as a legitimate option to make some income. “They think it is normal,” she says. “I told her, ‘Kieu, your dad is sick and can’t work… Do you agree to do that job to contribute to your parents?'”

“I know that I did wrong so I feel regret about it, but what can I do?” she says. “We cannot move back to the past.”

But she adds she would never do it again.

Sephak’s mother, Ann, has a similar story. Ann moved to Svay Pak when her father came to work as a fish farmer. She and her husband have serious health problems.

“We are very poor, so I must work hard,” she says. “It’s still not enough to live by and we’re sick all the time.”

The family fell on hard times. When a storm roared through the region, their house was badly damaged, their fish got away, and they could no longer afford to eat. In crisis, the family took out a loan that eventually spiraled to about $6000 in debt, she says.

With money-lenders coming to her home and threatening her, Ann made the decision to take up an offer from a woman who approached her promising big money for her daughter’s virginity.

“I saw other people doing it and I didn’t think it through,” she says. “If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t do that to my daughter.”

On her houseboat, as squalls of rain lash the river, Toha’s mother Ngao sits barefoot before the television taking pride of place in the main living area, and expresses similar regrets. On the wall hangs a row of digitally enhanced portraits of her husband and eight children. They are dressed in smart suits and dresses, superimposed before an array of fantasy backdrops: an expensive motorcycle, a tropical beach, an American-style McMansion.

Life with so many children is hard, she says, so she asked her daughter to go with the men.

She would not do the same again, she says, as she now has access to better support; Agape International Missions offers interest-free loan refinancing to get families out of the debt trap, and factory jobs for rescued daughters and their mothers.

The news of Ngao’s betrayal of her daughter has drawn mixed responses from others in the neighborhood, she says. Some mock her for offering up her daughter, others sympathize with her plight. Some see nothing wrong with she did at all.

“Some people say ‘It’s OK — just bring your daughter (to the traffickers) so you can pay off the debt and feel better,'” says Ngao.

Toha’s mother Ngao says she sold her second daughter to sex traffickers to try to make ends meet for the rest of the family. She has eight children.

A new future

Not long after her suicide attempt, Toha was sent to a brothel in southern Cambodia. She endured more than 20 days there, before she managed to get access to a phone, and called a friend. She told the friend to contact Brewster’s group, who arranged for a raid on the establishment.

Although children can be found in many brothels across Cambodia — a 2009 survey of 80 Cambodian commercial sex premises found three-quarters offering children for sex – raids to free them are infrequent.

The country’s child protection infrastructure is weak, with government institutions riven with corruption. Cambodia’s anti-trafficking law does not even permit police to conduct undercover surveillance on suspected traffickers. General Pol Phie They, the head of Cambodia’s anti-trafficking taskforce set up in 2007 to address the issue, says this puts his unit at a disadvantage against traffickers.

“We are still limited in prosecuting these violations because first, we lack the expertise and second, we lack the technical equipment,” he says. “Sometimes, we see a violation but we can’t collect the evidence we need to prosecute the offender.”

He admits that police corruption in his country, ranked 160 of 175 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, is hampering efforts to tackle the trade in Svay Pak. “Police in that area probably do have connections with the brothel owners,” he concedes.

Toha’s nightmare is now over. She earns a steady income, weaving bracelets that are sold in American stores, while she studies for her future. Her dream is to become a social worker, helping other girls who have been through the same ordeal.

Brewster believes that corruption was to blame for nearly thwarting Toha’s rescue. In October 2012, after Toha’s call for help, AIM formulated plans with another organization to rescue the teen, and involved police.

“We get a warrant to shut the place down,” recalls Brewster. “Fifteen minutes later, Toha calls and says, ‘I don’t know what happened, the police just came with the owner and took us to a new place. I’m locked inside and don’t know where I am.'”

Fortunately the rescue team were able to establish Toha’s new location, and she and other victims were freed and the brothel managers arrested – although not before the owners fled to Vietnam.

Toha’s testimony against the brothel managers, however, resulted in their prosecutions.

Last month, at the Phnom Penh Municipal Courthouse, husband and wife Heng Vy and Nguyeng Thi Hong were found guilty of procuring prostitution and sentenced to three years in jail. Both were ordered to pay $1,250 to the court, $5,000 to Toha, and smaller sums to three other victims.

Brewster was in court to watch the sentencing; a small victory in the context of Cambodia’s child trafficking problem, but a victory nonetheless.

“Toha’s an amazingly brave girl,” he says on the courthouse steps, shortly after the brothel managers were led down to the cells.

“Getting a telephone when she’s trapped in a brothel to call for help, to saying she would be a witness in front of the police…. She stood up and now people are going to pay the price and girls will be protected. What it will do is bring more Tohas, more girls who are willing to speak, places shut down, bad guys put away.”

Like the other victims, Toha now lives in an AIM safehouse, attending school and supporting herself by weaving bracelets, which are sold in stores in the West as a way of providing a livelihood to formerly trafficked children.

In the eyes of the community, having a job has helped restore to the girls some of the dignity that was stripped from them by having been sold into trafficking, says Brewster.

It has also given them independence from their families — and with that, the opportunity to build for themselves a better reality than the one that was thrust on them. Now Sephak has plans to become a teacher, Kieu a hairdresser.

For her part, Toha still has contact with her mother – even providing financial support to the family through her earnings – but has become self-reliant. She wants to be a social worker, she says, helping girls who have endured the same hell she has.

“(Toha)’s earning a good living and she has a dream beyond that, you know, to become a counselor and to be able to help other girls,” says Brewster. “You see the transformation that’s happened to her.”

International Adoption: Saving Orphans or Human Trafficking?

A Cambodian orphanage in 2010.

By Kevin Voigt, CNN

Editor’s note: In this series, CNN investigates international adoption, hearing from families, children and key experts on its decline, and whether the trend could — or should — be reversed.

(CNN) — Srey Powers’ earliest memories in Cambodia are “waking up each morning, climbing trees to forage for fruit and berries with my cousins, and sitting around a fire each night with the one meal provided,” the 19-year-old said.

Born in a refugee camp, Powers remembers traveling at age 6 for two days by moped, car and foot “only to be left at a building with many infants and toddlers and strange adults,” she said.

At the orphanage, she met her new American family — Claudia and Patrick Powers from Long Island, New York.

“From day one, I had a bond with my mother. Our first language was through playing soccer,” recalled Powers, who was named most valuable player after leading her high school to the 2010 girls soccer state championship.

Powers was adopted from Cambodia in 1999.

Two years later, the U.S. closed Cambodia to adoptions due to allegations of corruption.

The U.S. adoption story of another 19-year-old is different.

“When I was 13, I was sold,” said Tarikuwa Lemma, who grew up in Ethiopia.

She and her two sisters were adopted by an Arizona family who were told Lemma’s parents died of AIDS.

“The truth was that our mother had died as a result of complications during childbirth, and our father was alive and well,” said Lemma.

Tarikuwa Lemma thought she was being sent to the U.S. for a home study program.

Lemma’s family was scammed by a man who said the girls were being sent to the United States on a study program, she said. Only when the sisters arrived did they realize their legal rights had been signed away to new parents.

“I wanted to escape from the people I felt had kidnapped us from our homeland, our culture and our family,” said Lemma, who hopped from three different U.S. adoptive homes before becoming independent after turning 18. “My sisters and I had a father, a brother and older sisters, plus a large extended family that cared for us and loved us. We were middle class by Ethiopian standards, not poor.”

These tales paint the divide on which, experts say, the legal and ethical debate on international adoption rests: Do the risks of abuse in a minority of cases outweigh the larger good that most adoptions provide?

Healing or ‘hostage taking’?

As international adoption becomes more difficult, a growing number of voices in the U.S., Australia and elsewhere are pushing to reduce restrictions that limit adopting from abroad.

“In every human endeavor, there is a chance for abuse,” said Elizabeth Bartholet, director of the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School, who adopted two children from Peru in the 1980s.

“But if a plane goes down, they don’t ground the whole airline industry … the only institution I can think of that when there’s a problem, they shut it down, is international adoption.”

Critics argue the hunger to adopt children from developing nations helps feed nefarious practices, as families are often deceived or coerced into giving their children up for adoption.

“The same story happens again in country after country,” said David Smolin, director of the center for Children, Law and Ethics at Samford University.

International adoption: I was stolen from my family

Smolin became a legal expert on international adoption issues after he and his wife adopted two daughters from India in 1998 only to discover that the girls were stolen from their mother.

Smolin, along with many other experts and organizations — including UNICEF and the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption — believe that orphans being adopted from abroad should be a last-case scenario, with more emphasis placed on helping keep children in their home country, such as providing day care, foster care, better orphanages and more domestic adoption.

Asked whether abuse in a minority of adoption cases should result in the closure of entire countries, Smolin said: “That’s a false choice. I don’t appreciate our family or my daughters’ family in India being used as collateral damage. That’s like hostage-taking.”

Srey Powers, adopted from Cambodia when she was six years old, visits her birth sister’s village in 2010.

International adoption ‘Stuck’

Adoption advocates argue the current system is holding children hostage, that developing in-country programs are at least a generation away — time that the millions currently languishing in orphanages can ill afford.

“The de facto result (of in-country preference) is they would prefer to have the children in institutional life rather than intercountry adoption,” Bartholet said. “The results are more developmental problems, more kids on the street and more cost to the government to institutionalize these kids.”

Until the global decline of transnational adoption in 2004, “40,000 kids a year were getting really good homes and moving from devastating circumstances,” according to Bartholet. “That’s an amazing social program that changes people at no cost to the home country. To shut that down is tragic.”

Read more: The decline of international adoption

Craig Juntunen, a former quarterback in the Canadian Football League and an entrepreneur who retired at age 43, toured a Haiti orphanage in 2006.

The experience changed his life, as he watched children “climbing over each other” to get a hug.

Later that year, he and his wife adopted three children from Haiti.

“Looking into their eyes when they first came, we were filled with a happiness we had never felt before,” said Juntunen, who lives in Scottsdale, Arizona. “But, I was constantly reminded of how kids living in institutions, deprived of such simple things as human contact, are robbed of the opportunity to grow into happy, healthy people.”

He wrote about his experience in a book, “Both Ends Burning,” which is now the name of the international adoption advocacy group he founded.

The group produced a documentary, “Stuck,” documenting the travails and successes of people attempting to adopt in Vietnam, Ethiopia and Haiti. In each case, children matched for adoption continue to spend years in institutions while adoption requests move at glacial speeds across two countries.

Juntunen’s group took the film on the road, showing it in cineplexes, film festivals and churches across 60 cities in 78 days, culminating in an “empty stroller march” on Capitol Hill in Washington.

Craig Juntunen with his wife Kathi, and their children (from left) Espie, Amelec, and Quinn.

A goal of Juntunen’s group is to raise international adoption in the U.S. to 50,000 children a year and cut the average time to approve adoptions to nine months.

In 2011, fewer than 10,000 overseas children were adopted in the U.S., with an average wait time of three years.

“We have to create the social and political will to deal with these things,” he said.

The boom-bust cycle

One country closes, and another country becomes this popular hotspot
Kathryn Joyce, author of “The Child Catchers”

To debunk the idea that corruption is the exception in the current international adoption systems, critics point to Guatemala, which was shut down in 2007 for adoption after allegations of families being coerced and children kidnapped to feed U.S. demand.

Before Guatemala closed to U.S. adoptions, the ratio of children adopted hit one per every 100 live births, according to the Adoption Council — more than double the rate in Latvia, the next-highest nation.

Two years later, the number of foreign adoptions from Guatemala dropped 90%.

As Guatemala closed, adoptions in Ethiopia — now the second-largest supplier of orphans to American families — skyrocketed from fewer than 900 in 2003 to 4,564 in 2009.

“International adoption tends to work in this boom-bust cycle … one country closes, and another country becomes this popular hotspot,” said Kathryn Joyce, author of “The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption.”

Many adoption agencies went from Guatemala to Ethiopia where “the number of agencies leaped from five to 50 in a few short years,” said Joyce, who traveled to Ethiopia while researching her book.

Read more: Overseas adoptions rise for U.S. black children

Brokers who source children for agencies can earn as much as $5,000 per child — “five times the amount they might expect to earn a year,” she said. “The influence of all this U.S. money can be distorting.”

Born in Liberia, Cynthia Newton, left, and her brother, James, say the Pledge of Allegiance during their 2011 citizenship ceremony.

Whole economies can emerge when international adoption blooms in a developing nation. Employment from agencies, new guesthouses and hotels for the influx of prospective parents, and even a rise in “searchers” — people paid to investigate the birth origins of a child like Lemma when U.S. families begin to doubt the stories agencies provide.

“Adoption is a business, there is no question, sadly,” said Susan Soonkeum Cox, vice president of policy and external affairs at Holt International, a nonprofit Christian adoption agency based in the U.S. “Many people got into this because it’s an opportunity to help (orphans), but for other people it was a lucrative business opportunity. You could see this in the explosion of adoption agencies and practitioners.

“There are so many cases of corruption … as an adoption agency, no one is more appalled, because we all get stuck with it and have our reputation smeared.”

Haiti earthquake and adoption theology

The international adoption debate played out on the world stage in the aftermath of the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake, which killed 200,000, when a group of U.S. Christian missionaries were accused of kidnapping “orphans.”

Laura Silsby led a group of 10 missionaries from Idaho that was stopped at the Dominican Republic border as they tried to cross the border with 33 children without proper legal documentation.

Silsby originally claimed the children were orphaned or abandoned, but the Haitian government and the orphans’ charity SOS Children later found that all had at least one living parent.

Laura Silsby, the head of New Life Children’s Refuge, arrives for a Port-au-Prince court hearing in February 2010 in Haiti.

Charges against all but Silsby were dropped; Silsby was jailed for four months before being tried on charges of arranging illegal travel by a Haitian court and released on time served.

Some parents told CNN they placed their children in Silsby’s care because that was the only way they knew to ensure a better quality of life for them.

Silsby’s group, New Life Children’s Refuge, said it was going to house the children in a converted hotel in the Dominican Republic and later move them to an orphanage.

According to the itinerary of Silsby’s mission, part of the group’s plan, in addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, was for the planned orphanage to “equip each child with a solid education and vocational skills as well as opportunities for adoption into a loving Christian family.”

While the incident — which some labeled “kidnapping for Jesus” — painted a dark picture of good intentions for international adoption advocates, the Haiti earthquake also offered a victory when in April 2010, the Obama administration granted “humanitarian parole” to speed up U.S. adoptions of Haitian children already in progress.

By August of that year, some 1,500 Haitian orphans joined U.S. families.

Can the system be fixed?

Smolin of Samford University says the problem with the current international adoption system comes down to one issue: money.

“I’m not a proponent of shutting down intercountry adoption,” Smolin said. But when a large amount of cash comes to developing countries with weak governments, “it reproduces systematic problems over and over again.”

Smolin wants to see limits on the amount of money and number of agencies that can operate in a given country.

Bartholet of Harvard says limiting agencies will place more control in weak governments of developing countries.

“If you shut down private intermediaries, you shut down international adoption,” she said.

Children play at Amani Baby Cottage, an orphanage in Uganda.

Juntunen’s group wants a U.S.-led effort to help developing countries with technology and training that will improve records — such as the creation of accurate birth certificates — and faster adoption procedures.

“I believe we have to start bringing nations together to talk about this,” he said.

Tarikuwa Lemma, who seven years ago was taken from her mother in Ethiopia, is writing a book about her experiences as she’s about to start college.

“I am fighting to make sure that first families and adoptive families know the truth about the possibilities of fraud and human trafficking in adoption,” she said.

Meanwhile, Srey Powers is a sophomore studying accounting at State University of New York at Oneonta. While visiting Cambodia three years ago, she found her grandmother, who spoke of the difficult choice to give Srey up for adoption.

At one point, her grandmother turned to her adoptive mother and asked in a harsh tone if she had her “working in servitude, farming the fields.” Her Cambodian grandmother assumed Powers’ suntan was from working outside, not playing soccer.

“Watching my mother’s attempt to put my (grandmother) at ease, I had a new level of gratitude for her, my father, my siblings and my life in America,” she said.

Nearly 3,000 Illegal Sex Offenders Released Under Court Order

** FILE ** Illegal immigrants at a U.S. Border Patrol facility in Tucson, Ariz. (Associated Press)

By Stephen Dinan

The news last week that federal authorities had to release 2,837 convicted sex offenders back onto the streets has renewed focus on a Supreme Court case that requires the government to release immigrants whose home countries won’t take them back.

A report released last week by the Government Accountability Office said the nearly 3,000 sex offenders are part of the 59,347 immigrants who the courts have ruled cannot be held, whom the U.S. has been unable to send home, and who instead were released under some sort of supervision as of September 2012.

The GAO took a sample of the sex offender cases and concluded that about 5 percent of the time U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement didn’t ensure that the immigrants released were properly registered with local authorities as sex offenders.

“I’m surprised that only 5 percent of them are not properly registered,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies.

She said ICE isn’t particularly rigorous about monitoring many of those it releases.

Following on news this year that ICE released a number of immigrants from custody and blamed automatic budget cuts, the latest report again highlights a thorny part of the immigration system.

In this case, the sex offenders and other immigrants — legal and illegal — who have been released are thanks to a 2001 Supreme Court ruling in what is known as the Zadvydas case. The court ruled 5-4 that detention for immigration purposes can’t be punitive; therefore, if there isn’t a likelihood someone can be deported, they generally have to be released.

That matters because many countries delay documents to make it more difficult for U.S. deportation. The worst is Qatar, which takes an average of 800 days to issue the necessary deportation documents, according to ICE numbers that Ms. Vaughan obtained. That is followed by Cambodia at 522 days and Vietnam at 368 days.

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SEE ALSO: Immigrant-rights groups call for October rally in D.C.

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Judy Rabinovitz, deputy director at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said the GAO report highlights how the system is supposed to work: Once illegal immigrants are released, they are supposed to be under supervision, and ICE is supposed to make sure the sex offenders register with authorities according to state and local laws.

“The GAO report is focusing on the more important thing, which is that it’s the criminal justice system that’s responsible for these people and ICE should be cooperating with the criminal justice system,” Ms. Rabinovitz said.

ICE regularly faces criticism from both sides of the immigration issue.

Advocates for strict enforcement want the agency to do more to detain dangerous immigrants it is trying to deport, and to do a better job of tracking those it doesn’t detain to make sure they don’t disappear into the country. But immigrant rights advocates said too many people are being detained and often are held in poor conditions, far from their families.

Under existing law, once another country refuses to accept its people for repatriation, the government is supposed to begin refusing to issue travel visas for citizens of that country to visit the U.S.

Ms. Vaughan said that can be a devastatingly effective tool, but administrations of both parties had refused to use it.

“When you start denying student visas — any narrow category that you want, that hits people in the ruling elite in that other country — they start paying attention,” Ms. Vaughan said. “That is the best leverage we have with people in other countries, is visas, because they all want to come here, go to school here, go to Vegas, Disney World, whatever.”

But Ms. Vaughan said the Department of Homeland Security hasn’t been proactive in pushing the visa retaliation.

A Homeland Security spokesman didn’t return a request seeking comment.

The massive immigration bill that passed the Senate this year waters down the visa penalty law, giving wide latitude to Homeland Security and the State Department to determine whether another country is being recalcitrant.

House Republicans are looking at a more concrete solution.

One of their immigration bills, which cleared the Judiciary Committee this year, would give the Homeland Security secretary the power to indefinitely order the detention of immigrants who are deemed to be public safety threats. That bill could come to the House floor this year if Republicans move ahead with an immigration debate.

The bill mirrors an approach championed by Rep. Lamar Smith, Texas Republican, in the previous Congress.

Ms. Rabinovitz at the ACLU said giving ICE permanent detention powers could be unconstitutional and is certainly misguided. She said the agency should be trying to figure out ways to reduce the population of detainees.

“It’s just stupid,” she said. “We’re talking about a situation where we’re spending so much money on detention, we’re in a period of fiscal straits where we should be concerned about spending our money. To lock up people who aren’t a flight risk doesn’t make sense. All we’re saying is provide them with a bond hearing.”

Fake Orphanages, Bogus Animal Sanctuaries and Crooks Growing Rich

• Caroline Green, 45, from London, volunteered at an orphanage in Thailand
• Turned out children there were not orphans
• They had been sent their by families on promise of better life
  
• But were actually mistreated while money was made through volunteers
• Responsibletravel.com no longer offers orphanage volunteering trips
• Matthew Butler paid to volunteer at animal sanctuary in Costa Rica
• In fact it was a poorly run zoo and money wasn’t spent on helping animals

Volunteer: Caroline Green on her placement in Thailand where she was shocked by the way the children were treated

By CHLOE LAMBERT

There’s a familiar scene being played out this month in airport departure lounges all over the UK.

Students, like a clutch of freshly-hatched turtles, stagger under the weight of over-laden backpacks as they hug nervous parents goodbye and head off for a ‘gap year’ adventure.

Flying to far-flung corners of Asia, South America and Africa, they will volunteer in orphanages, schools and animal sanctuaries, gathering invaluable additions to their CVs.

Often sold as a life-changing experience combined with an exotic holiday, travel companies charge thousands of pounds for such volunteering packages.

In fact, ‘voluntourism’, as it’s been dubbed, is the fastest growing travel sector, worth an estimated £1.3 billion globally.

And it’s not just twenty-somethings who are catching the volunteering bug; nowadays, professionals in their 40s and 50s, and retirees are just as likely to seek a more meaningful foreign adventure than their usual two weeks on a sunlounger.

One recent study showed that one in four over-55s in Britain has either been on a gap year or is planning to take one, and many include a volunteering placement in their travel experience.

Investigated: Caroline had to contact social services to check up on Starfish Ventures also know as the Dream House Foundation

Yet how much ‘good’ are they actually doing? According to some experts, our Western thirst for volunteering often only serves to make the problems we are heading out to alleviate worse. And in some cases volunteers’ time and money ends up feeding a corrupt and immoral trade, which is not only ripping them off, but exposing vulnerable children to harm and exploitation.

This summer, one leading tour operator announced that it was dropping all orphanage placements – highly popular among Westerners – after concerns that institutions were being set up purely to make money from tourists, using children who were not genuine orphans.

Caroline Green certainly had her eyes opened when she volunteered in Thailand earlier this year.

The 45-year-old, who runs her own hairdressing and hair extensions business, had become increasingly preoccupied by the world’s inequalities and injustices.

‘I’ve always wanted to go and volunteer abroad. Then last year I started reading up on human trafficking (where people, normally women and children, are bought and sold by sex traders) and watching lots of documentaries and felt even more strongly about it,’ says Caroline, who is single and lives in North London.

‘I thought, even if I can make a jot of difference, it’s got to be worth it. So I started looking on the internet. Eventually, I came across an orphanage called the Dream House on the borders of Thailand and Burma, which rescued children at risk of being trafficked. There were videos on the website and it all looked amazing.’

A Thai charity, Starfish, was offering two-week voluntary placements at the orphanage for £400, with basic accommodation included.

Caroline paid in advance, and in January this year she travelled to Thailand. On arrival, she met other volunteers, many of them teenagers on their gap years, all signed up to help at the orphanage.

But within days of starting the placement, Caroline sensed that something was seriously wrong. ‘I was pretty shocked at the conditions,’ she says. ‘The children slept on the floor – although there wasn’t even a floor, just carpet underlay – with no beds or blankets. The youngest was only two years old.

‘At dinner, they had one chicken between 29 children and a few vegetables. All the volunteers were coming in and giving £200 a week. So where was all the money going?’

As time went on, the picture became even more worrying.

Lesson learnt: She still wants to volunteer to help children but next time will do so through a reputable organisation

‘It became clear that these children were not orphans,’ says Caroline. ‘The staff told us that they had families, but their parents had been persuaded to send them here because they’d been told they’d have a better life.’

Caroline was also seriously concerned about how the children were being treated.

‘I saw the woman who ran the orphanage pulling the children across the room by their hands, and shouting at them,’ she says.

Then one morning, a Thai academic who was doing an internship at the orphanage told Caroline the children had reported to her they were being hit and physically threatened. At that point, the two women raised the alarm and contacted Thai social services.

‘I couldn’t stop crying,’ says Caroline. ‘I couldn’t bear what was happening here – and the worst thing of all was that I and the other volunteers were funding it with our time and money.’

It’s an account that’s becoming depressingly familiar. Inevitably perhaps, in countries where money is hard to come by, there has been a rise in unscrupulous companies which exploit well-meaning volunteers’ time and cash.

Orphanage placements are the trips causing the most concern. In July, responsibletravel.com, which promotes ecological and ethical travel packages, said it would no longer be offering orphanage volunteering trips.

The company took the decision following reports by leading organisations such as Unicef, which found many children living in orphanages are not in fact orphans, and have instead been taken from their families and trained to perform and attract tourists and donors.

Shockingly, they also found one orphanage in Cambodia that parades its children through the town at night, purely to entice holidaymakers – and their wallets – on to the premises. Investigations have shown that 90 per cent of children in orphanages in Ghana, and three quarters of those in Cambodia, are not orphans and have at least one parent.

And perhaps not surprisingly, Unicef also found less than one third of the money donated to orphanages is spent on childcare.

‘An orphanage visit has become a popular and easy thing to do for volunteers, and so for some individuals it’s become a way to earn an income,’ says Justin Francis, managing director of responsibletravel.com.

‘The volunteers are fuelling the growth of orphanages, rather than a real local need. Is it any coincidence that in Siam Reap, Cambodia, a big tourist attraction, there are now 35 orphanages despite the town having a population of only 100,000?

‘The shocking revelation has been that volunteers, who have intentions to give some love back to children in real need, are tragically and inadvertently having the opposite effect.’

The other concern is that vulnerable children are being cared for by gap year students with zero training or experience, who often come for just a couple of weeks – a practice that would never be allowed in the UK.

Naive: Matthew Butler volunteered at what he thought was an animal sanctuary Costa Rica in 2009

As Caroline Green says: ‘My placement at the orphanage in Thailand was for just over two weeks, which, looking back, is just a joke. I don’t see how anyone can make a difference in that time.’

She is haunted by the thought of the psychological effect the orphanage was having on the children.

‘Some of the kids really started to trust me, and then I just left.’

‘It’s not just orphanage trips that are under the spotlight. Travellers have reported spending months building a community centre or toilet block in an impoverished village, only to discover it will stand empty or even be demolished because there is no money for staff to maintain it or no electricity supply.

‘The market for volunteering has grown faster than the supply, and projects are being created to fill the gap,’ says Justin.

‘One volunteer I heard of turned up to teach at a school, and wondered why he didn’t get a very warm reaction. Towards the end of his time there he discovered the local teacher had been fired because a Westerner was coming in to teach for free.’

Experts are urging volunteers to do some research before they shell out on a package.

Matthew Butler certainly wishes he did. Having a strong interest in wildlife conservation, he and his cousin each paid £3,000, including flights, to work on an animal rehabilitation centre in Costa Rica while on their gap years in 2009.

‘Soon after arriving we discovered this wasn’t really an animal rehabilitation centre, but a poorly run zoo,’ says Matthew, 25, a charity worker who lives in North London. ‘We were put to work feeding the animals and cleaning out their cages. There was no indication of any of them being released into the wild.

‘The cages were quite small and we saw some shocking behaviour. I remember seeing the keepers trying to antagonise the lions to make them roar so the tourists could get a good photo.

‘Our money clearly wasn’t going to the centre, either. The people who owned it had a very plush house, with plasma TVs and two Land Rovers and quad bikes.

‘I was naive. I thought because I’d spent such a large amount of money, and had used a gap year company, it was going to be up to standard.

Fooled: Sarah Woods wanted to help people in the Amazon but one trip she took was not as it seemed

‘It does taint your enthusiasm for the whole sector if you have an experience like that.’

Matthew and his cousin made a complaint to the gap year company’s representative in Costa Rica and eventually they were moved to a different project.

Travel writer Sarah Woods got a nasty surprise when she volunteered to go on an expedition into an unmapped area of the Amazon rainforest and help translate Spanish to English.

‘It involved two days hiking and several hours canoeing, but by the time we reached the area, I realised this was not all it was made out to be,’ says Sarah, 46, from Bedfordshire.

‘We’d been told we were doing an expedition for a conservation group. But from listening to some of the conversations being had in Spanish, I realised we’d been hoodwinked into doing a recce for a company interested in oil drilling there.

‘In other words, rather than helping to protect the Amazon, I was funding a trip for a huge money-making business whose ultimate ambition would be deforestation. Since then I’ve started putting much more thought into the projects I help on.’

‘I’m not going to stop looking to make a difference. But this time I want to do it with a proper organisation and I’m going to do lots of homework’

Experts stress that volunteering, when done appropriately, can be highly valuable for the local community and volunteers alike. Those taking part, however, should do their homework first to make sure they are putting their money in the right place.

But Caroline Green says many volunteers just don’t want to speak out about the problems they find.

‘A big part of the problem is that rich gap year students see it as a holiday. They don’t want to delve into it too much and just want to have a bit of fun.’

When contacted by the Mail, Dan Moore, founder of the Thai charity Starfish, which runs the Dream House, said: ‘The Dream House was originally funded by local residents. I can confirm that allegations were made by the children against the original founder of the home. The founder was never an employee of our business.

‘On hearing the allegations, Starfish moved swiftly using our connections with the local police and local government to remove the founder from the home.

‘Starfish arranged for child protection professionals to assess our children, and for the local government’s social services to assess the home, within days of the founder being removed.’

Mr Moore added that contributions from volunteers had funded a new building for the Dream House children, with better conditions and facilities. He said he agreed with the view that orphanages should be the last resort.

But Caroline is still plagued by the thought that other children may be suffering at the hands of dubious projects, funded by volunteers.

At first she wished she had never gone to the orphanage in Thailand, but now she feels glad she was able to help protect the children she met. She plans to go to volunteer abroad again.

‘I’m not going to stop looking to make a difference. But this time I want to do it with a proper organisation and I’m going to do lots of homework.’

http://www.responsibletravel.com/

One in four men across Asia admit to having committed rape

A girl holds a poster during a demonstration demanding justice for Delhi gang-rape victim, in Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh. File photo

Nearly one out of four men in a United Nations study of 10,000 men in Asia admitted to having committed a rape, a report released on Tuesday shows. Marital rape was by far the most common type of rape, followed by the rape of an intimate partner.

Sexual entitlement — the “belief that men were entitled to sex regardless of consent” — was the top reason men gave for committing a rape, and half of the men who admitted to rape said they had committed their first rape as teenagers. The authors of the report urged better understanding of men’s lives following the finding that childhood abuse and neglect of a man were strongly correlated with his likelihood of committing rape as an adult.

The study, ‘Why Do Some Men Use Violence Against Women and How Can We Prevent It? Quantitative Findings from the UN Multi-country Study on Men and Violence in Asia and the Pacific’ was conducted by Partners for Prevention, a regional joint programme of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), UN Women and United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme in Asia and the Pacific. It covered 10,000 men in nine sites in six countries – Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea.

This is the first ever multi-country survey to assess the prevalence of rape, violence against partners, and men’s reasons for committing these acts. One of the reasons the survey was able to get the kind of responses it did is likely the way the questions were framed; men were not asked directly whether they had committed rape, but were rather asked questions such as, “Have you ever forced a woman to have sex?”, or “Have you ever had sex with a woman who was too drugged or drunk to indicate whether she wanted it?”.

There was considerable variation between countries, from a rape prevalence rape of 10% in urban Bangladesh to 62% in Papua New Guinea. In south Asia (Sri Lanka and Bangladesh), nearly all the reported partner violence occurred within marriage, and physical violence was more common than sexual violence. (Marital rape is not considered to be a crime in several countries including India.)

Partner rape was far more prevalent than non-partner rape across regions, a finding that is also reflected in India’s official statistics that show that the majority of sexual assault in India is committed by persons known to the victim. Moreover, the UN study did not disaggregate the category of ‘non-partner’, the authors told The Hindu in an email, which could potentially include a friend, neighbour or acquaintance.

But all violence against women, whether it occurs in the public sphere or in the family, is still a government and police issue, Emma Fulu, Research Specialist of Partners for Prevention, and lead author of the report, told The Hindu in an email. “Changes are needed to address rape, including marital rape, from the individual to policy levels. For example the police and governments have a major role to play to ensure that adequate legislation is in place as well as comprehensive legal mechanisms to guarantee women’s effective access to justice. And this study shows that to prevent violence from occurring in the first place it is equally vital to address social norms that make violence against women acceptable, including men’s belief that they have the right to sex within marriage, and promote non-violent and caring ways to be a man,” Ms. Fulu said.

Just under half of them men who admitted to rape said that they had raped more than one woman. Between 2 and 8 per cent of men also admitted to raping another man. Most men who had raped another man had also raped a female non-partner. There was significant overlap between men who had raped another man and committed a gang rape against a woman. The study found that vast majority of men who committed rape — 72 to 97 per cent across countries — faced no legal repercussions. The report recommended ending impunity for men who rape and changing social social norms related to ‘the acceptability of violence and the subordination of women’.

Despite the high prevalence of rapes by men when they were teenagers, a research finding with resonance in India, Ms. Fulu did not advocate changing India’s juvenile laws. “It does not make sense to remove the human rights of one group to address the human rights of another,” she said to The Hindu.“Juveniles should not be tried as adults but this does not necessary preclude them from facing some form of detention. However, they also require age-appropriate rehabilitation. Our priority must also be to work with boys and adolescents to change social norms and behavior to prevent perpetration of rape by teenagers – this includes programmes that enhance the knowledge and skills of young people and help them to understand gender equality, healthy sexual practices, consent and foster respectful relationships,” she said.

Why do men use violence against women?