Sorry world of sex slavery

by Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury
February 3, 2010

Sex Slaves in Cambodia

The sad fact is that sex slavery is very much a reality in this world. Often it is young women who have been kidnapped and sold into bondage. Grown men leave their comfortable western homes and commit acts of atrocities in so-called third world countries that they would never attempt at home. Some of these men believe that because theses girls have a smile on their faces that they are happy about the forced deflowering and subsequent sexual exploitation by her men. These men see their vacation time as an opportunity commit rape. With the prevalence on reporting of sex slavery, they cannot be oblivious to the nature of the crime that they are committing. This means that they are knowingly raping women.

Feminists have said over and over again that we live in a rape culture. This is not something that is specific to western countries as patriarchy respects no boundaries. Wherever men and women cohabit men seek to assert their dominance by any means necessary. This is about power. These so called sexual voyeurs are using their money to claim a body solely to provide sexual pleasure. These women are little more than tools to these men and forgotten in less time that it will take to read this post. Such trend of sex slavery is gradually becoming a part of regular culture for rich Arab sheikhs. They visit various Asian nations in particular, in search of 'fresh flesh'. As if their assaults are not criminal enough many of these women end up with STD's. Imagine after spending your teen years serving men's sexual proclivities dying from AIDS, or any number of untreated diseases. What needs to be acknowledged is that sex slavery equals a death sentence. It is a life of being raped repeatedly by nameless faceless men that ends in a death sentence. This is not some Shakespearean tragedy; this is the life of many women across the globe.

We don't want to tell ourselves about the illegal brothels in every major city that warehouse women for male sport. We would rather take the express trains back to the suburbs, ignoring the crimes that are happening within our midst. It's not our problem we tell our selves, those are not our women. We may shake our head when we read the occasional story in the newspaper, or frown when an expose shows up on the local news put in truth we consider this someone else's problem. The daily of rape of women cannot and should not be ignored.

Couple of years back, New York Times published the story of Sina Vann, a Vietnamese girl, who 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.

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.

Many of the brothels in Cambodia have 'torture chambers', which are located at the underground because then the girl's screams are muffled. The brothel owners would give electric shock to the disobeying girls thus died down, doused in water and then prodded with wires running from the 22 volt wall outlet. The jolt causes intense pain, sometimes evacuation of the bladder and bowel – and even unconsciousness.

Shocks fit well into the brothel business model because it cause agonizing pain and terrify the girls without damaging their looks or undermining their market value.

Sreypov Chan, when she was 7 years old—an age when most girls are going to slumber parties—she was sold to a brothel in Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital city, to work as a sex slave. The woman who made the sale: her mother. For years, pimps forced Sreypov to have sex with as many as 20 men a day. If she didn't meet her quota, or if she tried to run away, she was punished in unthinkable ways—burned with a hot poker, covered with biting insects. And worse! What kind of person sells her own daughter into slavery? In Cambodia, a deeply poor, corrupt nation still reeling from the bloody genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge regime in the '70s, it's someone especially desperate. As shocking as Sreypov's tale is, she's not alone. More than 12 million people are now victims of forced prostitution and labor across the world. The buying and selling of humans is a $32 billion global business, according to the U.S. State Department's 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report.