All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [45]
Each woman in this group, save one, came from impoverished families and worked in prostitution because she had little or no education and no opportunities. (“Prostitution occurs in the absence of choices,” Ruchira Gupta, who became a hero to me in India, would teach me.) All of these women sent money home. Some prostituted women were aware of the risks they were running in the midst of an AIDS epidemic, but one told me, “I may be dead in a few years from contracting HIV/AIDS, but I don’t have food for tomorrow.” I have since had others say to me, “My life is so miserable, I don’t want to use a condom. I want to die.”
Another of the peer educators told me her story in detail: Poor and rural, struggling to survive, she contemplated a typical migration to an urban area in search of work in a garment factory, where conditions were often harsh. A seemingly kind friend said, “Oh, I can get you a job at the factory where I work.” After traveling to the capital, she discovered to her horror that her friend had sold her to a man who locked her for a week in a hotel room, where he abused her obscenely. He threatened to have her gang-raped if she resisted and beat her if she was anything less than fully compliant. At the end of the week, he sold her to a brothel, where she was ordered to work to pay him back what he had spent on her. In addition, she was told she had to pay her room and board at the brothel. She had been a virgin. I despairingly puzzled over the economics of this strange math, before I could accept that modern indentured servitude is terribly common.
She was such a gentle young woman; it was hard to reconcile her manner with the brutality she had just recounted. My soft-spoken friend explained how now she was ruined and unable ever to return home. She came to the center to learn vocational skills that might someday allow her to earn enough money on which to live; they offered hairdressing, sewing, and beading training, as well as access to medical information and other services. As a peer educator who helps identify and sensitize other slaves and prostitutes to the health risks that are inherent in sexual exploitation, PSI paid her a small sum, which allowed her to accept fewer clients to eke out her living.
The name of Sochua’s campaign for gender equality was Neary Rattanak, meaning “Women Are Precious Gems.” She told me that she had turned an old Khmer saying, “Men are like gold, women are like white cloth,” into a motto: “Men are like gold, women are like precious gems.” The redemptive message was that unlike white cloth, a gem is a thing of permanent strength and value, and if it is soiled, it can be polished and made to shine even more brightly.
I lost touch with Mu Sochua for a time, but I never forgot her. I kept a news article about her my mother had given me in my bedside drawer for years, a fierce tableau of courage and an exhortation for me never to forget that day or the reality of the modern slave trade, in which more people are trapped than at the height of the slave trade in the nineteenth century. Trafficking in human beings is a $12 billion business, more lucrative than the illegal drug and arms trade, and it is a major factor in the continuing AIDS pandemic.
I was unsurprised when Mu Sochua was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. And in 2008, with the help of international pressure, she was finally able to persuade her government to enact its first antitrafficking law and to shut down the notorious brothels in Svay Pak. Unfortunately, most of the pimps and traffickers simply moved to other locations and went further underground. United with scholars and activists worldwide, I have intensified my antislavery efforts, realizing that as long as there is a demand for prostituted sex, people will find a way to sell girls and women. “Demand abolition” is essential.
From a public health perspective, condom distribution and education programs in Cambodian red-light districts had been effective, and most new cases of HIV/AIDS were no longer