Her name was Srey Neth, and she was one of the hundreds of thousands of teenagers who are enslaved by the sex trafficking industry worldwide.
As readers may remember, I then freed the girls and took them back to their villages. At first, it turns out, everything went well for Srey Neth. Our plan was for her to start a shop in her village, near Battambang. For a few months, business boomed. The problem was her family. Srey Neth's parents and older brothers and sisters had a hard time understanding why they should go hungry when their sister had a store full of food.
And her little nephews and nieces, running around the yard, helped themselves when she wasn't looking. She said she had to have money to buy new things.
But in a Cambodian village, nobody listens to an uneducated teenage girl. Indeed, the low status of girls is the underlying reason why so many daughters are sold to the brothels. So by May, Srey Neth's shop was empty, and she had no money to restock it. Srey Neth worried about her father, who was coughing up blood from tuberculosis.
She also worried about her older brother, who could not afford to get married, and about the family debts, which could cost her family its land. It was that kind of concern for her family that had led her, at the suggestion of a female cousin, to sell herself to the brothel in late and send the proceeds home. Some , people are trafficked across international borders each year, and that's often how they end up in the sex industry: they assume debts and then, when they cannot quickly repay the money, gangs force them into brothels -- where they are stuck until they are dying of AIDS.
