Human Trafficking
http://www.humantrafficking.org/
The chanty has since expanded and now works in different locations, most
recently in Thailand and Cambodia where the focus is on sex-trafficked girls. In
2005, Tree visited 25 different projects in the two
countries. It was a life-changing trip and one not without its dangers.
'It was one of the most devastating
experiences,' she (Penelope Tree) says. 'In Cambodia
you realise very soon that this is a country that has been completely raped and
people are still living in fear.' She talks vividly
about the poverty she encountered, visiting refugee camps where sex trafficking
is so common it has almost become accepted, where
families are so desperate they will sacrifice one daughter to unscrupulous
agents in the mistaken belief that her earnings will look after the rest of the
family. In reality parents receive a fraction, if any,
of the money that agents promise and if they do see their daughters again they
are invariably emotionally and physically scarred.
Many disappear forever and of the
few who do eventually return home it is because they're HIV-positive and of no
more use to their captors. 'I remember a village
where, as a sex tourist, you could pick up a five-or six-year-old boy or girl.
Camps where agents would offer families $80 for one of their daughters and then
sell her on for $500,' she says, plainly still
affected by what she saw. A staggering 600,000 to a million girls are
trafficked each year in the region. (Observer Woman Aug
2008)