My inquiring mind accepted it as a kind of personal research assignment. When we arrived, I watched my colleague walk around with a video camera while the girls each took their turn on the stage. In the end, a girl with a tiny frame who wore a lime green bikini, with shiny black hair and a gorgeous smile, won the prize. I quietly asked my colleague how old she was, which he mouthed to me. One of my guy friends became another drooler and looked up at her as she received her trophy on stage. “Whoa,” he said. “She’s hot.” I abandoned my objective lens and shot back, “She’s fourteen.”
The Asia Foundation is headquartered in San Francisco with offices all over Asia, and is just one of many NGOs working on why girls like the one above get to the bar industry, and how to prevent others from doing so. They came out with a study and database in May of 2006, which assessed a decade of data and case studies of human trafficking in Cambodia, called the Review of a Decade of Research on Trafficking in Persons, Cambodia. The report is a comprehensive assessment of over seventy research studies, highlighting what is and what is not known about human trafficking in Cambodia, along with a database that will allow counter-trafficking stakeholders to share their findings by being able to add comments to each report and submit their own reports directly through a new website interface. I saw that even with all of their research, The Asia Foundation still asked the same questions that I had and stated in the Review, “This makes it all the more important to be explicit in determining how to identify trafficking for prostitution. Is a woman who was deceived into sex work but chooses to stay (still) a “victim of trafficking”? Is a woman who indentures herself “trafficked”? While such distinctions may appear irrelevant, they are crucial if the research is to be rigorous in estimating the magnitude of the problem and helpful in considering program and policy responses.”
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