his story by Abigail Pesta was first published in Marie Claire.
Sreypov Chan, a young Cambodian woman with a feisty laugh and a love of Kelly Clarkson songs, has a recurring dream: She’s being chased by gangsters. They catch her and throw her into a filthy, cockroach-infested room. She knows what will happen next: She will be tortured – whipped with metal cables, locked in a cage, shocked with a loose electrical wire – and then gang raped.
Sreypov has lived this dream.
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 her to have sex with as many as 20 men a day. If she didn’t meet her quota, she was burned with a hot poker, covered with biting insects. And worse. “I wanted to die,” she says.
Sreypov is among the lucky ones. At age 10, she managed to break free of the brothels and start a new life. Today, she’s ready to tell her story, talking openly about her enslavement and escape, and about coming to terms with her dark past.
Sreypov says she remembers a happy childhood, with loving parents, five siblings, and a house in the rural district of Koh Thom, where her family owned a rice field. “You need to get an education,” Sreypov recalls her father saying. She pictured herself going to school one day. When she was 5, her father died. “After that, my mother changed,” Sreypov says. “She was terribly unhappy; all the love drained out of our lives. We became very poor.” The family eventually moved to a shack. When Sreypov was 7, her mother sold her, telling her she would be working as a housekeeper in another home. Sreypov felt it was her duty to obey.
In Cambodia, daughters are like property: they are there to provide for the family, she says.
Indeed, Sreypov did do a little housecleaning—for two days. On the second evening, her new employers drove her to another home, in Phnom Penh, where she ate dinner and went to bed. “When I woke up, I couldn’t get out,” she says. “I was locked in the room. I was crying, trying to open the door. At first, it was quiet,” she says, recalling her initial days in the brothel. “Then one day, a man opened the door and said, ‘Do you want a client?’ I didn’t know what he meant, but I knew it was bad. I said no. Then he brought me to a room for punishment.” She pauses for a moment.
“I had to drink the man’s urine.”
The abuses escalated in the following days. She was tied up and covered with biting ants, whipped with an electric cable. Finally, she said yes. When Sreypov saw her first client – “an Asian man with a cruel look in his eyes,” she recalls—she changed her mind and said no again, and started to cry.
Furious at her behaviour, the pimp took his abuse to a new level, crushing up a handful of hot chilli peppers with his foot and stuffing them in her vagina. Then he took a hot metal rod and jammed it inside her as well. “The pain was so terrible,” she says. “I couldn’t speak.” Soon after, the client raped her.
Sreypov doesn’t know if the client paid a high fee for her virginity; she never saw any money at the brothel. In general, sex with girls can cost as little as $5 (that’s less than the $9 I paid to take a taxi from the airport to my hotel), but virgins usually command a far higher price.
After Sreypov’s initiation into sex slavery, she spent the next few months imprisoned in her room, with a guard stationed at the door. If she didn’t meet her quota of men for the day, she would be shocked with a loose wire from a socket in the wall. “On some days, I was so tired, I couldn’t get out of bed. The men would just come to my bed, one after another, like a gang rape,” she says. “I became numb. My life grew dark. I thought everything was finished for me.”
“I knew ever since my first client that I had to run,” she says. Of course, she also knew what could happen to her if she failed—she’d heard about girls being chained up for days or locked in coffins, covered with live maggots—but she didn’t care. “They could kill me if they wanted,” she says. “Death seemed better than that life.”
After two failed attempts, she decided to try for the third time.
“I knew if I stayed, I would get sick and die,” she says. “I had nothing to lose.”
So one night, when her guard had left the doorway, she fled again. This time, she made it out into the street and eventually to rescue centre in Kampong Cham. She was 10 years old then.
To this day, her past haunts her in new and unexpected ways. The bad dreams are fading; she hasn’t had one for a couple of years now. “After I escaped, I tried to keep everything in, and the nightmares were the worst,” she says. “But now I talk about it, I help other girls, and I don’t hurt so much.” The path Sreypov has chosen isn’t easy, she openly acknowledges. Telling her story will always be a struggle. But, she says, turning to me with a steady gaze, “If no one knows, nothing will change.”
Read the full text on
Marie Claire.
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