Edition: U.S. / Global


Published: April 14, 1996
(Page 2 of 3)

Miss Nguyen was smuggled across the border from Vietnam where, as in Cambodia, the collapse of strict Communist ideology has been accompanied by the rise of a huge flesh trade. The buyer of Miss Nguyen's virginity will probably be a foreigner, the owner said, most likely a newly prosperous ethnic Chinese from Taiwan, China or Singapore. A Chinese superstition holds that sex with a virgin helps makes a man young again, or that it can cure venereal disease.

A 15-year-old Vietnamese girl who is also new to the brothel, having been sold by her mother, piped up to say that a Singaporean man paid $500 for her virginity a few days earlier. It is eerie to hear the girls speak of these topics because, to Western eyes, they look several years younger than their ages, not like sexual beings at all, more like American 10-year-olds than teen-agers.

"It hurt a lot and I cried," the girl added. "It still hurts me, several days later. But it's not quite so bad now."

Miss Nguyen shuddered and leaned against the 15-year-old.

"I'm scared," she said softly. "I'm scared."

Fear A Deadly Game Of Sexual Roulette

In another Cambodian brothel, a 14-year-old girl also said she was scared -- of AIDS. And with good reason. The girl said she was sold by her mother to the brothel a week earlier.

In this case it was a Cambodian, not a foreigner, who purchased her virginity -- a district police commander paid $500. The man, like many customers, did not use a condom.

Now the girl, as a fresh arrival, sells for $10, but in another week she will drop to $5 and then eventually to $2 or $3. She lay down on a bench, her long pink dress flowing over her, full of anger and helplessness.

"My mother needed money, because she was sick," the girl said, staring at the ceiling. "How can I be angry with her? She's my Mom."

A decade ago, such a slight young girl would not have been in much demand. But now men throughout Asia are turning toward younger and younger children, partly because they are deemed less likely to be infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.

In fact, the children are greater risks because of their youth: their vaginas and anuses are easily torn, creating sores and bleeding that permit the AIDS virus to spread.

"Most men I know want younger girls, the younger the better, because then they can scare the hell out of us," said Tisay, a 14-year-old street-walker in Quezon City, the Philippines. "Older girls can set a price, can set conditions, but younger girls can't do that."

"I'd prefer safe sex," Tisay added. "But it's hard to insist that a man wear a condom. I'm small and I'm alone and I can't do anything about it if he doesn't want to."

Tisay has contracted gonorrhea, which increases the risk of acquiring AIDS, but she refuses to be treated. Partly she is afraid that if the other girls find out, they will tell her customers and drive them away, and partly, her behavior is simply self-destructive.

"My life's worth nothing now," a social worker quoted Tisay as telling her. "It's better for me to die."

The AIDS virus is spreading extremely rapidly among prostitutes in Asia. India had its first AIDS case in 1986, yet already some 1.6 million Indians are infected with H.I.V. Thailand may have 800,000 people infected with the virus, and Myanmar -- where condoms were banned until 1992 and are still rare -- has some 400,000 infected people. In Cambodia, one study found that 39 percent of prostitutes are infected with H.I.V.

The virus spreads rapidly from country to country in part because of trafficking of prostitutes across borders, but also because customers tend to hop from place to place. Sex tours started in Japan, allowing groups of men to visit brothels in South Korea or Taiwan, and now other countries are doing the same. Indeed, South Korean and Taiwanese men are now prosperous enough to travel on sex tours of their own to places like Bangkok or Manila.

Some Asian governments are beginning to prosecute foreigners caught having sex with minors, as Dr. Gavin A. M. Scott can attest. Dr. Scott, a tall, lean Briton who has lived in Cambodia practicing medicine since 1992, is still fuming over having to serve five months in a Phnom Penh prison last year on rape charges after paying five teen-age boys to have sex with him.

The police and the court said the boys were 14 to 16 years old, but Dr. Scott said that they were over 16 and that he simply engaged in sex with prostitutes.

"It was basically a case against homosexuality," said Dr. Scott, who is gay. "But it was misrepresented as a case about child sex, which it was not."

How do the customers regard their actions? From a conversation with Dr. Scott, who continues to practice medicine in Phnom Penh, and from materials published by pedophile organizations, it seems that customers sometimes offer two defenses.

First, they note that the age of consent in much of the world is 16 -- indeed, it is 14 in Pennsylvania and Hawaii -- and suggest that there is nothing wrong with people of such an age engaging in sexual acts. Second, they sometimes suggest that young prostitutes are at least earning substantial sums to help their families, and that the alternative would be backbreaking jobs that would be even more demeaning and dangerous.

A growing number of Westerners are, like Dr. Scott, being arrested for sexual abuse of children in Asia, although usually they are simply fined and deported. Prison sentences are very rare.

Betrayal Selling a Daughter For a Karaoke System

What kind of a mother would sell her daughters?