“Dara Keo and her mother, Rotana, were both in tears when it was time for her to leave. A motorized rickshaw had arrived to transport 12-year-old Keo from her one-room shack in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, to an unknown location. Keo was crying because she was terrified. Rotana was crying because she knew she had done something unspeakable: She had sold her daughter’s virginity to a rich, powerful man. The rickshaw driver took Keo to an underground medical clinic. A corrupt doctor on the payroll of brokers who arrange the sale of virgins examined her to check that her hymen was intact and gave her a blood test for HIV infection.
“He confirmed I was a virgin and disease-free,”
Cambodia’s highly secretive upmarket virgin trade is a world apart from the capital’s rowdy, neon-lit bars and karaoke clubs where foreign tourists and locals can buy sex for $10 or $20. Its clients are high-ranking officials from the Cambodian government, military, and police force, as well as other members of Asia’s wealthy elite, who pay between $500 and $5,000 to sleep with a virgin.
The virgin trade thrives partly due to a cultural myth.
“Many older Asian men believe sex with virgins gives them magical powers to stay young and prevent illness,”
In addition to rich locals, men from neighboring countries such as China, Singapore, and Vietnam are regular customers in Cambodia. “They travel here on business and have everything prearranged by brokers: a five-star hotel, a few rounds of golf, and a night or two with a virgin,” says Eric Meldrum, a former police detective from the United Kingdom who now works as an anti-exploitation consultant in Phnom Penh.
“The men know they can get away with it.”
Home to more then 1,000 people, the Phnom Penh riverside slum where I meet Keo and her mother is a splintering jumble of wooden shacks alongside rancid water. Keo says that here, almost every teenage girl is sold for her virginity at some point. “Everyone knows, but nobody talks about it.”
Keo and Rotana tell their story inside the tiny room on stilts they rent for $10 a month. Outside, babies wail and hammers bang, and the walls shake as people traverse the slum’s rickety pathways.
Quiet-spoken Rotana, 62, says the decision to sell her daughter’s virginity was a “last resort.”
Rotana married relatively late, in her 30s, and had six children. She was unable to marry earlier because romantic relationships and family life were banned under the bloody communist regime of the Khmer Rouge, during which an estimated 2 million people died in the 1970s. Three of her children died from fever, and she earned as little as $1 a day as a trash recycler to support the remaining three. (Keo is the youngest.) Her husband drank and played cards. “He died a few years ago, leaving gambling debts. His creditors threatened violence when I couldn’t pay,” Rotana says. A female neighbor working as a broker, or middlewoman, approached Rotana. “She said she felt sorry for me and promised me big money if I sold Keo’s virginity.” The virgin trade recruits local women to lure girls because they can befriend mothers easily. Often, they are former trafficking victims or sex workers themselves.
“Fear and worry about the debts made me ill,” Rotana says. “Finally, I gave in.”
Keo is sitting on the floor dressed in mismatched floral pajamas. “When my mom told me she needed me to sleep with a strange man, I was very scared. We both wept for a long time,” she says. Rotana was so desperate she accepted a fee of only $500 ($100 went to the broker). Keo says she “agreed” to be sold—although, as a 12-year-old, it’s unlikely she had much choice or fully understood her fate.
“I wanted to save my mother,” Keo says.
She was taken to meet her buyer in a room in an exclusive hotel after her visit to the medical clinic. The man, wearing a dark suit and a gold watch, insisted on a doctor’s certificate attesting that she was a genuine virgin. (Some brokers try to trick clients by surgically restoring a girl’s hymen, so she can be sold multiple times.)
“He ordered me to undress. Then he pinned me down on the bed, unzipped his pants, and forced himself into me,” Keo says. “The pain was excruciating.”
I ask about the man’s identity. Keo and Rotana give me the name of a Cambodian politician who is still in office, but they refuse to reveal his name publicly. (To protect their safety, their names have also been changed as well as the names of other mothers and daughters mentioned in this story.)
Keo’s ordeal went on for a week, a common length of time for men to keep each virgin they buy. The man forbade her to leave the room and visited her for sex two or three times a day. “He was very forceful,” she says.
“A few times he asked if he was hurting me. When I told him yes, he used even more force.”
Source : Marie Claire.
Pictures by Will Baxter for Marie Claire.
