Cambodia: The Great Foreign Pedophile Myth
By KorskiSince 2003, I have made eight trips to Southeast Asia, in all totaling more than a year and a half wandering through every country in the region, and in most cases five, six or seven times. There are few dark and dangerous corners and edges I have not visited, or talked about, often at length, with fellow travelers. This is my fifth visit to Cambodia, and while there are a number of things that make this quite poor country different, two have once again struck me almost immediately upon arrival. One is the very large number of NGOs (non-government organizations), by some accounts the greatest number to be found anywhere in the world on a per capita basis. How good they are at what they are doing, I’m not sure. I’ve gone out of my way to touch bases with a few of them, and I’ve not been impressed—but then in all fairness I’m a hard person to impress about almost anything. The other thing that hit me on my first visit, and on all subsequent visits, is the concern with foreign pedophiles in Cambodia, one that as far as I know has no parallel anywhere in Asia. The concern makes itself evident within minutes of leaving the airport in Phnom Penh and heading toward the city. There are large billboards that signal that there is zero tolerance for such perverts in the country, and that they will face long prison terms in Cambodia if caught. They can also expect yet more years in prison when they are sent to their home countries.
On one of my first visits to Cambodia, I entered the country though the southern route, via Krong Koh Kong and Sihanoukville. It so happened that at the time I was crossing the border from Thailand into Cambodia with a young Dutch traveler and a small muscular American approaching middle age. At the border crossing, the American, who up to this point had stuck me as one of those tough and likeable guys you’d want alongside you in a dangerous war zone, suddenly got cold feet, and as subsequent events unfolded I came to the conclusion that he might’ve had a previous run-in with the Cambodian police over taking an underage girl to his hotel room in Phnom Penh. I surmised that his visa got a nasty stamp put on it, something to the effect that he was no longer welcome in Cambodia. He tried to solve the problem, I also concluded, by tearing the large Cambodian visa out of his passport, and this is what, in a proximate sense, got him in trouble when the three of us went to get visas at the border. (This incident I detailed in the first essay I ever wrote on Cambodia [“Welcome to Cambodia,” 15/12/05]).
On a subsequent trip, a flight from Bangkok to Phnom Penh, I met a heavy-set and matronly middle-aged woman who was pleasant to a fault. She was working for one of the NGOs in Phnom Penh. I would discover that she was attached to an agency concerned with the country’s young children. During our conversation she rather authoritatively, I thought, informed me that there were literally thousands of foreign pedophiles in Cambodia, a scourge to be sure—if true. I had no way of knowing if there was a good deal of truth or little truth to the woman’s claims, but my long history of looking at questions related to human sexual behavior, and particularly prostitution, made me quite skeptical of her claims. Among other things, I had read enough to appreciate that women like this (there are always exceptions, of course) carry in their minds the idea that middle-aged foreign men that live in or visit Asia are sexual predators—whoremongers, dirty old men, perverts, the scum of the West that could not make it in relationships with Western women. And thus their flight, for weeks or years at a time, to Asia where there is, particularly in Thailand, no shortage of young women eager, for money, to satisfy the sexual needs of men of any age.
But by this time—long before this time, actually—I’d come to appreciate that all kinds of do-gooder organizations (those concerned with the environment, with poverty, with development issues, with human health) are full of people with strong preconceptions that profoundly bias how they think and what they do. Another feature as prominent as their biases, and often unbridled embrace of the “native” no matter how obvious the native shortcomings, is the desire to make their missions “important” and to either maintain their existing base, or like all bureaucracies increase their share of a limited pool of resources.
On this trip to Cambodia, again a flight from Bangkok to Phnom Penh, I struck up a conversation with a young German woman who has been working for an NGO for six months in Phnom Penh, one involved in health issues broadly defined. She was articulate, confident, and, alas, just flat out wrong about one of her claims about foreign men in Southeast Asia, a claim that is by no means trivial. In our discussion, I asked her what she knew about HIV infection rates in Cambodia and how prevalent AIDS is. She said that the rates have dropped dramatically in recent years, down from those that were at one point said to be among the most alarming in Southeast Asia. She did not have anything remotely like a good explanation for this “good news” change, and she would have nothing to do with my thought that in all likelihood the infection rates of some years ago were nothing more than wild guesses, and that now with somewhat better record keeping people were coming to their senses about more realistic rates of HIV infection and those with AIDS. The conversation did not get to the point where I was able to point out that even in the U.S., with far superior data collection agencies and methods, the rates of infection still are not known with anything like precision, and these rates have also been revised downward through the years.
She confessed that various agencies in Cambodia involved in the HIV/AIDS issue did not want the rate to drop too low, and for the simple reason that this would mean fewer funds available to the NGOs. Surprise, surprise...
More startling was the woman’s answer to my not-so-innocent question: why do you think the HIV rates in Cambodia were so high in the past?
Her answer to me was: Because of all the foreign men going with Cambodian prostitutes who were not using condoms.
This, of course, is the most transparent kind of bullshit to someone who has given half a thought to the issue. The amount of prostitution directed at foreign men in Cambodia is trivial, and particularly when compared with what is going on in Thailand, and even the Philippines. We’re talking about several orders of magnitude difference in the number of prostitutes serving foreigners in Thailand vs. the number in Cambodia today, or at any time in the last several decades.
Furthermore, even today there are at any one time probably hundreds of foreign men (thousands over even short periods of time) in Thailand who are going bareback with Thai prostitutes (not using a condom). The foreign men are not getting infected with the HIV, and if they get infected with anything it is usually gonorrhea. Nor are the Thai prostitutes, hundreds of times greater in number than in Cambodia, getting infected with the HIV from these foreigners. The foreign men are generally free of STDs, and the Thai women who are getting infected are principally getting it from their boyfriends and husbands (most of the Thai hookers have them) who inject themselves with drugs and exchange needles. Or who are bisexual and picking up the HIV from receptive anal intercourse, and then passing it on in their “monogamous” relationships with their hooker girlfriends and wives. Furthermore, and not widely known, is that prostitution for Thai men, single and married, is far more important than that for foreigners, and for various reasons this prostitution, which long predates the American military presence in Thailand, accounts for a much greater proportion of the HIV that is sexually transmitted than anything having to do with the tens of thousands of foreign men going with Thai prostitutes.
The point I’m making here is that were there anything at all to the young German woman’s claim about foreigner men not using condoms with Cambodian women in the past, and this being the major factor is accounting for the high rate of HIV infection, then the rate of HIV infection in Thailand among hookers that spend all of their effort among foreigners would be astronomically high. In fact, just outright fucking mind-boggling! And it is, of course, no such thing.
I have thus far digressed from the title of this essay, and for the reason that I wanted to highlight a couple of points previously noted: the “agendas” that NGOs have; the strong and moralistic and negatively judgmental positions taken against Western men in Asia; and what I also suspect, but don’t have good information on, are agendas and biases aimed at Western men in Asia and primarily promoted by Western do-gooder moralizing women.
*
On this trip from the airport in Phnom Penh into the hotel on the Sisowath Quay (along the Tonle Sap) where I am writing these very words, I was once again assaulted (yes, this is the right word) by large billboards proclaiming that men going with under-aged Cambodian girls (young boys are not obviously seen as part of the problem) can expect up to twenty years in a Cambodian prison and then subsequent prison time in their home country. This time, and for the first time, I also saw prominent similar signs on the back sides of tuk-tuks, or the small motorized vehicles that can carry up to four passengers. There is not the slightest doubt from theses billboards and signs implicate and are aimed at foreign men.
When I checked into the Paragon Hotel, I picked up a thick 4 X 6 inch color brochure titled: “Phnom Penh Visitor’s Guide.” The guide is chockablock with information on where to stay, where to eat and where to be entertained, including on the last several pages a listing of numerous bars, a fair number of which are known to be little more than places to pick up Cambodian hookers, all of them of legal age. None of these bars and cafes are identified as venues for prostitutes, but anyone who’s been around Asia knows the places by name and can’t miss the “polite” ways of indicating what’s going on: “happening night scene...lots and lots of friendly females;” “lots of friendly hostesses to help you pass the time;” “hostess bar with more hostesses per square meter than any three hostess bars put together—literally brimming with attentive, uniformed ladies.”
The back cover for the 131 page “Phnom Penh Visitor’s Guide” shows the backside of a white male (at least six feet tall) with his arm around a short Cambodian girl of uncertain age (again no face shot), though meant to be seen as underaged; the top of her head is a couple of inches below the white male’s shoulder. (This of course does not in fact mean that the girl is underaged, for all kinds of Asian women of all ages are less than five feet tall).
Above this color photo that takes up more than two-thirds of the back cover are the following bold words in red: SEX WITH CHILDREN IS A CRIME.
Below the photo of the large white male and the small Cambodian girl is a national hotline number to call if “you have information on the sexual exploitation or abuse of children.” And beneath this are two further pieces of information. One reads: “Offenders face up to 20 years in prison in Cambodia as well as criminal prosecution in their own countries.”
And then this striking claim: “More than 2,000 offenders arrested for sex crimes during the last five years.”
The figure of 2,000 and that of five years apparently were not pulled out of a magician’s hat, for at the bottom of this warning, and claim, is the seal for the country’s National Police and that of the Ministry of Interior; and the well-known organizational name: UNICEF, and its seal.
I read this last line several times, and I thought: This means the Cambodian police are arresting more than one foreigner every day of the year for molesting or having sex with a Cambodian girl who is...12, 13, 14, 15....
I thought: I fucking just do not believe these figures! I would be greatly surprised if the Cambodian police were arresting forty foreigners a year on a charge of exploiting a female minor in Cambodia, and I’d go to this number or one smaller if only for the reason that the country is so blatantly targeting foreign pedophiles, and there are more than enough children to go around in other Southeast Asian countries that are giving short shrift to the problem—if there is a problem. Pedophiles may be certifiably sick, but surely they’re not that dumb to come to Cambodia when there is so much publicity on the issue and there are so many other places to go....
In all my time in Southeast Asia I have not once been approached to have sex with an underage girl. I have heard of some sightings of pedophiles—usually Germans with young boys on the beaches south of Pattaya, Thailand —but I have never seen these alleged pedophiles with my own eyes. There used to be one infamous section of Phnom Penh where underaged girls were working alongside older prostitutes, and some foreigners probably went with the girls. How many? I don’t have a clue, and I doubt anyone has a figure that is remotely in the ballpark. Whatever, this famous street of dumpy whorehouse shacks is now history.
Virtually every man in Southeast Asia with whom I have discussed the issue of pedophiles has had a feeling and a position very similar to my own. The idea of having sex with an underaged girl, or boy, is utterly repulsive. And were I, or any of the men I have talked to, to catch a man doing so, we’d all probably do the same thing. Begin by beating the shit of him, and then perhaps cutting off his dick and balls. Few things evoke as much disgust in men as the thought of other men going with underaged girls or boys. Few men are detested more by other inmates in prisons than pedophiles.
Which of course does not mean that men who go with hookers on any kind of consistent basis have not gone to bed with an underaged girl—one sixteen or seventeen, perhaps even fifteen. The reasons for this are that it is very hard to tell the age of young Asian girls, and more than a few of them have lied about their ages or knowingly used faked documents, and with their employer’s consent. But men who have made these mistakes, I dare say, have almost always made them honestly, and most men, as far as I know, will quickly walk away from a girl they suspect of being below the legal age.
*
The thoughts I have noted above came to mind my second day in Phnom Penh and I decided to see if I could get some solid facts, and one in particular. I wanted to know what that figure of “more than 2,000 offenders arrested for sex crimes during the last five years” really represented.
I spent a good half hour with the Cambodian Yellow Pages, took down some telephone numbers and addresses, and then went looking for a moto driver to take me (without a helmet as I sat behind him—always the M.O. in Cambodia) to talk to people who might know what was up.
It didn’t take me long to get more than a first approximation of the Great Lie being laid on every foreign visitor to Phnom Penh and other ports of entry to Cambodia. His name was Chea Pyden, and he is the Executive Director of Vulnerable Children Assistance Organization.
In the course of our conversation, and directly related to this issue of foreign pedophiles in Cambodia, he told me, and not following a leading question, that “no more than a handful” of the figure of 2,000 sex offenders arrested during a five year period were foreigners. He couldn’t be more precise than that, but I gathered that we were talking about at most twenty or so a year, not 400 a year, giving a maximum total of say 100 foreign pedophiles rather than 2,000 as so strongly implied in billboards and signs and the back cover of a visitor’s guide I have described in detail.
Who were the other 1900 sex offenders?
Cambodians.
Fathers and step-fathers to be more precise, he said.
Is this a surprise? Not at all. It is just what I found in Nicaragua in the late nineties when I was trying to get a handle on why young boys and girls turned to glue sniffing, prostitution and acting as city mules for drug dealers.
Step fathers as pedophiles, to an evolutionary biologist, are exactly what one would predict, and not just in Cambodia and Nicaragua. The wife is out working, the young girl or boy of eleven or twelve or thirteen or fourteen is around the house, and the new husband, who is not genetically related, and has the mind of a rutting pig and probably can’t read or write, takes sexual advantage as opportunity presents itself. Fathers do it too, of course, as Chea Pyden noted. But because they are biologically related to their sons and daughters, they are, generally, and despite their primitive rutting tendencies and first-grade minds, more reluctant, simply less likely to fuck or demand a blowjob from the son or daughter when mom is away working.
I still wanted, if at all possible, to see some actual records. The data. On such issues, and a real shit-kicker like this one, I don’t honestly give a flying fuck about anyone’s opinion. I want to put my eyes or the data, or get the next best thing: the word from the man, woman or mouse who has seen them first hand.
So I headed for the Ministry of Interior, which Chea Pyden told me had the data I was after, and was the source for all those “fair-minded” people at UNICEF who came to the same conclusion: namely that there are one hell of a lot of foreign pedophiles being apprehended every year in Cambodia.
This wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought it might be. I had to go through nine Cambodians on the sprawling grounds of the Ministry of Interior before I found someone who spoke roughly forty words of English. The rest of the uniformed cops and those in civilian clothes and thongs just smiled at me like I was incoherently blabbering to myself when I asked a simple question about how to get to a department that dealt with crimes against children.
An hour later, and after having been through more than a half dozen doors and been questioned by three or four people with important military stripes on their brown shirts about who I was and what I wanted and where did I work, I finally got to a lawyer for the ministry who arranged for me to get a special police escort to another building a kilometer away where I could talk to the director of the Department of Anti-Human Trafficking. He had what I was after.
My escort was a small man with a melon-shaped head and a desire to be a host among hosts. He insisted on taking me to a mid-afternoon lunch where, of all things, I had hot coffee followed by hot tea while I was sweating my ass off in a stuffy little shithole restaurant without air conditioning. He left me in an office where the person below the director, who I was there to see, was playing a video game while I waited for the better part of an hour and a half with nothing better to do than cuss at myself for not bringing along something to read.
When the director came out, he was accompanied by a woman with short hair and a threatening scowl. Both of them looked like they were headed for battalion headquarters, or perhaps some of the long overdue Pol Pot hearings, now that Pol Pot and so many of his henchmen murderers are dead. Again: who was I and what did I want to know and why...and I said, Well it’s for my students. I always do these things for my students, but I never confess that I’m really dealing with a population of three: me, myself and I.
The director, I would quickly discover, spoke as much English as I speak Cambodian; and I don’t even know how to say hello or thank you. But I was in luck. For his female uniformed assistant—or maybe she was his superior for all I know—didn’t pull any bullshit with me.
I put the back cover of the brochure in front of her face and I read the line about the 2,000 sex offenders, and I said. Who are they?
They are Cambodians, she said. We arrest less than ten foreigners a year.
Shortly, I thanked them for their time, and I headed for the street to find a moto driver to take me to the famous Foreign Correspondents Club where I could get a couple of cold draught beers.
As we sped in and out of traffic and through stop lights, I thought: So at best, two percent of the pedophiles arrested in Cambodia in the last five years have been foreigners. Would one percent of foreigners who read the billboards and signs and ads showing a large white male with a small dark Cambodian girl, and read the bullshit words beneath them, come to a similar conclusion? Or would they believe me if I told them what I had just found?
Then, of course, there are those great truth tellers: the Cambodian National Police who are in the business of protecting their own asses, and their countrymen—more or less. And then, too, all those “native lovers” and male haters at UNICEF and similar self-righteous NGOs.
Stickman's thoughts:
Excellent. I love your determination to cut through the bullshit.
I cannot comment on Cambodia, but here in Thailand there is also a problem with underage women. What is sad is that there is this preconception that the naughty bars that cater to foreigners, particularly the foreign owned bars, never ever have underage girls. Korski would admire me for reporting that that is complete and utter bullshit. I could rattle off the names of half a dozen foreign owned and / or managed bars that have such girls now. And yes, the owners know. Why don't I do something about it? Well, I rather like being alive...and besides, these girls are not there against their will. If they were to lose their job in that bar today, they'd just show up in another bar tomorrow.
The author can be reached at korski1@cox.net.
The author of this website, NOT this article, can be contacted at: stickmanbangkok@gmail.com.
