The skin trade

It is late afternoon and the tourists are drifting into Svay Pak, a squalid shantytown surrounded by rice paddies on the fringes of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. They congregate outside ramshackle cafés, swigging Angkor beer and surveying the wares: the pint-sized prostitutes spilling out of the brothels that line the potholed main street.

There is sex for sale all over Phnom Penh: in nightclubs, pool halls and karaoke bars, even in the cluster of hairdressing shops near the art deco central market. No need to make the 30-minute trek north to Svay Pak along a congested highway, weaving through a jumble of bicycles, dogs and tractors. But Svay Pak offers something special: young girls. Girls barely older than children – and some that are simply children.

Cambodia, once best known for the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime, has acquired a new kind of infamy as the latest haunt of globetrotting paedophiles. Gary Glitter, the 1970s glam-rock star, who was jailed for four months in November 1999 for downloading child pornography from the internet, was deported from Phnom Penh last month, but less prominent offenders have little to fear in a nation where poverty is rife and corruption rampant. Glitter, whose real name is Paul Gadd, served two months. He moved to Cambodia a year ago and set up home with a young Khmer girl and her mother. After a public outcry stirred up by the British tabloids, he moved to neighbouring Vietnam, but slipped back into the country before Christmas.

His reappearance underscored the international dimensions of the problem. Crackdowns in the West, with the establishment of sex-offender registers and stricter monitoring of people working with children, are driving abusers abroad.

Cambodia, despite being a signatory to international conventions against the trafficking and exploitation of children, allows the trade to operate quite brazenly. In Svay Pak, where hens pick in the dirt and ragamuffins play in puddles, child prostitution is a thriving industry. Twenty brothels, each sealed by a padlocked iron grille, line the narrow, rutted track that runs through the village. Step into any of the brick and concrete buildings, and the papasan – pimp – will produce a girl or boy to suit every whim. Oral sex in one of the sweaty plywood cubicles costs $5 (£3.20); $500 buys a six-year-old for a week.

Across the road, in a café set up by enterprising locals, the English menu offers fish and chips and baked beans on toast. The tourists seated around the battered Formica tables greet each other like kindred spirits; they range from pale-faced backpackers to men in their sixties. The air is full of American drawls and Australian twangs – and the unmistakable sound of a Geordie accent can be heard.

Several girls in skin-tight trousers and spaghetti-strap tops are dancing around a group of Japanese men, giggling and flirting, sitting on their knees. A waif in a pyjama-like outfit whispers in the ear of a prospective punter, suggesting "boom-boom" (intercourse) or "yum-yum" (oral sex). "Very good, very nice," she promises, massaging his shoulders, then leans over and kisses him firmly on the mouth.

The prostitutes look no older than 12 or 13, but there are younger models inside the brothels, where the girls are instructed to lift up their tops and skirts to show off their childish bodies to customers. "That's why foreigners like Svay Pak," says Om Cham Roeun, who makes a living from whisking tourists around Phnom Penh on the back of his motorbike. "Very young girls, very small girls, and no one cares. Why should they? It's good money."

A moped draws up and two Englishmen alight. They are plainly regulars; the adolescent waiter brings their drinks without being asked. One sports a greasy ponytail and floral shirt; the other has a beer gut spilling over safari shorts and a sunburnt neck. Ponytail is planning to visit Angkor Wat, Cambodia's famed ancient temple complex. Sunburnt Neck snorts with derision. "That's just a load of old stones," he says. "I'm telling you, this is the place to be."

After draining their Cokes, the men disappear inside a dimly-lit doorway, through which candles can be glimpsed flickering in a Buddhist shrine. A few minutes later, a uniformed police officer saunters up to the metal grille and is given an envelope by the Vietnamese pimp slouching outside. The bribe changes hands in broad daylight. The policeman swaggers off.

The girls are, in effect, sex slaves; they receive no money, only food, and armed guards stop them running away. Yet the trade operates with virtual impunity, thanks to high-level political protection and the connivance of corrupt police and judges. With much of the lucrative industry controlled by senior police and military officers, successful prosecutions are rare. Evidence is mysteriously lost, brothels are tipped off before raids, and pimps slip their handcuffs on the way to court.

Only three foreigners have been convicted of paedophile offences over the years, including a British former headteacher, John Keeler, who threw a chair across court, shouting that he had been promised an acquittal after paying the judge $3,000 (£2,000). Keeler, who spent a year behind bars in Phnom Penh after being convicted in November 2000, was caught making pornographic videos with young girls in a park.

However, most offenders manage to buy their way out of trouble, according to Pierre Legros, the director of AFESIP, a French charity that rescues child prostitutes. "It's anarchy, total anarchy," he says. "If the police did their job properly, they could arrest 50 paedophiles a day. As it is, a perpetrator gets to court and the evidence has been burnt. Of those that are jailed, most are released after a few months."

AFESIP and other agencies working in the field are frustrated by the flagrant failure of law enforcement. "Sometimes we have all the evidence, but no one will pursue the case because the brothels are run by powerful people," says Sun Sothy, the director of the Cambodian Women's Crisis Centre. "Or the police have someone in custody, then they get a call from high up telling them to release him or else."

In one incident last year, 14 Vietnamese girls aged from 10 to 13 were removed from the Svay Pak brothels after an undercover investigation by AFESIP. When the matter came before a judge, he ordered the girls to be arrested and deported as illegal immigrants. One of the brothel owners, meanwhile, was handcuffed and put in a police car. By the time the car arrived at the police station, she had vanished.

Legros claims that a senior cabinet minister is involved in the trade. "If I give you the name, I'm dead," he says. It is no empty boast. He and his wife, Somaly Mam, receive regular death threats and their house was firebombed in 1998 by a vengeful pimp. His wife has been followed and threatened by armed men on three occasions. At one stage, she was forced to seek refuge in neighbouring Laos.

The AFESIP centre in Tuol Kok, a suburb of Phnom Penh, is surrounded by a high metal barrier crowned with barbed wire. Security guards patrol the entrance. Just inside, in a shady courtyard, two young girls play on a swing under a mango tree. In a downstairs room, a dozen girls are bent industriously over sewing machines. A literacy class is in progress next door.

The centre is a place of sanctuary for former child sex workers, who are given medical and psychological help and taught vocational skills. AFESIP has a second base in Kompong Chang, on the Mekong River, and has just opened a third in the tourist town of Siem Reap, near the Angkor temples. A recent survey found that 70 per cent of children in Siem Reap had been approached by foreigners asking for sex, or knew someone who had been approached.

Chantala is not sure how old she is; possibly 14. She has the look of a frightened animal and is unable to meet a stranger's gaze, staring at the floor and kicking her bare feet. A few years ago, a woman approached her aunt and offered to employ the little girl as a live-in cleaner at a shop in Phnom Penh. Her impoverished family quickly agreed. The shop turned out to be a brothel. Her first client was a Chinese man. "He wanted sex with me. I said no," she says in a barely audible whisper. "He beat me until I was nearly unconscious, then he tore my clothes off and raped me. Afterwards the boss of the brothel ordered me to have sex with many men. When I said no, I don't want to, he screamed at me and put a gun to my head.

"I worked most days from 9am until 3am. Sometimes I was sick and the boss cursed me and said I'd be a prostitute until I died because I owed him so much money. One day a man came and took me to a village outside Phnom Penh. When we got there, there were 10 men waiting for me. I had to have sex with all of them. I was taken to the same place many times again."

There are worse stories. Avy, an eight-year-old girl living in AFESIP's Kompong Chang centre, was sold into the sex trade after being raped by her stepfather and nine other men. She was hit across the face and given electric shocks when she refused to have sex with clients. When she grew sleepy after working long hours, the pimp thrust chillies in her eyes.

A Unicef survey concluded that 35 per cent of Cambodia's 55,000 prostitutes are under 16. "We believe the figure is even higher," says Sao Chhoeurth, AFESIP's technical co-ordinator. "We find the girls are getting younger. There used to be people in their twenties working in the industry. Now the oldest girls are teenagers."

The trend is fuelled by a growing demand for virgins, who – according to a widely-held belief in Cambodia – bring good luck and long life to the men who deflower them as well as eliminating the danger of HIV infection. Sex workers are not allowed to insist that clients use condoms. Not surprisingly, up to half of them are believed to be HIV-positive. Some of the younger girls are stitched up in hospital and sold on to other brothels so they can once again be presented as virgins.

Many of the girls working in Svay Pak and other centres of child prostitution are trafficked from rural villages. Some of them – like Chantala – are lured by false promises of jobs. Most are illiterate, and easy prey for the networks of recruiters set up in rural communities. Others are sold to brothels by parents so poor that they are willing to sacrifice an older girl in order to feed the rest of their children.

Cambodia is the hub of a people-trafficking racket with tentacles stretching across South-east Asia and links with several Asian mafias. Many of the country's underage prostitutes are from Vietnam, while Cambodia supplies girls to countries in the region as well as to Japan and Europe.

Poverty, corruption and lack of education have created the perfect environment for the trade to flourish. Some believe that Cambodia's turbulent past is another factor; 30 years of civil war have left a fractured nation with a weak institutional infrastructure and confused notions of right and wrong. "We are a brutalised, damaged society," says Sun Sothy. "Why else do we treat our children like this?"

The industry is not fed by tourists alone. Visiting brothels is an acceptable practice in a country where women are expected to be virgins when they get married. Sex with young girls is regarded as a perk of power and privilege; those girls, of course, will never get married. "A virgin is very stimulating, you know?" explains Brasil, an agriculture student in the southern town of Kampot. "But after a girl loses her virginity, she's finished, no one will love her. A boy, on the other hand, is always 100 per cent golden."

This is the muddled morality that Western paedophiles are exploiting with glee. Svay Pak, once just an anonymous village, is now extolled in the darker recesses of the internet. Websites set up by regulars give directions, as well as offering stomach-churning reviews of children in the various brothels. Svay Pak's pimps even deliver to central hotels. One Italian man had 11 girls dropped off at his room in three batches.

Cambodia is a relatively new travel destination, only deemed safe since Pol Pot died in 1998, prompting the remaining Khmer Rouge guerrillas to lay down their arms. The tourism industry has grown rapidly since then, with 400,000 people – including 18,000 Britons – visiting last year. The child sex trade, once tiny, is now booming. The Tourism Ministry estimates that one-quarter of visitors are sex tourists. "More and more foreigners are coming for this reason," says Somaly Mam, adding bitterly: "Cute temples, cute children."

Ecpat, an international network that campaigns against child prostitution, says that Cambodia's sex tourists are seasoned travellers. "They've been to Thailand, they've been to the Philippines and they're looking for new frontiers," says Bernadette McMenamin, the director of Ecpat's Australian branch. "These are men who see children as a commodity. To them, they're fresh meat."

Mary Robinson, the former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, criticised the exploitation of children when she went to Cambodia last year. Lord Puttnam, who produced the 1984 film about the civil war, The Killing Fields, also highlighted the problem while visiting the country this month in his new role as the president of Unicef UK. Western aid workers, however, say there is no political will to crack down. "It's clear that the Cambodian government doesn't care about its own citizens," says Legros.

The onus is on Western countries to prosecute perpetrators for sex offences committed abroad. However, only one Briton, 53-year-old Mark Towner, has been convicted since the relevant legislation was passed in 1997. In June 2001, Towner was jailed for eight years by Maidstone Crown Court for abusing children in Cambodia. McMenamin calls Britain's record "pathetic". No doubt Chantala, Avy and thousands of other girls, if they knew the situation, would agree.