Pooja Shali

Very similar to Cambodia. I was in Cambodia recently, advising an NGO that rescues girls from traffickers. I walked those streets in Phnom Penh. Bars with little children standing outside, forced to sell themselves. You lose faith in humanity after seeing children held as sex slaves. And old, washed-up men lusting after them. I learned the history of how this started. In the early 1990s, Cambodia was emerging from two decades of hell. The Khmer Rouge had killed nearly two million people. Civil war followed. The UN sent some 20,000 peacekeepers under UNTAC in 1991 to oversee the transition to democracy. They brought money, power, and demand. Before UNTAC arrived, Cambodia had about 6,000 sex workers. By 1993, when the mission ended, that number had exploded to over 25,000. The UN’s own reports documented peacekeepers buying sex from women and children. When the head of UNTAC, Yasushi Akashi, was confronted about it, his response became infamous: “Boys will be boys.” The full quote is worse. “Eighteen-year-old hot-blooded soldiers who come in from the field after working hard should be able to chase after young, beautiful beings of the opposite sex.” The leadership did not shut it down. They told peacekeepers not to wear uniforms when visiting brothels and not to park UN vehicles directly outside. When an HIV epidemic broke out and increased demand for younger girls on the assumption that they were disease-free, the UN’s response was to ship 800,000 condoms to Cambodia. When UNTAC left, the infrastructure of exploitation remained. Brothel owners discovered they could make more money catering to foreign tourists and local pedophiles wanting sex with children. Cambodia became known on international pedophile networks as “the new frontier.” By the early 2000s, officials estimated the average age of sex workers in Phnom Penh was 15. Akashi was never removed. He was promoted. He went on to serve as UN Special Representative in Bosnia. He received Sri Lanka’s highest national honor for foreign nationals. Thirty years later, the boys are gone. Now it is all old men. The children are still there.