GETTING IT WRONG - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 86

rarely meet girls over twenty-six years of age in a brothel. That is the life cycle for sex tour-
ism.”
We spotted some single foreign men nosing around a café that fronts for a brothel in the
club district. The Soul Club was on the right. Dunne remembered a particularly difficult
investigation in the area that included several well-paid informants spending lots of hours
gathering evidence, presenting the evidence to the police, shepherding them through a
raid and finally freeing the underage girls.
I asked why he didn't just buy the young prostitutes from the brothel. “First rule— never
buy a girl. It only keeps the system going and encourages other families to sell their chil-
dren,” said Dunne.
Dunne had high praise for a Cambodian general recently appointed director of the gov-
ernment's juvenile section antitrafficking division. “He's good, but he can't prevent all the
snitches from tipping off the brothel owners about a raid.”
The rescue is only the beginning. The difficult task of rehabilitation of the children
takes years. That is done by several charities at a cost of $800 a month for long-term care
of as much as eight years or short-term care at $1,200 a month over two or three years.
“Often we can't send the girls back to their families because that would risk the family
exploiting them all over again. They depended on the girls for their livelihoods. We have a
program to train the families to find other methods of employment and to reintegrate their
daughters. Sometimes they do return to their families.”
Since 2005, Dunne's group has rescued 406 children from brothels and helped invest-
igate 186 sex violators. As the sun set and the clubs began to open, Dunne pointed to the
right. “Look—that corner with the children—they could easily be underage prostitutes.
That would never be permitted in Thailand. Here, the police and courts are far more cor-
rupt,” he said.
We saw foreigners ducking into a doorway that Dunne said led to a brothel. “It costs a
tourist twenty dollars for a night; it costs us at least twenty thousand dollars to rescue the
girl and put her on the road to recovery.”
The supply of those girls seems endless. As more families are thrown off their land, as
rural Cambodia is left behind and the urban elite prospers, poor young girls have few op-
tions other than “tourism.” The youngsters are sent to tourist spots to sell trinkets, where
their families end up selling them.