Seth Rath, Cambodian teenager at aged 15, when her family ran out of money; she decided to go work as a dishwasher in Thailand for two months to help pay the bills.
Her parents fretted about her safety, but they were reassured when Rath arranged to travel with four friends who had been promised jobs in the same Thai restaurant. The job agent took the girls deep into Thailand and then handed them to gangsters who took them to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia.
At first Rath was dazzled by her first glimpses of the city’s clean avenues and gleaming high-rises, (tallest twin buildings); But then thugs sequestered Rath and two other girls inside a karaoke lounge that operated as a brothel.
One gangster in his late thirties, a man known as “the boss,” took charge of the girls and explained that he had paid money for them and that they would now be obliged to repay him. The boss forces them to find money to pay off the debt, and then he will send them back home.
The boss locked her up with a customer, who tried to force her to have sex with him. Whenever she fought back, enraging the customer, the boss got angry and hit me in the face, first with one hand and then with the other. The mark stayed on her face for two weeks then the boss and the other gangsters raped her and beat her with their fists, while warning them “You have to serve the customers. If not, we will beat you to death. Do you want that?” Rath stopped protesting, but she sobbed and refused to cooperate actively.
The boss forced her to take a pill; the gangsters called it “the happy drug” or “the shake drug.” That made her head shake and induced lethargy, happiness, and compliance for about an hour. When she wasn’t drugged, Rath was teary and insufficiently compliant—she was required to beam happily at all customers—so the boss said he would waste no more time on her:
She would agree to do as he ordered or he would kill her. Rath then gave in. The girls were forced to work in the brothel seven days a week, fifteen hours a day. They were kept naked to make it more difficult for them to run away or to keep tips or other money, and they were forbidden to ask customers to use condoms.
They were battered until they smiled constantly and simulated joy at the sight of customers, because men would not pay as much for sex with girls with reddened eyes and haggard faces. The girls were never allowed out on the street or paid a penny for their work.
“They just gave us food to eat, but they didn’t give us much because the customers didn’t like fat girls,” Rath says. The girls were bused, under guard, back and forth between the brothel and a tenth-floor apartment where a dozen of them were housed. The door of the apartment was locked from the outside. However, one night, some of the girls went out onto their balcony and pried loose a long, five-inch-wide board from a rack used for drying clothes. They balanced it precariously between their balcony and one on the next building, twelve feet away. The board wobbled badly, but Rath was desperate, so she sat astride the board and gradually inched across.
“There were four of us who did that,” she says. “The others were too scared, because it was very rickety. I was scared, too, and I couldn’t look down, but I was even more scared to stay. We thought that even if we died, it would be better than staying behind. If we stayed, we would die as well.”
Once on the far balcony, the girls pounded on the window and woke the surprised tenant. They could hardly communicate with him because none of them spoke Malay, but the tenant let them into his apartment and then out its front door. The girls took the elevator down and wandered the silent streets until they found a police station and stepped inside. The police first tried to shoo them away, then arrested the girls for illegal immigration.
Rath served a year in prison under Malaysia’s tough anti-immigrant laws, and then she was supposed to be repatriated. She thought a Malaysian policeman was escorting her home when he drove her to the Thai border—but then he sold her to a trafficker, who peddled her to a Thai brothel.
The owners of the Thai brothel to which Rath was sold did not beat her and did not constantly guard her. So two months later, she was able to escape and make her way back to Cambodia.
Upon her return, Rath met a social worker who put her in touch with an aid group that helps girls who have been trafficked start new lives.
The group, American Assistance for Cambodia, used $400 in donated funds to buy a small cart and a starter selection of goods so that Rath could become a street peddler. She found a good spot in the open area between the Thai and Cambodian customs offices in the border town of Poipet. Travelers crossing between Thailand and Cambodia walk along this strip, the size of a football field, and it is lined with peddlers selling drinks, snacks, and souvenirs
In 2008, Rath turned her cart into a stall, and then also acquired the stall next door. She also started a “public phone” business by charging people to use her cell phone
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| Rath holding her son |
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