Sunday, November 28, 2010

Paying a high price for cheap sex

Prostitutes outside a brothel in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Photograph: Rob Elliott/AFP/Getty Images
MAGAN' WORLD: Manchán Magan’s tales of a travel addict

Saturday, November 27, 2010
IrishTimes.com

HOW MUCH for a really good hooker in Cambodia these days? For a young one, just down from her remote mountain village.

As a travel supplement aimed at helping travellers get the best from their holidays it would be remiss of us not to cover this important tourism growth area. After all, 22 per cent of foreign visitors to Cambodia in 2000 were there for sex; no doubt some may have been Irish Times readers. So, in the interests of catering to readers of all tastes, let’s seek out the best value for yam-yam and bam-bam.

It might help first to take a quick glance at international sex trafficking statistics, as a large proportion of Cambodian sex workers are trafficked in from Vietnam and northern Thailand. The pretty little girl you buy is likely to have been either kidnapped by neighbours or sold by desperate relatives for a few hundred euro.

She will probably have been held in the brothel you found her in, or in some squat belonging to the pimp from whom you bought her, but one needn’t think of it as imprisonment.
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