Last week I had the privilege of attending the launch of the Buying Sex is Not a Sport campaign. Focusing on the 2010 Olympic Games, it is a campaign headed by Resist Exploitation, Embrace Dignity (REED), and seeks to raise awareness of the documented fact of the increase in the sexual exploitation of marginalized women during major sporting events.
Buying sex is not a sport. It is not a game. Buying sex is not a vacation, a hobby or a pastime. It is not glamorous or sexy. Prostitution is not the oldest profession, rather it is the oldest oppression. It is not Pretty Woman. In fact, half of the victims of sexual exploitation are not women at all, but mere children. They are not there by choice, they do not like sex, they do not aspire to this as a career.
Each woman or child is a daughter, sister, mother, friend, who has been oppressed and marginalized in every way imaginable…..poverty, lack of education, childhood sexual abuse, racial discrimination, foster care. Their stories are as numerous as their faces. This is the story, the face of one.
Om is from Laos. She was born to a father who was an alcoholic, a “butterfly” who would go from village to village and woman to woman. He rejected Om from a very young age, never telling her he loved her, and despising her as his daughter. Om’s mother resented this daughter too, never showing her the love she deserved. To her own mother she became a commodity and at 10 years of age, Om was sold by her mother to a much older man in the village. By the time she was 13 she was pregnant. After her son was born her “husband” left her for another woman and Om returned to live with her mother to have help caring for her son.
When her son was 2 years old, Om’s mother sold her again, this time to a trafficker. One night, Om left her village and walked through the night to get to a clearing in the road. There, she was picked up and put in a refrigerator truck with 50 other women. The space was so small that the women sat on each other’s shoulders, stacked two and three high. They drove for hours through Laos to Thailand, where they were taken to Bangkok and put to work in a bar in one of the red light districts.
It was there that Om would stay for 9 days before we met her, sometimes working 10am to 2am every day, dressed up in the outfit provided to her, and sitting perched on a bar stool trying to look sexy, seductive and interested in the men who would leer and assess and buy her.
The young girl in the refrigerator truck. It was only three weeks ago in Thailand that I met this young girl, heard her story firsthand, held her face, heard how her dreams had been stolen from her, and tried to tell her that she is a child of God……loved, honored, valued, respected, cherished.
This isn’t just an anonymous story.
The young girl in the refrigerator truck……she is my friend.
I often wonder how the façade of choice, the belief that ‘she wants it’ or ‘she seduced me’, would hold up against the harsh reality of her story. A story that is repeated a million times over, every day in every part of the world.
By the sheer grace of God, Om is now safe, having had the courage to say yes to the invitation for a better life, a way out. Her journey to Thailand in the back of that truck was a long one; her journey to healing will be even longer.
~Sue Todd