Societal Challenges: Health, Education, and Human Trafficking

After three decades of civil war, Cambodia is still struggling to overcome its past and rebuild its fragile infrastructure, economy, and society. The civil war ended seven years ago, but political troubles and wide-scale corruption still plague the country. Although political and economic instability has decreased recently, Cambodia still has a long way to go in order to meet the standards of its Southeastern Asian neighbors in many arenas. Perhaps the most important of these is in the area of human rights. I’ll explore the human rights issues affecting Cambodia after first taking a brief look at the economy, health, and educational opportunities in the country.

Cambodia is a poor country and 36% of Cambodians live below the poverty line. This can easily be seen by a visit in the countryside. The large majority of families do not have running water, and electricity is a luxury. Water for bathing, the toilet, washing clothing and dishes, etc. is collected in big vats when the rain falls.

Although increased stability has led to increased development in recent years, this has in turn led to an increase in the severity of flooding in Cambodia’s flood plains. This is compounded by the fact that many foreign companies have flocked to Cambodia to cut down the country’s forests (because of limited or non-existent governmental regulation). Humid tropical forests covered 75% of Cambodian territory as late as the 1960’s, but that has decreased to less than 30%. It is hard to imagine this, because when we bike through the countryside, there is virtually no tree cover, apart from a few sugar palms that have been left standing. The resulting flooding due to deforestation and development leads to more damage on the already poor roads, cutting off villages from food supplies, health and educational services, and trade opportunities.

Health conditions are no better than the environmental conditions. Nutrition levels are the worst in Southeast Asia and one-half of children suffer from chronic malnutrition and internal parasites. Many do not eat breakfast before going to school. 44.6% of children under 5 are stunted and 45% are underweight. It is not uncommon to see children in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap hanging out near the markets or sidewalk food stands and restaurants, hoping for money, hand-outs, or leftovers. They often ask for drinks, and the young children at the market in Siem Reap would wait in the distance for us to finish our meals, and if we had a few bites of rice or anything else left on our plates, they would run over and fill up their plastic bag with our leftovers before they were cleared away by someone else.

Cambodia has the lowest utilization of health services in Southeast Asia. Health services are very poor, especially in the countryside. We stop often at the health centers in the villages because they are one of the few places where I may find a toilet, in a country where most of the trees are cut down and it would be immodest for women to satisfy nature’s call in plain public view. And, from having seen many of these health clinics, I can testify to the fact that they are very rustic and hardly have the facilities to care for patients that have even a moderate illness or disease. They are often composed solely of a single room with one cot. Pharmacies, when they can be found, are often in miniscule wooden huts only a few meters square. Supplies and medicines are sorely lacking.

Life expectancy in Cambodia is only 57.92 years (55.49 years for males and 60.47 years for females) . Cambodia has the highest rate of maternal mortality rate in the region, and a whopping 66% of expectant and nursing women are anemic. 12% of females will die before the age of 5, and 24.4% of the population will not reach 40 years of age.

Cambodia has the region’s highest rate of tuberculosis, which spread drastically during the war. They also have the fastest growing HIV/AIDS endemic in Asia, with 50-100 new cases per day. It is often passed from prostitutes to men and from the men to their wives, who then pass it to their children during pregnancy. About 3.5% of the overall population and 33% of prostitutes are affected.

As for education, 60.3% of females and 80.5% of males are literate. Girls and boys start their school years on an equal basis, but as they grow older, girls see their educational opportunities decrease in relation to boys. This is because village temples instruct boys, but not girls. The temples are an important source of learning because only 46% of rural villages have primary schools and only 5.4% have a junior high school. In addition, one-half of the 5000 primary schools in Cambodian villages do not cover the first six grades (theoretically, compulsory education in Cambodia is 6 years). So, although 46% of students in primary school are girls, only 37% of those enrolled in secondary school are girls. Because many students are taken out of school to work, the average 15-year old has still not graduated from elementary school.

As we have seen, girls start out life pretty equal with boys, but see their educational opportunities limited as they grow older. This holds true for employment opportunites and advancement, as well. The status of women is, in fact, a bit ambiguous. Although 20% of them are heads of families and although they are the only ones to work in many families, men hold the overwhelming majority of important posts and have a dominant social role within the family. Women rarely have the same opportunities as men. They may open small shops in their towns or villages, but if they wish to do something else, it becomes more difficult. Women are also victims of marital violence, prostitution, and STDs, which they generally get from their husbands who have had relations with prostitutes.

Unfortunately, the incidence of prostitution, and thus of AIDS, increased drastically during the U.N. presence in the country. Wealthy foreign workers with money to spend led to the high incidence of prostitution in the poor, war-stricken country. In addition, and even worse, the problem of pedophilia increased dramatically at the same time, practiced in large part by foreigners who came to Cambodia to have sex with children because it was legislated against and punished in their own countries.

Although pedophilia committed against Cambodian youngsters by foreigners is a serious problem, there are other problems related to child abuse. Certain families sell their babies for adoption or their children for sex. Some poor families rent their children as beggars, agricultural workers, or street vendors. A large number of child prostitutes in Cambodia are Vietnamese children who were sold from their families in Vietnam. Like adult prostitutes, children are exposed to rape and some of those “responsible” for them make them dependant on heroine or yama (a meta-amphetamine) in order to keep control over them.

Currently, one can see advertisements and pamphlets in tourist areas that advertise against pedophilia and warns that the practice is now considered a crime in Cambodia and can be punished by both the Cambodian government and the offender’s home government with jail terms. Some offenders are currently in jail.

However, the Cambodian government has been accused of not doing nearly enough to eradicate the pedophilia problem, nor the problem of human trafficking. A 2005 U.N. report on the subject has listed Cambodia as having one of the highest incidences of slavery and human trafficking in the world. Human trafficking is a modern-day form of slavery and is among the fastest-growing of criminal activities. Its victims are typically defrauded or forced into prostitution or other forms of commercial sexual exploitation or labor exploitation. It concerns mostly women and children.

The U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report, published in June 2005, states:

Cambodia is a source, destination, and transit country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of sexual exploitation and forced labor. A significant number of Cambodian women and children are trafficked to Thailand and Malaysia for labor and commercial sexual exploitation. Cambodian men are primarily trafficked to Thailand for labor exploitation in the construction and agricultural sectors, particularly the fishing industry. Cambodian children are trafficked to Vietnam and Thailand to work as street beggars. Cambodia is a transit and destination point for women from Vietnam who are trafficked for prostitution.

The Government of Cambodia does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so. Cambodia is placed on Tier 3 for its lack of progress in combating severe forms of trafficking, particularly its failure to convict traffickers and public officials involved in trafficking. Cambodia’s anti-trafficking efforts remained hampered by systemic corruption and an ineffectual judicial system. The government must take aggressive measures to prosecute and convict traffickers and public officials found to be involved in trafficking, and confront the corruption in its judicial system that hampers prosecutions of traffickers.