One Child's Life Saved, Another Movement Towards Justice in Cambodia

My blog focuses more on individual cases of child labor, as opposed to my midterm that encompassed the issue on a grander scale (i.e. factory busts and accusations). Here we have another case of an 11-year-old Cambodian girl, Soam Srey Neang, who was sold by her adopted grandmother to a wealthy couple in the same country for the equivalent of US$400. She was forced to do domestic house work, such as cleaning floors, doing laundry and cut the grass, while being beaten with pincers, clothes hangers, brooms, whips and electric wires, according to Pean Rathamanith, a senior monitor for children’s rights at the rights group Licadho. Look to the right; she has the scars to prove it.

Several things strike me about this article. The first is the thoroughness of the original article from The Phnom Penh Post, Cambodia’s Newspaper of Record as they call it. What I’m noticing is the individual cases that are being dealt with, like others I’ve posted on this blog, are well represented and publicized in the country where it’s happening. This is immediately sparking change in the way these countries view child labor with regards to human rights. Even in this article, the police came to rescue Soam Srey Neang, the police came to arrest her “parents,” and even the last quote is blatant disapproval of the circumstances by a government official.

“A child labour programme officer from the International Labour Organisation, who declined to be named because he was not authorised to comment on the case, said he was “shocked” to read of the girl’s plight but argued that the arrest was a sign that the government and law enforcement officials were taking proactive steps to fight child labour.”

The next day, The Phnom Penh Post had an update story naming Soam Srey Neang’s owners, quoting new sources on their thoughts about the outcome of the case and updating readers on the girl’s status. It even included a photo of the suspects.

After searching Soam Srey Neang on global news media organizations’ websites (NYTimes.com, BBC.com, CNN.com and MSNBC.com), only the latter had any sort of mention of this story. And all it had was a link to the story by The Phnom Penh Post, but not one to the follow up. After searching Google, the results aside from the original story were video and audio clips for a singer with the same last name. One German website, ShortNews.com, had a 100-word feature of the story covering the basic facts, but that was it. No follow up.

A trend that the case of Soam Srey Neang reinforces is the ‘why’ of all the subjugation of young children. Why do parents abandon their children? Why do people sell children? How can a life cost only US$400?  

Poverty. Hands down, no questions asked; in every situation where an individual child is exploited, recognized or rescued, they were put into that situation involuntarily because their families’ monetary need. I guess the real question is, how can we give these families something more to live for? How can we assist them for less than the cost of their child’s life?