Sophea’s Journey Through Hell
One Girl’s Human Trafficking Nightmare
By Kerry Decker

They cried, but there was none to save them: even unto the Lord, but he answered them not.            Psalms 18:41

As a young teen, Sophea’s first experience with sex was not with someone whom she thought she loved. A total stranger in a dirty guest house on the road to Siem Reap, the tourist mecca of Cambodia, raped her. When he was done, a second man raped her and brutally beat her when she tried to resist. This was fourteen-year-old Sophea’s introduction to sex.

After this ordeal, the woman who had lured Sophea from her home with the promise of a legitimate job told Sophea not to worry. She said the men paid for the experience. Sophea, however, never saw any of the money and ended up being sold to a brothel where she spent eight months in a living hell.

How did an innocent girl end up in a place like this? It all started with a single incident of domestic violence.  One day when Sophea was in the third grade, her grandfather and mother got into an argument. After being hit, Sophea’s mom ran away to the Thai border, leaving her family behind.

It’s hard enough growing up in a fractured family in the most prosperous country on earth. But growing up destitute and in a broken family in one of the poorest nations on earth can drive people to make desperate decisions.

In order to help her family make ends meet, Sophea took a job as a laborer at a sugarcane farm in Thailand. The adults mistreated her, calling her lazy and blaming her for everything that went wrong. She needed whatever money she could get, but wanted desperately to escape this oppressive situation. One day a man came along speaking her native tongue. He invited Sophea to come to work in Bangkok. She trusted him and went. There she spent the next year working as a laborer and receiving nothing in return. So she called her grandma and asked to come home.

Sometime after returning home, a woman came through her hometown telling about a restaurant in Siem Reap that was hiring responsible girls to wait on tables. The pay was sixty dollars a month. Sophea left with her grandmother’s blessing. And on the way, she found herself at the guesthouse where she was raped and then was sold to the brothel.

The dirty tile floors and windowless cement walls at the brothel resemble prison cells. And in many ways that is what they are for the girls confined there. Whirring ceiling fans provide slight relief from the sweltering tropical heat and humidity. They offer a place for Sophea to fix her attention during the customers’ visits—an endless parade of men morning, noon and night. It’s not uncommon for trafficked girls to be raped seven to fifteen or more times a day for two to five dollars per visit.
Of course, the girls never see this money. Instead, they’re relentlessly reminded of their growing debt for food, clothing, lodging and whatever other charges the brothel owners choose to assign to them. It’s just another scam that the owners use to maintain dominion over their victims. Seldom do victims challenge this extortion. No one speaks out against the crimes that brought them to these places—fraud, kidnapping, rape and more. And any who dare risk fierce retaliation.

At first, Sophea protested being abused. She explained that she had never done such things before. Brutal beatings silenced her protests. To make her compliant, she was locked in a room with no food or toilet. Eventually, her captors forced drugs upon her to manage her. Such techniques are called “seasoning” and these Mengele-like men are expert practitioners of their hideous art. They know how to break the will.

Dehumanized, Sophea was reduced to a body without a soul—an object to be used and used up until she would eventually die or be discarded due to disease or undesirability. Death is often the only escape from this bondage. And Sophea recounts through her tears the time that she reached the point where she entertained killing herself.

Fortunately, she found another way out. One evening, a customer unconsciously left his cell phone on the bed when he went to the restroom. In a moment of clarity, Sophea phoned home and reached her grandmother. She said she was being held at a brothel. Her grandmother notified the authorities.

However, the brothel owners were tipped off and began grilling each of the girls to find out who told. Sophea eventually confessed. Then the brothel owners rounded up the girls and moved them to another location. They decided that Sophea was more trouble than she was worth, so they turned her over to a drug dealer who repeatedly tried to rape her, but eventually decided to give her $2.50 to wash his hands of her and left her to find her own way home.

Today, sixteen-year-old Sophea lives at a safehouse and is studying cosmetology. And dreams are starting to replace her nightmares.

Kerry Decker directs the vocational training program for Rapha House, a safehouse for trafficked and abuse girls in Southeast Asia. www.freedomforgirls.org.

Ten Facts About Human Trafficking and the Sexual Exploitation of Minors

Publisher’s Note
By Mike Bundrant

For months I avoided contacting Kerry Decker about this article. I was uncomfortable with the material.  After reading the first paragraph I told Tobi, who introduced me to Kerry and had been suggesting for some time that we run this as a feature, that I couldn’t publish it. It was just too heavy and I felt sick to my stomach.  No one likes to think about such atrocities perpetrated upon the innocent.  And this is the very reason why it belongs on the front page. We need to wake up.

Just this evening, staring at a Chevron marquis from where we waited in line at the Starbucks drive thru, I expressed shock that gas prices had actually exceeded $4 per gallon. Ok. Who isn't complaining about gas prices?  Yet, how petty and self-absorbed does this manner of thinking seem when compared to the plight of people in the world who actually suffer? We need to get beyond ourselves.

What a blessing it is that people like Kerry Decker, Senior Minister at Pathway Christian Church in Riverside, CA and director of the Rapha House Freedom Foundation, are not avoiding the world’s problems.  Armed with his faith, Kerry regularly travels to Cambodia and actively participates in freeing enslaved girls. Once rescued, the girls are given a safe place to live, rehabilitation, counseling and education.  The Rapha House is an escape from hell into a place of refuge, peace and opportunity.

As I imagine the silent, desperate prayers of these enslaved and brutalized girls, I realize that it is through people like Kerry and those at the Rapha House that their cries for help will be answered.   May the prayers of each young person in need be heard.

I’ve made my first donation. Please visit FreedomForGirls.com and do the same.