Helen
Sworn
Chab
Dai Coalition
PO
Box 1185
Phnom
Penh
Cambodia
5th March 2013
5th March 2013
Dear
Helen
In
2008 I wrote to you expressing my concerns regarding the manner in which a Chab
Dai coalition member (Citipointe church) had removed two girls from the care of
their family, contrary to the express wishes of the girls’ parents. The mother
Chanti’s many requests to have her daughters returned to her care were met with
a combination of promises by the church that they soon would be returned and a
refusal to return them.
Citipointe
church’s ‘She Rescue Home’ was, at the
time, and remains, a ‘refuge’ ostensibly set up primarily to take care of girls
who were victims of Human Trafficking or who had been rescued from the sex
trade. Neither Rosa nor Chita were victims of Human Trafficking. There were
merely the daughters who a poor woman who had accepted Citipointe church’s
offer of interim care. Nor were Rosa and Chita at risk of being trafficked.
I
wrote to you in 2008 only because Citipointe kept referring to Chab Dai to justify
its actions, stating that the church was merely acting in accordance with Chab
Dai protocols. At the time I had known the mother, Chanti, for 14 years and had
knows the girls – Rosa and Chita – for pretty much all of their lives.
You
responded to my expressed concerns with the following:
Dear Mr Ricketson
Please be informed that I will not be in
correspondence with you regarding this case.
Citipointe are a member of Chab Dai and
are autonomous in their own right as an organisation. They are carrying
out a good program here in Cambodia and I am certainly not at liberty
or legally able to share information on cases of children within their
care. As a member of Chab Dai, they believe, as we do in the protection
of children and the desire for children to be cared for by their families in the
community as the first option for any child.
Regardless of your history with the
family, you do not live here in Cambodia and you clearly do not understand the
complexities of the issues we or our members are dealing with on a daily
basis.
Yours sincerely
The italics have been added by me.
With
18 years of experience in Cambodia now, acquired over around 30 or so visits, I
am not totally without insight in the nature of the problems confronting the
people of Cambodia – one of which is the wholesale removal of children from the
care of their materially poor families to feed the appetite of ‘poverty
tourists’ to visit ‘orphanages’ and convincing themselves that they are
‘helping’ Cambodia’s poor.
How
did you know in 2008 that Citipointe was ‘carrying out a good program’? Do you
still believe that Citipointe is carrying out a good program? Does Chab Dai
believe that the following constitute evidence of a ‘good program’?
- Citipointe’s refusal to provide
the mother of children removed from her care with copies of any of the
contracts or agreements the church has entered into since 2008 with either the
Cambodian Ministries of Foreign or Social Affairs – contracts that provide
legal justification for the church’s refusal to return the girls to their
family?
- Citipointe’s presentation of Rosa
and Chita as victims of Human Trafficking despite the fact that the church
knows ,and has acknowledged, that they are not? (Only in Alice in Wonderland
and Orwellian worlds can a victim be ‘deemed’ to be a victim simply with the
stroke of some bureaucrats pen!)
- Citipointe’s use of alleged victims of Human Trafficking
in the church’s care as tourist attractions – each ‘poverty tourist’ enriching
the church’s coffers whilst not one cent of this money flows to the family of
the two alleged ‘victims’.
- Citipointe’s refusal to allow
girls in its care from a practicing Buddhist family to attend or take part in
any Buddhist or Cambodian festivals, combined with its insistence that the girls
attend a Christian church regularly.
- Citipointe’s refusal to allow
Rosa and Chita to attend any family gatherings, including two recent weddings
of their father’s sisters in Prey Veng.
- Citipointe’s refusal to allow
Rosa and Chita to visit their extended family in Prey Veng on even one occasion
this past close to five years.
- Limiting the access of the
Chanti to her daughters and Rosa and Chita to their immediate family to a
couple of hours of supervised visits a month?
- Providing no material support
whatsoever for the family of the girls in care other than the opportunity to
earn 25 cents per bracelets for a product that the Chab Dai coalition member
then sells for $3.
- Citipointe’s staff never once,
over a period of close to five years, visiting the family or community into
which the children are to be reintegrated. (The same applies forthe4 Ministry
of Social Affairs. Not one visit!)
- Citipointe’s never once, in close
to five years, making any effort to even begin the reintegration process.
- Citipointe’s allowing the
remainder of the family of the girls in the church’s care to fall so deeply
into poverty that the children are suffering from malnutrition?
- Citipointe’s refusal to provide
the mother of the children in the church’s care with medical assistance when
she has a tumour on her wrist (cost of removal, $60) or when, 8 months
pregnant, she has a fever owing to pneumonia and needs to go to hospital. Cost
of hospitalization: around $200. (Had Chanti’s fever gone untreated, the baby’s
life may have been at risk and, as a result, Chanti’s also.)
If
these initiatives on the part of Citipointe (or should I say, lack of
initiatives) constitutes what Chab Dai considers to be ‘good care’ I shudder to
think what ‘bad care’ might look like.
If,
for some reason, all of the above manifestations of a ‘bad program’ have
escaped your attention, will Chab Dai now ask Citipointe to address the points
I have made? Will, for instance, Chab Dai insist that its coalition member
supply the mother, Chanti, with documents relating to the loss of her two
daughters? Or does Chab Dai believe that a poor Cambodian mother has no such
rights?
In
1995, when I first visited Cambodia, several experienced observers referred to Phnom Penh as “the pedophile
capital of the world.” Now I think that Phnom Penh is probably vying for the
title, “Orphanage capital of the world” – the supply of ‘orphans’ growing to
meet the demand of ‘poverty tourists’ whose dollars fill the coffers of the
NGOs that conduct such tours.
There
are many things wrong with orphanages – especially when three quarters of the
orphans in them are not orphans at all but merely the children of poor parents.
But one thing that is particularly wrong with orphanages and such like
organizations committed to ‘rescuing’ children, and which I would have thought
would have been blindingly obvious to Chab Dai, is that it is not just
culturally insensitive to exploit girls who are allegedly victims of Human
Trafficking as tourist attractions (as Citipointe does) but that it is also
psychologically and emotionally damaging to the girls to be treated like
animals in a zoo. Why does Chab Dai tolerate such behavior on the part of
Citipointe church? Indeed, why does Chab
Dai allow such behavior on the part of any of its members. Imagine if, in the
United States or Australia or anywhere other than in the Third World, NGOs
tried to conduct tours of refuges for rape or sexual abuse victims and to make
money from such tours! In the West such behavior would be viewed and treated as
the grossest form of human rights violation. And yet, in Cambodia, it is OK!
Really,
Helen, Chab Dai cannot simply sit on the fence here. Either Chab Dai supports
‘poverty tourism’ or it doesn’t. With 50
coalition members Chab Dai is in a very good position to (a) ban the practice of
‘poverty tourism’ amongst its members and (b) exert its moral authority to
induce all NGOs in Cambodia to stop conducting such tours. I suspect that with
the effective banning of ‘poverty tourism’ a lot of so called ‘orphanages’
would close and that there would be, as a result, less incentive for poor
families to send their kids to Phnom Penh to become ‘orphans’.
Excuse
me for belabouring the point but:
Does Chab Dai condone the
practice of ‘poverty tourism’ in which young girls like Rosa and Chita become
tourist attractions whilst coalition members such as Citipointe make money out
of such tours without passing any of the money raised on to the family of the
girls? Is this form of exploitation condoned by Chab Dai!
Rosa
and Chita have been deprived of their liberty and Chanti has been denied her
rights as a mother to care for her own children – with no reasons given to her
and no legal documents provided to her so that she can understand why her
children have been removed, or what she must do to have them returned. Other
than the fact that Rosa and Chita are not (presumably) being sexually abused at
the She Rescue Home, there is not that much difference between theirs and their
mother’s plight and those of girls that really are the victims of Human
Trafficking. It could be argued, however, that exploiting Rosa and Chita and
the other girls at the She Rescue Home as tourist attractions is a human rights
abuse in itself.
Despite
your insistence that you will not communicate with me, I would welcome a
response from you to this letter. I am doing so as Chanti’s advocate and on the
basis of a legal document a copy of which Citipointe has in its possession.
best
wishes
James
Ricketson
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