Anderson Cooper Tackles Child Prostitution, Elephants, and Giant Squids
Suki (star girl)
April 06, 2007
CNN journalist Anderson Cooper and his news crew recently spent a week in Cambodia and Bangkok reporting on the trafficking in humans and animals. One extremely good aspect that came out of all this was the profiling of Somaly Mam, a Cambodian woman who was sold into prostitution as a child and who escaped and now rescues other girls, many just five or six years old, and most of them, sadly enough, already infected with AIDS. It is hoped that this publicity may garner her beyond-courageous, one-woman effort some financial support from women elsewhere whose lives are so much easier than hers has been. It is also hoped that the international publicity may afford her more protection since her life has been threatened by brothel owners.
Cooper is also to be commended for highlighting child prostitution in an American city, Atlanta, where, he points out, young girl children may be raped as many as 40 times a night by grown male customers. This segment suggests that the men we call ‘johns’ or customers are really rapists—a useful contention since, in my view—as you may know from my many other articles on this site--any buying of any body, no matter what the age of the female, is an act of rape. Prostitution always involves exploitation of the weak by the strong and it reinforces the idea that a woman or girl is a piece of property and that she is worth less than a man. Whether it be Atlanta or Bangkok, it is the same orifice being raped, and the same attitudes that degrade women apply. So, it was with great happiness that I found some echo of my idea that the ‘buyer’ is a rapist, even though the idea was just being applied to this one situation—the child prostitute as rape victim—rather than more broadly.
Unfortunately, Cooper only focused on child prostitution. He failed to mention that many girls in Cambodia and Bangkok were sold into the trade as children, making them just as much victims as the younger ones. And there was not one profile of or word from any of the older girls forced into this industry due to the usual reasons: poverty, coercion from family members, lack of alternatives, lack of education, exploitation by pimps who misrepresent the work the girl is being hired for—the picture is familiar by now—a depressing situation of taking advantage of the most vulnerable entity in the world: a young, poor, often unprotected female.
I sent Mr.Cooper feedback at CNN. I always like to offer journalists--and the world--large, idealistic solutions to problems. Solutions that have a sure-fire chance of success—if anyone would listen to me. One solution: Instead of waging a futile war in Iraq, why not have our soldiers out there doing something useful, like breaking down the doors of Cambodian pimps, and taking these little girls out of sexual bondage?
I also mentioned to Mr. Cooper that, although I appreciated his efforts to cover a taboo subject, the analysis of the situation was rather on-the-surface. It was not the 360˚ that the title of his show implies. Rather it was a tiny slice. He should have also gone into the heavy frequenting of brothels by local men in Thailand and Cambodia. The average Thai male rapes at least thirty different brothelized prostitutes before he marries a ‘nice’ Thai girl. As in Japan, in Cambodia visiting a brothel and raping an enslaved body is simply a commonplace night out for roughly 80% of the men in that country—of no more importance than buying a bag of potato chips or fish chips. I wish, too, that Mr. Cooper had covered the practice of ‘bauking,’ in Cambodia: purchasing of one prostitute by a group of young men (any where from 3 to 10, many of them college students) and then they all serially rape the girl—usually more than once. The girl screams and cries but the men don’t stop and the poor girl may be raped 30 times a night. I would say to Mrs. Cooper: Don’t just target Western tourists—or pedophiles, but also, as in the case of Thailand, visiting militaries—mostly a lot of drunk rough servicemen out for a good time. Please enlighten the public about all these other aspects of the sex trade in Cambodia and Thailand, Mr. Cooper.
At one point, Mr. Cooper expressed great surprise that children were being sold in brothels. As a well-educated and experienced journalist, surely, he must have seen this going on around the world: the current exploitation extends far beyond Southeast Asia. Saudi Arabia has roughly half a million children being held in sexual slavery; Dubai is another hot spot in that part of the world for child prostitutes. And Mr. Cooper must have witnessed, in Bombay, the four-year-old whores painted up like sad little harlots in that city’s huge red-light district. In the many war zones he’s been in, he must be familiar with the prostituting of the vulnerable (women, girls, and children) to occupying soldiers. What surprised me is that he expressed surprise. This misleads the public into thinking that the plight of Somaly Mam’s charges is unusual—whereas it is, sadly, commonplace. In the aftermath of the Tsunami, Mr. Cooper must have noted the trafficking and exploitation of homeless children. What was surprising about finding child prostitution in Cambodia?
What is surprising, of course, is that so little is being done about it, or about the enslavement of females of all ages. Cooper’s crew could have put a hidden cameras in their shirts and gone into brothels and filmed the girls being raped by customers. Better yet, they could have taken the girls out of their rape prisons. There is no justifying the ‘ethics of objectivity.’ You do not leave a girl’s body suffering under the cruelty of serial rapists everyday.
I also asked him about the sexual behavior of journalists abroad. One I know personally who is currently living in Malaysia says that journalists frequently take advantage of the ‘sexual perks’ offered in Southeast Asia. A journalist may do a story about sexual exploitation in Bangkok and then turn around and buy a bargirl. I am not saying, of course, that any specific member of Mr. Cooper’s crew may be buying girls. I hope they are not, and that their compassion for the enslaved extends to the grown-up prostitutes as well, who are also horrendously exploited. But, if his men are typical, I would like to know what they’re up to when they travel the world, uncovering ‘exploitation.’ If any journalists anywhere, on any news crews, buy girls, they are contributing to the suffering they are supposed to be trying to reveal. If they buy prostitutes who are eighteen or older, the girls may have been sold into the trade as children and that if they have survived the rape, diseases, beatings, roughness of customers, etc., they are massively damaged, both physically and psychologically. They have never known another life so that ‘choice’ of any sort cannot be presumed about their lifestyle. Buying them is as terrible as buying the children.
It has always puzzled me that, up to age 17, 11 months, and 29 days, the girl is an exploited victim because she is underage; and then when she turns 18, she automatically becomes a ‘whore’ who deserves her fate, even though she was forced into the trade many years before any age of consent was possible. It makes no sense—compassionate, humane, or otherwise.
One of his reporters, Dan Rivers, a British journalist working for CNN in Bangkok, has also traveled with the Royal Navy. All navies move from port to port and from brothel to brothel. If Mr. Rivers saw this kind of exploitation, as he went from port to port, I would like to have this kind of reporting from him, about the sexual suffering of the enslaved when navies dock, as well as what he says about child prostitution in Cambodia. This would have broadened out the prostitution picture in a necessary direction.
For the Cooper team, Mr. Rivers covered the story of Srey, a six-year-old ex-prostitute rescued by Somaly Mam. Unfortunately, he called Srey a ‘sex worker.’ I can assure Mr. Rivers, from personal experience, that having the insides raped out of you is not work.
This term, sex worker, is in common use, fashionable, and it should be abolished. It is an abomination to classify little Srey and all the rest of these girls with their rape-battered bodies and destroyed lives as ‘workers.’ The phrase ‘sex work’ cannot convey the reality that Srey experienced. It is not remotely accurate to call having rapists shove their penises in you ‘work.’ The term ‘sex worker’ is cold and sterile and inaccurate. I also object to ‘trafficking’—another sterile word that parades around as if it were something ‘new’ on the scene. Trafficking is prostitution, enforced sex, sex performed on an enslaved body, and this is nothing new. Men and poverty have inflicted this form of rape on us for centuries. Why pretend that prostitution is something new by disguising it behind a fancy new word like ‘trafficking.’
Mr. Cooper also paid attention to the plight of animals in Bangkok and Cambodia. These creatures are as helpless as the trafficked girls. I was, however, surprised to see, in one segment, a bull hook being used on an elephant at a place that was purported to be a ‘sanctuary’ for these animals. The bull hook is a heavy stick with a curved thick nail-like sharp projection at one end that is used to control elephants through pain and fear. Trainers jab the elephants in sensitive areas—inside the ears, in the genitals. Mr. Cooper could have pointed out that all captive elephants in Thailand, and around the world, have been broken through pain and terror. As babies, they are separated from their mothers, tied down, starved, terrorized by fire, beaten for hours--and they also have nails driven into their feet. He could have pointed out that every time tourists ride an elephant in Thailand, they are on top of a beaten animal who has had her spirit broken in this way. That would have been immeasurably useful in his ‘trafficking’ in animals segment. Every captive elephant is trafficked: taken from her home in nature, broken, and enslaved.
All elephants, worldwide—in Thailand, in the USA in circuses--are trained through pain and fear—it takes hours of beatings to break their spirits so they will ‘perform.’ They won’t do those stupid, degrading tricks on their own.
No true ‘sanctuary’ would use a bull hook, so I wonder about this place Mr. Cooper visited in Thailand. Go to the web and look up the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee and PAWS in northern California—no hooks of torture in these ‘true sanctuaries.’ The animals are terrified of them, bear scars all over their bodies, not just in the ears and genitals, from them. You cannot give an elephant peace, in a sanctuary, if there is a bull hook in sight.
Then, although the show purported to be ‘sensitive’ to animals in all this southeast Asian coverage, the reporters back home showed footage, at the tail end of the night, of a giant squid recently yanked out of its home and killed for ‘scientific reasons’ and then the reporters joked about it being ‘calamari,’ etc. This squid had a life that was taken from it by the arrogance and stupidity and cruelty of these sadists we call ‘scientists.’ To ‘study’ it. They killed it to study it. Not much animal sensitivity and awareness there. Or in the show’s coverage of this incident, as if the life of the squid were trivial. What makes the elephant matter, and not the squid? They both have lives that belong to them—or, rather, belonged to them--until humans took them away.
Suki Falconberg, © 2007
Cooper is also to be commended for highlighting child prostitution in an American city, Atlanta, where, he points out, young girl children may be raped as many as 40 times a night by grown male customers. This segment suggests that the men we call ‘johns’ or customers are really rapists—a useful contention since, in my view—as you may know from my many other articles on this site--any buying of any body, no matter what the age of the female, is an act of rape. Prostitution always involves exploitation of the weak by the strong and it reinforces the idea that a woman or girl is a piece of property and that she is worth less than a man. Whether it be Atlanta or Bangkok, it is the same orifice being raped, and the same attitudes that degrade women apply. So, it was with great happiness that I found some echo of my idea that the ‘buyer’ is a rapist, even though the idea was just being applied to this one situation—the child prostitute as rape victim—rather than more broadly.
Unfortunately, Cooper only focused on child prostitution. He failed to mention that many girls in Cambodia and Bangkok were sold into the trade as children, making them just as much victims as the younger ones. And there was not one profile of or word from any of the older girls forced into this industry due to the usual reasons: poverty, coercion from family members, lack of alternatives, lack of education, exploitation by pimps who misrepresent the work the girl is being hired for—the picture is familiar by now—a depressing situation of taking advantage of the most vulnerable entity in the world: a young, poor, often unprotected female.
I sent Mr.Cooper feedback at CNN. I always like to offer journalists--and the world--large, idealistic solutions to problems. Solutions that have a sure-fire chance of success—if anyone would listen to me. One solution: Instead of waging a futile war in Iraq, why not have our soldiers out there doing something useful, like breaking down the doors of Cambodian pimps, and taking these little girls out of sexual bondage?
I also mentioned to Mr. Cooper that, although I appreciated his efforts to cover a taboo subject, the analysis of the situation was rather on-the-surface. It was not the 360˚ that the title of his show implies. Rather it was a tiny slice. He should have also gone into the heavy frequenting of brothels by local men in Thailand and Cambodia. The average Thai male rapes at least thirty different brothelized prostitutes before he marries a ‘nice’ Thai girl. As in Japan, in Cambodia visiting a brothel and raping an enslaved body is simply a commonplace night out for roughly 80% of the men in that country—of no more importance than buying a bag of potato chips or fish chips. I wish, too, that Mr. Cooper had covered the practice of ‘bauking,’ in Cambodia: purchasing of one prostitute by a group of young men (any where from 3 to 10, many of them college students) and then they all serially rape the girl—usually more than once. The girl screams and cries but the men don’t stop and the poor girl may be raped 30 times a night. I would say to Mrs. Cooper: Don’t just target Western tourists—or pedophiles, but also, as in the case of Thailand, visiting militaries—mostly a lot of drunk rough servicemen out for a good time. Please enlighten the public about all these other aspects of the sex trade in Cambodia and Thailand, Mr. Cooper.
At one point, Mr. Cooper expressed great surprise that children were being sold in brothels. As a well-educated and experienced journalist, surely, he must have seen this going on around the world: the current exploitation extends far beyond Southeast Asia. Saudi Arabia has roughly half a million children being held in sexual slavery; Dubai is another hot spot in that part of the world for child prostitutes. And Mr. Cooper must have witnessed, in Bombay, the four-year-old whores painted up like sad little harlots in that city’s huge red-light district. In the many war zones he’s been in, he must be familiar with the prostituting of the vulnerable (women, girls, and children) to occupying soldiers. What surprised me is that he expressed surprise. This misleads the public into thinking that the plight of Somaly Mam’s charges is unusual—whereas it is, sadly, commonplace. In the aftermath of the Tsunami, Mr. Cooper must have noted the trafficking and exploitation of homeless children. What was surprising about finding child prostitution in Cambodia?
What is surprising, of course, is that so little is being done about it, or about the enslavement of females of all ages. Cooper’s crew could have put a hidden cameras in their shirts and gone into brothels and filmed the girls being raped by customers. Better yet, they could have taken the girls out of their rape prisons. There is no justifying the ‘ethics of objectivity.’ You do not leave a girl’s body suffering under the cruelty of serial rapists everyday.
I also asked him about the sexual behavior of journalists abroad. One I know personally who is currently living in Malaysia says that journalists frequently take advantage of the ‘sexual perks’ offered in Southeast Asia. A journalist may do a story about sexual exploitation in Bangkok and then turn around and buy a bargirl. I am not saying, of course, that any specific member of Mr. Cooper’s crew may be buying girls. I hope they are not, and that their compassion for the enslaved extends to the grown-up prostitutes as well, who are also horrendously exploited. But, if his men are typical, I would like to know what they’re up to when they travel the world, uncovering ‘exploitation.’ If any journalists anywhere, on any news crews, buy girls, they are contributing to the suffering they are supposed to be trying to reveal. If they buy prostitutes who are eighteen or older, the girls may have been sold into the trade as children and that if they have survived the rape, diseases, beatings, roughness of customers, etc., they are massively damaged, both physically and psychologically. They have never known another life so that ‘choice’ of any sort cannot be presumed about their lifestyle. Buying them is as terrible as buying the children.
It has always puzzled me that, up to age 17, 11 months, and 29 days, the girl is an exploited victim because she is underage; and then when she turns 18, she automatically becomes a ‘whore’ who deserves her fate, even though she was forced into the trade many years before any age of consent was possible. It makes no sense—compassionate, humane, or otherwise.
One of his reporters, Dan Rivers, a British journalist working for CNN in Bangkok, has also traveled with the Royal Navy. All navies move from port to port and from brothel to brothel. If Mr. Rivers saw this kind of exploitation, as he went from port to port, I would like to have this kind of reporting from him, about the sexual suffering of the enslaved when navies dock, as well as what he says about child prostitution in Cambodia. This would have broadened out the prostitution picture in a necessary direction.
For the Cooper team, Mr. Rivers covered the story of Srey, a six-year-old ex-prostitute rescued by Somaly Mam. Unfortunately, he called Srey a ‘sex worker.’ I can assure Mr. Rivers, from personal experience, that having the insides raped out of you is not work.
This term, sex worker, is in common use, fashionable, and it should be abolished. It is an abomination to classify little Srey and all the rest of these girls with their rape-battered bodies and destroyed lives as ‘workers.’ The phrase ‘sex work’ cannot convey the reality that Srey experienced. It is not remotely accurate to call having rapists shove their penises in you ‘work.’ The term ‘sex worker’ is cold and sterile and inaccurate. I also object to ‘trafficking’—another sterile word that parades around as if it were something ‘new’ on the scene. Trafficking is prostitution, enforced sex, sex performed on an enslaved body, and this is nothing new. Men and poverty have inflicted this form of rape on us for centuries. Why pretend that prostitution is something new by disguising it behind a fancy new word like ‘trafficking.’
Mr. Cooper also paid attention to the plight of animals in Bangkok and Cambodia. These creatures are as helpless as the trafficked girls. I was, however, surprised to see, in one segment, a bull hook being used on an elephant at a place that was purported to be a ‘sanctuary’ for these animals. The bull hook is a heavy stick with a curved thick nail-like sharp projection at one end that is used to control elephants through pain and fear. Trainers jab the elephants in sensitive areas—inside the ears, in the genitals. Mr. Cooper could have pointed out that all captive elephants in Thailand, and around the world, have been broken through pain and terror. As babies, they are separated from their mothers, tied down, starved, terrorized by fire, beaten for hours--and they also have nails driven into their feet. He could have pointed out that every time tourists ride an elephant in Thailand, they are on top of a beaten animal who has had her spirit broken in this way. That would have been immeasurably useful in his ‘trafficking’ in animals segment. Every captive elephant is trafficked: taken from her home in nature, broken, and enslaved.
All elephants, worldwide—in Thailand, in the USA in circuses--are trained through pain and fear—it takes hours of beatings to break their spirits so they will ‘perform.’ They won’t do those stupid, degrading tricks on their own.
No true ‘sanctuary’ would use a bull hook, so I wonder about this place Mr. Cooper visited in Thailand. Go to the web and look up the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee and PAWS in northern California—no hooks of torture in these ‘true sanctuaries.’ The animals are terrified of them, bear scars all over their bodies, not just in the ears and genitals, from them. You cannot give an elephant peace, in a sanctuary, if there is a bull hook in sight.
Then, although the show purported to be ‘sensitive’ to animals in all this southeast Asian coverage, the reporters back home showed footage, at the tail end of the night, of a giant squid recently yanked out of its home and killed for ‘scientific reasons’ and then the reporters joked about it being ‘calamari,’ etc. This squid had a life that was taken from it by the arrogance and stupidity and cruelty of these sadists we call ‘scientists.’ To ‘study’ it. They killed it to study it. Not much animal sensitivity and awareness there. Or in the show’s coverage of this incident, as if the life of the squid were trivial. What makes the elephant matter, and not the squid? They both have lives that belong to them—or, rather, belonged to them--until humans took them away.
Suki Falconberg, © 2007