Exposed: The Scandalous Story of Sex Work in Cambodia

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the recent scandal that engulfed the Cambodian anti-trafficking activist, Somaly Mam, who was accused of fabricating tales of abduction and prostitution in her memoir, Le Silence de l'innocence (2005). In my reading of Mam's memoir, I focus on the tropes of silence and voice in the narrative as well as in the context of its initial reception and eventual denunciation in order to offer some preliminary thoughts on the appeal and limitations of the testimonial narrative within the global rescue industry. I finish by examining the implications of Mam's narrative and its alleged falsehoods for the women on whose behalf she claims to speak. Rather than attempt to determine whether Mam has told the truth, I take this scandal as an occasion to explore the problem of evidentiary versus narrative truths in the literary testimony and the ways in which various truths are mobilized and silenced when the literary testimony intersects with the human rights campaign.

KEYWORDS:

• Cambodia
• trafficking
• memoir
• testimony
• human rights

Notes

1. See the forward to the English translation of Mam's memoir (xii). To date, it has been translated into German, Dutch, Japanese, Spanish, English, Italian, Slovenian, Swedish, Czech, Sinhalese, Danish, Korean, Turkish, Arabic, Marathi, Norwegian, and Polish.

2. One finds the numbers quoted to be higher among abolitionist groups, who tend to see any form of sexual commerce as a form of violence, if not slavery, than among sex workers’ rights advocates, who argue for sex work as a profession worthy of recognition and sex workers as laborers deserving autonomy.

3. During the Khmer Rouge regime, sex work was a crime punishable by death and was virtually eliminated. A vibrant commercial sex market emerged in its wake, however, partly in response to the deployment of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia in 1992. Many link contemporary social problems in Cambodia, including sex trafficking, to its war-torn past. See, for example, Rithy Panh: “The terrible thing about past wars and about the Cambodian genocide is not only the millions of dead […] it's also our shattered identity, the ruins of our social cohesion...” (30).

4. In this, Mam's memoir echoes a body of Cambodian-American autobiographies largely motivated by the glacial pace of justice in the years following the Khmer Rouge. Mam's experience of the Khmer Rouge period differs from that of many other overseas Cambodian writers, however, because of her impoverished, provincial origins (Silence, 16–17).

5. Patai continues: “If one is asserting that human rights abuses occurred, charges must be specific and verifiable. Exaggeration of existing evils is not an acceptable way to call attention to those evils, since in the absence of first-hand empirical knowledge, the public—and especially human rights activists—have no way of distinguishing fraudulent claims from those having substantial merit” (81).

6. Karen Thornber asks whether the tendency to present these survivor narratives as interchangeable—which she notes is more pronounced in the English and the Korean translations—is itself a silence imposed on the traumatized with which the memoir is complicit (237, 247).

7. The New Somaly Mam Fund: Voices for Change was launched in December 2014.

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Notes on contributors

Leslie Barnes

Leslie Barnes is Senior Lecturer and Convenor of French Studies at the Australian National University. Her first book, Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature (U of Nebraska P, 2014), studies the impact of colonialism on the modern French novel. Her current project offers a comparative analysis of literary and cinematic narratives that engage with questions of sex work, mobility, and human rights in Southeast Asia. She has published on these subjects in French Cultural Studies, Australian Journal of French Studies, and Screening the Past.