IMAGINE THIS

Imagine this:

You're a thirteen year old Cambodian girl who has been sold into the sex trade by your parents. You live in a brothel, sleeping with God knows how many men a day. You are fed when the kindly pimp in charge of the place feels like feeding you. You look out the window at night and picture the day when you will see the moon that shines down on your home village. Is this moon the same as the one back home? Sometimes you wonder.

Luckily, you are rescued. (I say 'luckily', even though many 'rescued' prostitutes return to the sex trade, for reasons that are multiple and sad -- being scorned by their family, feeling an emotional attachment to their pimps, a sense of shame that has no limits or end.) An NGO specializing in the trafficking of women and children swoops down and takes you and over forty others to someplace safe, warm, protected.

But this is Cambodia. You are rarely protected in Cambodia.

And so, as reported by The Cambodia Daily the last few days, what happens?

An armed group of over thirty men and women stormed into the women's shelter and abducted more than eighty sex workers who had been rescued only the day before. They were forced into 'several luxury sports vehicles'. The two guards in charge of the place were too afraid to get involved. Eight police officers from the government's elite fighting force mysteriously left their posts soon after arriving, shortly before all hell broke loose.

I read something like this and I wonder, not what what kind of country I'm in, but what type of planet I'm on.

Women and children being trafficked for sex. Rescued by aid workers. Kidnapped by their old pimps, in 'luxury sports vehicles'. Guards being paid off to be conveniently absent at the appointed time of abduction.

There are so many factors at work here, all of them brutal, all of them horrifically sad, many of them focusing on the concepts of 'rights'.

I've become more conscious of this after working for awhile at the NGO (non-governmental organization) where I work now.

Many countries in Asia are, how shall we say, unfamiliar with the concept of people having 'rights'. If you are a child, or a woman, you obey those in control -- meaning, parents and husbands. If you are poor, you obey the rich. If you are a citizen, you obey the government, or they will beat you, torture you, kill you.

Simple.

It's a simple concept and at the same time mysteriously difficult to wrap your head around -- the fact that people don't know that it's actually not okay to sell your child into the sex trade, even if you need money, even if there are few other options. This is what we are taught at a young age (if we are lucky). Don't hit your brother. Say sorry to your sister. You can't take his toy truck because he's not done playing with it. Because it's not right.

This is not to say that these concepts don't exist here; of course they do. Humans are humans, pain is pain, and right is right.

But when you add in poverty, coupled with people in power linked to government, armed with wealth (and AK-47's), you create a system that acknowledges the rights of only one group: those who have the means to kick your frigging ass from here to next Wednesday. And then bury you while you scream.

Rights are violated all the time back home. The people who commit the offensive acts should be prosecuted, jailed, punished. We are right to complain about our rights in a democracy that represents the world at it's finest and demands respect.

It's just...

The next time you're on the street, and someone's bumped into you without saying a word, arrogant prick, or you're at work, and someone's screwed you over, and said something about you behind your back, and not paid you back the twenty bucks you lent them, like, three months ago, hello, I know he didn't, like, forget, because I see him every day, the next time that happens, just pause, okay? Just breathe. Think about a warm room, and eighty terrified Cambodian country-hick women shaking and crying and scared, really scared, upset and relieved and hoping, hoping, that they can maybe, if they're lucky, make it back to their home village. And then imagine the door to the room opening, thirty masked men and women armed with machine guns bolting in, screaming at them, striking them, taking them back to a life of servitude and rape and one more customer, just one, do as I say, and close the door. You stink.

Just think about it.

That's all I'm saying.