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Fighting the Cause of the Lost
by Lisa Albers

Molly Jester enlists the little boy’s help in passing out candy treats to the hospital patients. There are about thirty men sitting in their beds, and they don’t look that sick to her, not as bad as most she’s seen, but she wants to give them something anyway. The little plastic cups of jelly candy will make them smile; the treats always work as a way to cheer up the people she meets in Cambodia.

But the boy won’t help her pass out the treats. He drops the cup of candy on the floor without even peeling off the lid to show the patients the treat inside. She feels a flash of anger. He agreed to help her distribute candy in exchange for as many of these rare treats as he can stuff into his pockets, and now he is breaking their deal. Then she notices the men’s hands. Leprosy has eaten away their fingertips. They cannot open the cups. The boy’s hands, too, are damaged this way.

Molly Jester—hardened social worker with years of experience—feels herself break down. She isn’t one to break down, not when talking to victims of acid attacks, not when she found the 9-year-old girl who’d been forced into prostitution. But the men’s hands undo her. She walks around the hospital room peeling the tops off the candy treats, and then goes outside to let herself have a rare cry.

Jester is president of an organization called Stop Exploitation Now! This is just the beginning of her story.

In 2003, Molly Jester went to Cambodia as a volunteer with Rose Charities USA, an organization which helps fund the Children’s Surgical Centre there and has ties to doctors at the University of Washington and Seattle International District Rotary members. She was delivering medical supplies along the border between Thailand and Burma when she met a very sick little girl.

The girl was living in an orphanage. She was covered in sores. “She had the worse skin I’d ever seen,” says Jester, who kept trying to buy her medicine, thinking the girl suffered from scabies. Jester did everything in her power to get the orphanage authorities to use scabicide on the girl; she offered to buy new bedding for every child in the orphanage if they would just treat the girl with the medicine. No one would give Jester an explanation for why they would not treat the girl, so she kept pushing until they finally took her aside and told her the girl suffered from AIDS, not scabies.

“It’s illegal to reveal someone’s HIV status there,” Jester explains. She refers to herself at that time as an “arrogant American,” but she has clearly learned how to temper her outrage and work within whatever system she encounters in Southeast Asia.

She and her colleagues—Ryker Labbee and Pat Roe—were able to connect the little girl with an organization that provided antiretroviral drugs to fight her illness. Subsequent travels to Southeast Asia and encounters with two other suffering young girls prompted the three to file for a nonprofit license and start their own organization committed to caring for those whose lives have been written off as lost causes.

“There are no lost causes,” Jester asserts, “just some problems that are harder to solve. We work with people, though, not causes. Once you meet one child or vulnerable person that you are able to help, you do not see it as a lost cause. I have been surprised by laughter and even smiles that eventually are visible on the faces of people who have been through so much.”

Since formalizing their efforts in 2005, Stop Exploitation Now! (SEN) has focused on four areas in which they can make a difference: fighting sex trafficking; providing food, clothing, and access to health care and education; supporting development through grants for construction or small businesses; and helping acid burn victims.

Prevention and Response

SEN’s efforts to combat sexual exploitation mean delving into other, related issues, such as business development and health care. Sex trafficking is a complex problem with multiple solutions, both preventative and responsive.

For example, Jester is proudest of SEN’s work to provide a viable means of self-support to those who are vulnerable prey for the sex trade. In Cambodia, 13 girls participate in an income-generation program designed to keep them out of brothels. Jester says, “They all come from high-risk families. Some of their siblings are already in prostitution; some of them are orphans; some of them were living on the streets.”

In addition to English and Khmer language classes, the girls receive vocational training in their chosen trade. They receive a base salary for living expenses during their two years of training, one that is comparable to the amount paid for the only other job available to young girls in town—a ‘waitress’ in a karaoke bar that functions as a front for a brothel.

Still, in a severely depressed economy, SEN struggles with the problem of what to train the girls for, and they have to get creative. For instance, someone found an untapped market in the wedding-cake business, and the idea took off.

SEN also provides a drop-in center for women and children currently involved in the sex trade. The drop-in center is a safe haven where sex workers can get medical care or a good meal, practice arts and crafts, and receive counseling. Drop-in center workers also go into the brothels themselves where they provide, in many cases, the only health care the women and children working there will ever receive. “We let these girls know that we see them, we know they are there, they’re not invisible,” says Jester, and that is often the first step toward helping them escape.

Prosecuting Pedophiles

SEN supports international attorneys who provide legal services to Southeast Asian countries in their efforts to prosecute foreign pedophiles. These are men from countries such as the U.S., Germany, France, Denmark, Russia and elsewhere who travel to Southeast Asia to exploit vulnerable children. In just one small rural town, authorities are trying to build legal cases against as many as 40 foreign pedophiles. One particularly heinous tactic Jester cites is when men set up bogus charities in order to gain access to children, or simply offer to take care of the child of a destitute family.

Some of the parents are complicit, says Jester, though they are usually operating under extremely desperate circumstances, and some are just not hard-wired for skepticism. “You offer to put a child through school, or to build the family a well, and the parents are so grateful,” she says. “It’s hard for them to question the men’s motives. And these are very welcoming cultures. Foreigners are generally welcomed warmly, so it’s sickeningly easy for a pedophile to go to Southeast Asia and abuse children.”

However, Jester points out that awareness of the problem has increased, leading to safe tourism campaigns and even signs in hotels that warn tourists: Have Sex with a Child in This Country, Go to Prison in Your Own. Foreigners, whose features usually do not resemble those of Cambodia’s ethnic Khmer people, are easy to spot, and an adult male who travels to another country just to befriend a child—especially if he spends a great deal of time alone with that child—is easily considered suspect. But most of the customers Jester has seen in Southeast Asian brothels are local people, and changing the sex industry there will take a paradigm shift for the culture.

Jester believes that the entire brothel industry is exploitative, regardless of the age of the women who work in them. “Of course it’s horrifying to see a 10-year-old sex worker,” she says, “but the pain I see in a 21-year-old who’s spent much of her teenage years in a brothel is no less than the pain I see in the child.”

She was surprised to learn that one of the challenges of trying to provide aid to sick women and girls working in brothels is that they are often moved to other areas or taken outside the country. Moving them away from their communities only serves to further isolate them and increase their dependency on the brothel for their needs as they have no other financial or social means of support.

Escaping the ‘Mental Prison’

Often those trapped in the brothel system have such leveled aspirations that they can’t even imagine another life for themselves. They live under a heavy stigma. They believe they deserve what has happened to them, that they have bad karma. “It’s a kind of mental prison,” Jester says.

One day, she and her colleagues talked to a woman for hours about leaving the brothel, trying to convince her that they knew a place where she could stay, that she would have help. Jester herself thought this woman might be a lost cause because she repeatedly said she couldn’t leave, that she deserved to live that way. They had no choice but to leave her there.

A few hours later, the woman left the brothel. She got a moto (motorcycle) driver to take her to a phone, where she called and asked to be taken to a shelter. In retrospect, Jester realized that the woman’s staunch reluctance might have had more to do with the “kindly old grandmother” who ran the brothel and had been listening in. Or maybe it just took hours of being told there could be another life for her before the notion broke through.

“I have yet to meet someone who is totally hopeless,” Jester says. Each person we help is a voice for change. We are showing them they deserve more, and hopefully they will demand they get treated better down the line and help make sure others are treated better, too.”

For more information about Stop Exploitation Now!, visit www.stopexploitationnow.org; e-mail admin@stopexploitationnow.org or call 425-941-8256.

Lisa Albers is a Seattle poet and freelance writer.

©2007 Caliope Publishing Company