Don and Bridget Brewster of Agape International Missions on combating Cambodia's child sex traffickers
Don and Bridget Brewster witnessed the scale of child prostitution in Cambodia and decided to do something about it. They tell Elaine Yau their remarkable story
Bridget Brewster's eyes well up as she recalls the heartbreaking tale of Rotha, a young Cambodian rescued in 2006 from a brothel that her mother had sold her to when she was eight years old.
Held captive, Rotha did not see daylight for three years. "She never left the room she was locked in. And men came repeatedly to rape her," says Brewster of Agape International Missions (AIM), a Cambodia-based organisation working to curb the country's child sex trade.
"Rotha was 11 years old when she came to us. Her mum was sent to prison for 15 years for selling her. She forgave her mum eventually and visited her in prison. The mum even brought her two-year-old son along to the prison, as you get more food if you get a child in prison. After Rotha graduated from our programme, she found work in a restaurant as a supervisor and got custody of her little brother and got him out of prison."
When we first moved to Svay Pak ... 100 per cent of children aged from eight to 12 were trafficked
Bridget Brewster and her husband Don had been working for a church in California but set up AIM after discovering for themselves the distressing extent of child prostitution during a fact-finding trip to Cambodia.
With three children of their own, the couple decided they had to do something.
"If this happened to our own daughters, how would we feel? No one did anything about it back then," says Don Brewster, who was in Hong Kong to give a keynote address on combating child trafficking at the Justice Conference Asia.
The couple quit their jobs, sold their house in California and moved to Cambodia. AIM opened its first shelter in 2006 in Svay Pak, a village about 11km outside Phnom Penh, known as a centre for child prostitution.