i have been born with our parents
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i have a soul into the brother
i was forced
to have sick
and i was raped
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who is somali mom depends who you ask
is one of the most incredible people i
have met the stories that she told for
the media got lots of attention because
they were so horrific she spoke on the
tyra banks show and the oprah show they
put me in the cage they put snakes in
the cage yes and the tasty chef how
about how old were you do you think i
was around maybe 10 or 12 years old
what if we told you her story wasn't
true that there are so many cracks in it
she's resigned from her us-based charity
when somali mom's story began to unravel
suddenly there was a whole heap of
attention on this industry these
orphanages that had been fabricating or
at least exaggerating stories in order
to raise money
orphanage had been bastardized
the concept of orphanages has long been
considered outdated in developed
countries and yet these institutions
still house hundreds of thousands of
children in the developing world
every day at the orphanage it's like you
are in a monster house
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my father
he loved reading newspaper
reading poems
and
when i was very young he always
carried me to
a parkour
[Music]
like very rare event
they will put a big white screen very
late at night
and
like putting some very very good movie
very old movie from the golden age
i always
like fell asleep before it's finished so
always my father carrying me back home
while i'm asleep
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after my father died
my
mother she is alone and there is not a
lot of job for her to do
i was nine years old when i first
entered the orphanage
there is a guy a monk
and he talked to my mother
saying his place can
take care of us
i remember the day that i went to
the orphanage
they
showed me the place to sleep the kitchen
give us some
good clothes and new issue
i was very happy
and
every day there is a lot of
foreigner donor sponsor
come to the orphanage
one
volunteer tara winkler
she kept coming
i wanted to have a gap year so i decided
to take some time out and travel through
southeast asia and i think like a lot of
westerners i felt quite uncomfortable
being on holiday surrounded by so much
poverty and wanted to do something to
give back while i was there and
my tuk-tuk driver suggested that i go to
the market we can buy some second-hand
clothes and books and toys and then i
could go and hand those out at the local
orphanages and one of the orphanages i
visited was particularly poor
that's where i met sanet but i had never
seen poverty like i saw in that
orphanage they were drinking dirty water
they were eating scraps from the
monastery down the road there were kids
there with really serious health
conditions
at that time i was just so naive i just
bought into the story that going to an
orphanage and visiting kids and
volunteering is a great thing to do and
makes you a good person
[Music]
i'm matt blomberg i'm a correspondent
for the thomson reuters foundation in
cambodia focus on human trafficking
modern slavery
the unraveling of the cambodian
orphanage industry as it had become
really began with the somali mom story
so i had been born with our parents i
was in the street and then after i had
been sold in brother i tried to help
older girls all the women who was like
myself before
somali mom who is a hero every single
day in helping women and girls who have
been abused to try to get their lives
back the ladies on the right together
right here all the way to the right
before too long she was rubbing
shoulders with the elite telling these
stories in order to gun her attention
and donations she had hillary clinton
come and visit her center and she had
meg ryan come and visit cheryl sandberg
the facebook boss was on the board
so you've saved over five thousand more
than seven thousand people in cambodia
we have also in vietnam and laos
she quickly became one of the global
faces of this fight against human
trafficking and trafficking of women in
particular honor disclaimer magazine's
woman of the year a cnn hero and most
recently named as one of time magazine's
most influential people of the year
she was beautiful and strong and a great
character for the media i mean loads of
media got carried away with it the
ultimate mother and freedom fighter
somali mom
for two decades cambodia's somali mom
has been the face of the country's
anti-sex trafficking campaign
but following reports that she lied
about her past she's been called a fraud
and her foundation shut down
as well as being accused of fabricating
her own story somali mom has been
accused of coaching victims in afisab's
care to fabricate their stories to
attract attention and ultimately more
funding
when the somali mom story broke firstly
here it really lifted the lid on
something that a lot of us lived here
knew had been going on for a long time
that children were being used as props
to raise donations but it wasn't until
newsweek published the full expose that
it kind of truly went global
suddenly there was a whole heap of
attention on this this industry these
orphanages and these shelters where
girls and women end up after they're
rescued from these situations
somali was was the first big target and
she was a really easy target because she
had become such a shining star but she
was far from the only one
at the orphanage they are very strict
every day we need to wake up at 4
cleaning the orphanage area and pakoda
prepare food for the monk and
if i sleep late there will be
a bucket of water throw
onto my face and sometimes if we
don't do what they want they will
like hit us
i realized that i don't have somebody
like my father going to protect me
like when i was
young
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when i was like by the director of the
orphanage
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it's
it was so
tragic for me
and
i was so so scared and
[Music]
i feel like
i live in a
horrified
like
tight very tight
place that i
can't go anywhere
i
always
hide myself
to get away from the director
sometimes
i wear a lot of pain
so that
should be protect me
[Music]
but it's not
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every day at the orphanage is
it's like you are in a
monster house
[Music]
we sleep on a long dormitory
road by roll
with the mosquito net
sometimes he just
stand
in front of where i sleep
and
pull the mosquito net just to
look at me
and
i know
he's standing there but i
i pretend to sleep
[Music]
so i think was about six months into
living
in cambodia and my chimera was pretty
fluent and i could communicate properly
with the kids at this stage
and
i remember sitting around
talking with one of them actually one of
the kids was getting in trouble for
stealing and sending money back home
to his mum and that was the first time i
learned that he had a mum
and you know these were kids that i had
thought had nobody in the world
to love and care for them
this one boy had living parents and
quickly found out that all of the
children
had living relatives
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me
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my
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foreign
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my initial reaction was a sort of
judgment
to these parents like
what kind of parents
give their children up to an orphanage
and it was on that trip and meeting
these kids parents for the first time
and seeing how much they love their kids
and how much they miss them
that
yeah i realized how wrong those
judgments were
they believed that it was a path out of
poverty to a better life and trusting
their children
into the orphanage was
in many ways an act of love
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foreign
[Music]
[Applause]
me
[Applause]
[Applause]
this often has been around
almost 20 years
[Applause]
we call a new hope for often
the word hope i pick up scripture from
the bible and leaving hope for those who
believe in jesus
we have around 100 children around 16
homes around the country these children
when we pick them up start from like one
month old up to like 12 years old but
now some of them they are pro early and
they study in different schools
we have a policy in our organization we
focus those who are real often that
means no parent at all
so none of the kids in your orphanage
have parents
okay actually our uh
children thirty percent are real often
and no father no mother
but uh a besides seventy percent either
uh they have living a
father or mother or the parent abundant
so this is what happened to them
[Music]
when somali mum's story began to unravel
suddenly there was a whole heap of
attention on what had been largely an
open secret that a lot of these kids who
were portrayed as orphans weren't
actually orphans suddenly this the cat
was out of the bag
surprisingly most of these children are
actually not orphans
your orphanage donation isn't helping an
orphan it's hurting a child
[Music]
this problem is not just confined to
cambodia there are an estimated eight
million children around the world living
in institutions like orphanages
what's contributing to this boom it's us
it's the well-meaning support from
people like me who are unwittingly
fueling an industry that exploits
children and tears families apart
[Applause]
it was not until the 1990s with the
paris peace agreement there's a lot more
injections of western money that's when
we started to see immediate growth of
orphanages throughout the country
the country was stable it was developing
the parents of these kids were still
alive so why were they ending up in
orphanages and what we began to
correlate then was that we okay we see
an increase in foreign visitors coming
to the country as it opened up and this
seems to relate to the increase in
orphanages so we were actually beginning
to realize this is a phenomenon this is
orphanage tourism people are coming they
want to give back to a country that they
know has suffered over the last four
decades how do they do that oh wow we
can help the children you know and where
are the children oh they're in
orphanages
i think whether you're talking about 20
year old tourists from australia or
wealthy philanthropists from america
they're all after the same thing you
know they're all looking to make
themselves feel good i guess
so volunteer from different country from
singapore or taiwan
malaysia from america
australia new zealand they can volunteer
camp that teaching english
now the other side of that coin is local
people were saying right you know
they're giving money to orphanages so
let's start an orphanage it seems to be
a very good business model
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the more donations flood in in support
of orphanages the more orphanages opened
and the more children were being
separated from their families to fill
their beds between 2005 and 2010 there'd
been a 75 increase in the number of
orphanages and the number of children
living in those orphanages had more than
doubled despite the fact that there was
less orphans in cambodia and the poverty
rate was in steady decline
struggling families see them as a better
opportunity that this place could give
their kid a better opportunity
potentially than they could kids can go
to these places and supposedly learn
english meet foreigners
you're creating this choice
false choice of
sending your children to north nature
staying with the family
and the poor family you know and that's
just
nobody should be presented with that
option i think it's almost evil to be
representing that option
volunteerism isn't just a buzz word and
it isn't just a cambodian thing it's a
multi-billion dollar global industry
you can make the world a better place
you can free the children all around
this planet
i think
actually that what we have here is
commercialization of volunteering
organizations who will create the
experience for you it's the way that we
work now we look for easy ways you know
we don't want to put in the the effort
ourselves if we can just click
the placement organizations you know
they have got very good at what they do
we can do anything from community
development work in nicaragua to
wildlife conservation in costa rica and
el salvador
they're targeting young people and
they're using whatever channels they can
to get to them internet of course
and they're going into universities
they're really very very good at getting
to the kind of people that they know
will be an easy target
and i want to make it very very clear
you know we are not against volunteering
but encourage it to be responsible you
can help train
people in local ngos for example to
better use the their information
technology resources that kind of thing
but that's not so attractive is it you
know you can't really get a selfie with
the children
i think one of the things we have to
remember too is that people
generally have good intentions you know
they don't want to cause harm they
actually want to do good however people
are going into orphanages playing with
kids they're not thinking about is it
possibly harmful to children rather than
beneficial thank you
for me
back then
doing that kind of
greeting
foreigner
it's become a job
you wake up in the morning you prepare
you act
you dress up
the director will come to talking to us
saying there will be 20 sponsors come
you need to smile you need to be very
friendly don't do naughty
these people come in being nice to us
bring us gifts playing with us
spend time with us like
real friends
like they sharing even their
family picture
and it's a wonderful feeling to get to
know them but also very sad at the same
time
like you are being abandoned
over and over again
[Music]
one day while i was hiding at the school
library tara come asking me that i need
to tell her the truth what happened
and i tell
her everything she said what if i set up
a new orphanage do you want to come with
me
i'm not thinking twice
i just said i want to go with you
i turned up at the orphanage unannounced
with the bus with the social affairs
department and police entourage the
situation is
kept
running around
a lot of noise
avoids crying
i was shaking i'm so scared
but i know already that this is my last
time i need to go now and later when we
are on the road to the new orphanage i
just say hooray to myself like yay you
did it
i was
like
i cannot explain how much i feel
overwhelming
scared
but i know that i'm going to be okay
there is no one going to hurt me no more
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so
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when the government went on its big
public push to deal with this issue
there was different estimates of how
many kids but between 17 000 i think was
the low end and up to 50 000
according to some studies kids were were
in these different various kinds of
facilities
certainly the effort to clean it up
certainly they put a massive dent in it
i'd say they've got rid of the the most
the most egregious one but it's still
available i mean you can go online and
you can find what has been termed now
volunteerism
yeah volunteerism is still a problem to
be honest orphanage issues are still a
problem people are still
running orphanages
very badly another thing is the reforms
saw loads of orphanages shut down and
children put back into communities but
the kids were scarred confused
traumatized and their mental health was
kind of an afterthought
after i leave the bad orphanage i was so
depressed
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i always have difficulty making peace to
myself
except who i am
[Music]
i know they want to help
but
what they don't know is that
their actions are hurting children
[Music]
we got a child behavioural therapist to
come in and do some training and that's
when
we first learned about attachment theory
which basically says that you know for
children to grow up
healthy and well that the most important
things is that they grow up within
relationships and at least have a secure
attachment with one primary caregiver
when they don't get that
the brain doesn't develop properly
the indiscriminate affection that
tourists encounter when they visit an
orphanage when a child runs up to a
perfect stranger and jumps into their
lap
that is a sign of an attachment disorder
from my experience children growing up
in the orphanage a lot of them after
reintegrate from orphanage they fell
into drug
a robbery
prostitute
one study has shown the young adults
raised in institutions
are 10 times more likely to fall into
sex work than their peers
40 times more likely to have a criminal
record and 500 times more likely to
commit suicide
to me
there is no good orphanage
even they live at the best orphanage
no one hit them
no one abused them
they get good food good hygiene they are
not suffering outside their body it
suffer inside
and it's going to traumatize them for
the rest of their life
[Music]
the moment that i realized that i want
to become an activist for children right
is when i
sat in front of the government people in
australia miss senate chan from the
command institution trust the
opportunity has been given to to further
hear about orphanage tourism and
the trafficking of children relating to
that i would like to urge the australian
people to stop
supporting donating or volunteering at
the orphanages
today i work for the cambodia church in
trust
working with young women that just come
from the orphanage to live in the
society
those people
they really need help
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i think one tricky thing about orphanage
kids they don't know how to ask for help
they ask it and thought that no one
understand about them
okay
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the more i grow older i met a lot of
young women
my women who have
experienced the same
to me
so my goal to build this care level
network to provide the connection to
provide
friendship sharing
life experience from what they have when
they were at the orphanage
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i am not the one should tell this story
alone
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there are many more
important unique stories that everyone
need to hear from them
for those kids i am a big sister
who have struggled facing their
hard life
and i am still
standing today
if i am still doing good with my life
they also can
but first
they need to believe in themselves
the more we sharing our story sharing
our
experiment
people going to here
that is why i keep sharing my story
[Music]
you