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| Somaly Mam, founder of the anti-sex trafficking organization, Somaly Mam Foundation. (Photo by TheIRD) |
This week’s Newsweek poses this question of the sex-trafficking-victim-turned-modern-day-hero Somaly Mam, who announced today that she would be resigning from her foundation: “Does it matter that key parts of her story aren’t true?” This wasn’t a shocker to those of us who’ve followed journalist Simon Marks’s reporting on Somaly Mam over the years—or have had our own run-ins with her foundation, its employees, or the ripple-effect of her camera-ready fibs. (Hence the mag’s nickname among journos, No Shit Weekly.) But Marks’s article didn’t answer the question, and the answer matters.
Newsweek instead offered a solid compendium of Marks’s work, debunking the figurehead of the so-called “modern slavery movement.” A self-proclaimed former victim of forced sexual exploitation, Mam and husband Pierre Legros cofounded AFESIP in 1996, a Cambodian NGO devoted to saving women and children from sexual exploitation throughout Southeast Asia. Global fundraising arm, the Somaly Mam Foundation, came later in 2007. The influx of attention brought an increase in confusion: Today Mam claims to have rescued over 4000 girls from sex slavery, but questions about her stories still arise from former staff members, her former husband, and those supposed former sex slaves.
Marks’s single-mindedness in wanting to destabilize Mam’s perch is understandable. She has worked diligently to protect her reputations as victim and as savior for nearly two decades, but a lot has happened in that time. Without acknowledging this, we run the risk of ignoring our complicity in her story—a pernicious web of obfuscations and self-aggrandizements that tangle all the way back to The New York Times, and keep women’s economic opportunities around the world hovering somewhere near deplorable.
The biggest change in those two decades? Depends on whom you ask. An acquaintance at the US State Department noted a shift in priorities from counter-terrorism to anti-human trafficking: Similar interests and many of the same staff police borders with the same old tools under a supposedly new agenda. Pals covering the sex industry might forward a rise in policy initiatives both domestically and abroad that criminalize certain forms of women’s labor. Friends in Cambodia would say the biggest change during that time is in economic opportunity—for some. There are money and resources out there, in other words, for those willing to do or say the right thing. Like the young women who lied for cameras at Mam’s urging.
So does The Somaly Problem—when a supposed victim is also a charlatan, but for a cause with worthy aspects, like gender-based oppression in Cambodia—matter, Newsweek? Well, many of these policy changes, each of which further limit the economic advancement of low-income women, can be traced back to Mam. She was named a “Hero of Anti-Trafficking” by the US State Department in 2007, Glamour’s “Woman of the Year” in 2006, and one of Time’s “Most Influential People” in 2009.
Many of her accolades, in turn, can be traced back to her friendship with New York Times columnist Nick Kristof. As of press time he still lists the Somaly Mam Foundation as a “partner” in Half The Sky Movement, his blatant attempt (along with wife Sheryl WuDunn) to brand and therefore profit from economic and physical violence against women and girls in the Global South. He also has yet to account for his inclusion of discredited statements by a Mam foundation “rescuee” in either the 2009 book or 2012 “documentary” “Half the Sky.” And Kristof’s live-tweeting of their brothel raid appears to violate the UN Conventions on the Rights of the Child, and his purchase of two “sex slaves” for media purposes is uncondoned by Cambodian Human Trafficking Law.Kristof may, eventually, claim to have been duped. I believe he’ll be lying (again), although other folks who are not Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters may be more sincere.
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