NYC: Glamour Mag Honors Somaly Mam

Somaly Mam, former child sex slave and now anti-trafficking and child prostitution activist, was honored by Glamour magazine as a Woman of the Year
NYC--For surviving her childhood as a sex slave, Somaly Mam is a hero. For rescuing thousands of other girls from that same fate, she’s a modern-day saint, and she’s setting an example for the world. As an orphan in war-torn Cambodia, Mam, now in her late thirties, was sold to a brothel by the family she lived with. She was forced to have sex with as many as six men a day and saw girls get chained, caged and beaten. The defining moment of her life came when she watched an abusive pimp kill her best friend. She looked the dying girl in the eye and decided to risk her life by escaping; if she made it, she’d help others break free too.

In the years since then, South Asia’s sex-trafficking industry has only boomed. Girls as young as five are sold by their parents for just a few dollars. Mam’s rescue organization, Acting for Women in Distressing Situations (AFESIP, its acronym in French), saves girls, many of whom have HIV, from brothels in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. At her centers, Mam, whose life is under constant threat from the brothel owners, helps the girls heal physically and emotionally. It’s heartbreaking work: Often they try to go back to their pimps because freedom is so unfamiliar. “I say to them that I was like them,” says Mam, who spent three years convincing one girl to stay. “Me also, I wanted to go back.”

“Somaly Mam’s story is a model for activism in the global effort to abolish modern-day slavery. She is a clear hero in my eyes,” says Ambassador John R. Miller, director of the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. Clearly her work has worldwide impact, but Mam is most interested in whichever child needs her this moment. “All I want is to help the victims,” says the woman who never knew her own parents—or even her birth date. “I want to be a true mother for them. A mother who gives them love.”

Read the full feature at Glamour.com