PHNOM PENH—Since April, she has been haunted by a fear of making court appearances: On the four occasions nine-year-old Kunthea went before the law in the southern Takeo province in Cambodia, she had to do so alone.
"I was afraid," says Kunthea (not her real name), when asked about her days in the courtroom without a lawyer to counsel her. "It was confusing and I did not know what was going on. I wanted to cry," she adds in a halting voice during a conversation in a children's shelter here in the Cambodian capital.
What took Kunthea to the provincial court has scarred her too: she was appearing as a rape victim. In this case, the accused was her 18-year-old neighbour, who allegedly committed the crime in the afternoon of Apr. 3.
But some of Cambodia's child victims have been more fortunate when they step into the intimidating confines of the country's courts.
Six-year-old Yon (not her real name) is among this minority. This year, when she appeared as a rape victim in case heard in a Phnom Penh court, a lawyer was by her side every step along this quest for justice.
"We have to be there for them," says Yim Sary, the lawyer who appeared for Yon in the case that resulted in the two rapists being served jail sentences. In addition, the judge ordered the two Cambodian men to pay damages for the child's "emotional suffering".
"Cases involving children require patience. You have to build trust, you have to get the child to be confident with you," adds Yim, a member of Cambodia's Bar Association. "We explain to the children what we are doing, to avoid them panicking or being in fear."
Beyond that, the lawyers appearing for children—be they victims of rape and exploitation by predators in the sex industry or forced into abusive forms of child labour—have to convince judges and prosecutors to respect the rights of their young clients.
"They have to be reminded about respecting the victims, about their rights when in court," reveals Bun Honn, a lawyer who shares Yim's passion to appear for children in the local courts. "It also means getting them to respect the right of the child to have special representation, a lawyer to protect the child's interest."
The line of work driving Yim and Bun is a pioneering feat in this South-east Asian nation's legal environment - which is itself getting back on its feet after decades of destruction caused by war. Until three years ago, the idea of child victims having legal representation was unheard of.
"It is still something new for the communities here," says Brigitte Sonnois, a project officer at the Cambodian office of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). "Now the parents of the victims have an alternative other than what often happens—an out-of-court settlement, where the victim or her family is given some money by the abuser."
"There has been some impact," adds Sonnois, whose organisation helped create the Bar Association's special legal team to represent children. "In places where NGOs (non-governmental organisations) are active and where there are child protection programmes, people have shown faith in this effort."
The Bar Association's team, which includes Yim and Bun, has handled 159 cases. It has appeared on behalf of victims that include six girls between the ages five and 17, who were raped, and three girls between 13 and 15 years who were exploited in the commercial sex industry.
UNICEF singles out one case the team handled in November 2000 as an indicator of how the legal avenues can work. In that case of a 17-year-old girl raped by four men, the judge sentenced the rapists to 10 years in prison and ordered them to pay the victim the equivalent of 1,000 U.S. dollars.
Cambodia has two other NGOs offering legal aid for child victims. These programmes were among those the world's governments pledged to support at the First World Congress against the Commerce Sexual Exploitation of Children held in Stockholm in 1996.
However, the success rate of such infant legal aid programmes is dwarfed by the sheer numbers of girls who have been trafficked to and trapped in the sex industry, or raped. According to one estimate, close to a third of Cambodia's commercial sex workers are between 12 and 17 years old.
"Child prostitution is a large and often visible problem," according to a report released in October by the Bangkok-based End Child Prostitution and Trafficking (ECPAT). "It is reported that young girls brought to Phnom Penh are almost always virgins."
In the main brothel areas in Phnom Penh, such as Toul Kork, Keo Chandra and Svay Park, pimps are known to "imprison children and do not put them to work until they've been presented to a series of bidders such as high-ranking military officers, politicians, businessmen and foreign tourists," it said.
ECPAT adds that the sale of a virgin into prostitution contributes a sizeable sum of money to the family by economic standards in this country, more than a third of whose 13 million people are malnourished. "On average a family can earn 150 U.S. dollars for the sale of their virgin daughter," its report adds.
"The under-18 girls working in brothels have not volunteered, they have been trapped," says Onn Mam, a 30-year-old sex worker who caters to male clients in a wooden shack in the Toul Kork strip of brothels. "I have met some of them and they are scared to leave."
The Bar Association's Yim agrees that the challenges that lawyers representing children face remain tough. It is also common for judges in provincial courts to deny legal aid to children.
But "we have to persevere," he insists. "Child victims have to be protected in the courts, and we are doing so for them. The system has to change."
