Inside Cambodia's Fake Orphan Scam | Open Secrets

i have been born with our parents [Music] i have a soul into the brother i was forced to have sick and i was raped [Music] 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stories in order to raise money orphanage had been bastardized the concept of orphanages has long been considered outdated in developed countries and yet these institutions still house hundreds of thousands of children in the developing world every day at the orphanage it's like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 [Music] 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 [Music] 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 [Music] when i was like by the director of the orphanage [Music] 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 [Music] 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 [Music] me [Music] my [Music] foreign [Music] 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 [Music] [Music] 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 [Music] [Music] 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 instagram 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 [Music] [Music] so [Music] 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 [Music] 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 [Music] 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 [Music] 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 [Music] i am not the one should tell this story alone [Music] 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

Channel: VICE Asia

Views: 222,776

Keywords: documentary, documentaries, docs, interview, culture, lifestyle, world, exclusive, independent, underground, videos, journalism, vice guide, vice.com

Id: prBov8X4uSE

Length: 32min 25sec (1945 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 27 2022