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Abused girls trade hell for haven

VANCOUVER — At a discrete compound in Cambodia, young girls form an orderly queue to be served noodles in the NewSong centre.

VANCOUVER — At a discrete compound in Cambodia, young girls form an orderly queue to be served noodles in the NewSong centre.

Routine lapses when the newest among them, a seven-year-old nicknamed Srey, barges past the line, grabs fistfuls of the slippery food and bolts out the door. She’s spotted in the backyard, furtively stuffing her face like an animal.

Her adult caregivers don’t bat an eye. It’s one of the child’s first meals since being rescued from a backstreet brothel where she was forced into sex with adult men — many of them westerners and almost certainly Canadians among them.

“When she wasn’t actually being abused by customers, they kept her chained below a table,” said Brian McConaghy, the Vancouver-based former Mountie and co-founder of the rehabilitation centre for sexually abused and exploited girls.

The brothel owners would scrape their leftovers onto the floor when they were done eating. Srey’s every meal was a competition with their dogs.

“Every scrap of food she ever got, she fought for,” McConaghy said.

In early January, McConaghy will fly again to the Southeast Asian country for a post-Christmas visit with the NewSong girls, including now 10-year-old Srey and several teens who were the victims of Canada’s first prosecuted child sex tourist, Donald Bakker.

The Vancouver man was arrested nearly a decade ago, largely as a result of the then-RCMP forensics investigator McConaghy, who had unique know-how from running a Cambodian medical charity. Each time he returns to the sanctuary, which he set up after leaving the police force to devote himself to victims, he sees tell-tale signs indicating Canadians are still committing “grotesque” crimes against the country’s most defenceless.

Such predators travel abroad to have sex with children because they believe themselves immune to consequences, and critics argue Canada’s record doesn’t contradict the notion: Only five men have been punished under Canadian laws against child sex tourism over the past 15 years.

McConaghy and other children’s advocates — including politicians, senators and frontline police officers — want more Canadians prosecuted. Yet despite the federal Conservatives’ tough-on-crime approach, the laws’ infrequent use appears unlikely to rise quickly. Domestic problems remain highest on the public radar, and there’s only a finite envelope of money available for policing.

Awareness of the true horrors inflicted is low and almost beyond comprehension, the advocates say, resulting in little social momentum to trigger a complaints-driven system that would compel police to get more aggressive.

About 38 countries have laws allowing authorities to hunt their own citizens for crimes committed away from home.

Canada’s sex-tourism law, with seven arrests and a handful of convictions to its credit, was enacted in 1997.

McConaghy has called for a scheme to fight child sex tourists in the same vein as the $25-million national action plan devoted to human traffickers, as well as a mechanism to warn other countries if known offenders will be travelling abroad and for an online repository of images where sex attacks have occurred (without showing victims) that the public can access to provide tips.