Children for Sale

Directed by María Sigrún Hilmarsdóttir, Guðmundur Bergkvist

Documentary on child trafficking in Cambodia. Every year tens of thousands of young girls are trafficked and sold into slavery, sexual abuse and prostitution. We follow these girls, interview young girls that currently are or have been sex slaves and girls that have been saved from this plight and NGO employees. We ask questions like: What makes parents want to sell their children and how does the child trafficking take place? What is being done to stop the problem? The Cambodian nation is still recovering after the genocide in the seventies where a quarter of the nation was executed. The social infrastructure is in ruins and corruption is severe. One fifth of the nation is illiterate and poverty drives children to work instead of attending school. Half the nation lives under the poverty line and earns less than a dollar a day. Poor families in the remote rural areas are the most vulnerable to the trafficking and we follow the fortunes of one such family.