Thirty years of war left Cambodia ravaged and poverty-stricken. Since the end of the brutal Khmer Rouge rule, poverty, corruption and global tourism have all made it particularly vulnerable to the child labour industry. Children are trafficked into cities from rural areas to become sex slaves or sex workers, or trafficked out to comparatively wealthy Thailand to work in Bangkok as beggars, domestic workers, or labourers on construction sites.

With 40 per cent of Cambodians living in rural areas, international trafficking gangs target poor rural families - often striking just before the harvest, when people are at their poorest. They offer families 'loans' in return for the children which then accumulate huge interest repayments, leaving the children trapped in 'debt bondage' for life.

Leng is 12 years old. She was rescued in a police raid five months ago. Leng's mother sold her as a housemaid but she ended up a victim of prostitution, forced to have sex with several clients a day. Now she's at a rehabilitation centre, learning to read and write for the first time in her life. It's only recently with counselling that Leng's been able to talk about what happened to her.

Hing Srey, director of the centre, explains: "The situation is very serious - the problem of sexual abuse and trafficking in children. People - especially young girls - can't read or write. So all these girls are easily tricked by people who come and charm them. They say that they will look for good jobs for them."

Today there are an estimated 50,000 prostitutes in Cambodia. In 1991 there were just 6,000 sex workers. That number trebled within a year - following the end of 20 years of war when thousands of UN peacekeepers came to Cambodia. Most clients today are Cambodian - the numbers of sex workers being fuelled by a combination of poverty, corruption and now a new wave of tourism. Over a third of the victims of the prostitution racket are children aged 11 to 17. Most of them are trafficked within Cambodia. Others arrive across the border from Vietnam, Laos or China. Children as young as four have been sold into the sex industry in Cambodia.

The presence of AIDS has made the situation even worse. Somaly, who runs AFESIP, an organisation working with particularly vulnerable girls which gave shelter to Leng, explains: "With the AIDS explosion rich men don't sleep with prostitutes, they buy virgins. Because there are not enough virgins to go around, sometimes a girl will have sex with a customer and then they get sewn up straight afterwards. They then sleep with another customer. He thinks that she is being 'broken in' and because she bleeds and is in lots of pain they think she must be a virgin... They are traumatised - they are really, really traumatised. You need to hear it from the girls themselves, because many people find it hard to believe. It hurts me to talk about it."

Poverty is at the root of the problem. Most rural Cambodians scratch a living farming the land which is often subject to natural disasters, and flooding. But today the greatest threat to their land is debt - more and more people are selling their land to pay off debts incurred when one of their family falls ill. Most families here have somewhere between 6 to 8 children. The children can't go to school because they need to help their parents earn money. It's not surprising that children become beggars or are sold by their families into service or prostitution.

Many are children trafficked across to wealthy Thailand - to work in the sex industry, or beg on the streets. Nine out of every ten child beggars in Thailand come from Cambodia. The children are smuggled over in trains, on the backs of trucks, or in buses. Linda Manning of the International Organisation for Migration says that child renting is common. "That is where a parent or care-giver rents the services of that child to be taken to Thailand to earn money with the idea that that money will be sent back to the family. In reality they very rarely see the money... We've got quite a few older children who may have been trafficked at two or four years old and have lived in Thailand for ten years. They have no idea where they came from so they have no history."

Another serious problem for poverty-stricken Cambodia is sex tourism. In July last year, the Ministry of Tourism reported that seven out of every ten children living near Angkor Wat had been propositioned by tourists for sex.

The IMO and the ILO are working with the Cambodian Government to combat the trafficking. They have established a National Framework on Child Labour. And the police are being trained to enforce existing laws better. Srey believes that stricter laws are the answer: "In the past Cambodians had a strong sense of their culture. The kind of sexual abuse we see today was rare. What we need are strong laws so that the real offenders are punished. Only then, I believe, will the abuse of children stop."

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