I wrote this story during a summer on the Thai/Burma border in 2006 when I was in college. Emotionally, it remains the most difficult project I’ve pursued.

A small, red bulb glows in the corner of this stuffy room, but the area holds a much darker tone. The light is absorbed by the walls, by the porous, homemade cinder blocks awkwardly held together by sloppy, hardened mortar. Something about the light in this room and the way the rickety, broken bamboo furniture is arranged makes everything feel so close – like it’s caving in.

News of my arrival spreads quickly through the rooms of this back alley structure, their high, tonal voices chattering in choppy, short syllables. Before I know it I’m sitting in a low wooden chair, its reclined position trying to put me much more at ease than I feel. Five of them enter the room. They stand so close in front of me with their hands behind their backs that I can feel them. They’re not touching me, but I can feel them. I had expected scantily clad seductresses, but instead my eyes fall on a scene that makes me feel like I’ve just stepped into a teenage girls’ clothing store at a Midwest American shopping mall. None of their shirts are low cut and many of them feature pictures of kitty cats or flowers. None of their pants or skirts come above their knees, and most of them look at me with the sweet, innocent smile of a precious moments doll.

It was about this time that the feeling overtook me. It started in my chest and floated up towards my head, causing a dark blur to begin forming around the edges of my vision. Had this place in fact been a little girls’ clothing store or perhaps a junior high school choir concert, I would have felt fine – everything would have made sense. But this was a place very different from these sorts of settings, ones that were normal to me. I was seated in the viewing room of a dirty brothel somewhere on the outskirts of Techileik, a Burmese border town just across from Thailand on the bank of a tributary of the Mekong River. This was one of about 20 locations for cheap sex that this small city holds, and though I knew my intentions in being there were justified and upright, I couldn’t help but feel just then like the scum of the planet.

But Techileik is only the beginning. The girls begin working at these brothels thinking that they will have made enough money to stop in just a couple of months. But often times they get duped into being trafficked into Thailand under the premise of a restaurant or housekeeping job. They’ll be brought to Chiang Mai and then, once they’ve become old hat at the brothels around town there, they’ll be shipped down to Bangkok, and then from there to Phuket, and often from there all the way down to Malaysia. They are sometimes locked in rooms and beaten if they won’t see customers. Or rather … until they will see customers. When they’re “sold” out of Burma, it’s often for a price around 30,000 baht ($800 US). The money is usually paid to the girl’s parents, but then the girl is in debt, owing her purchaser that 30,000 baht as well as her monthly rent space and meal coverage. They fall into an endless cycle of debt that is next to impossible to break out of, their despair actually bringing them, somehow, to hope for as many customers as possible every single day. There are no days off. In fact, in Burma there didn’t seem to even be any hours off. A man could come any time of day and the girls would all be woken if they were asleep to come out and stand in a line in front of him.

I had my translator tell the girls that I was not there for any “sexual affair”, as I believe he literally translated it, but that I would just like to talk. When they heard this, a confused look spread over their faces. To begin with, young, decent-looking Western men were not the kind of visitors these girls were accustomed to having. The men they saw were mostly aged, Asian men, and when they did see foreigners, they were always “old and creepy” as one girl put it for me. And as if my presence wasn’t enough of a shock, I told them that all I wanted to do was talk, a request that one of the girls told me had never happened there before … ever.

She stood slightly behind the others in her jeans, cheap, plastic sandals, and black kitten t-shirt that her chest hadn’t even developed enough yet to fill. She wouldn’t look me in the eyes, but her tiny frame stood, staring with eyes glazed over at the concrete floor, her small mouth set permanently straight with as complete a lack of emotion as seemed possible. She was 16. The other girls left us together in the room, a dim, foreboding place lit only by two small candles perched on top of the thin, concrete room divider.

Sixteen. I couldn’t help but think that if she were at the same point in her life living in the town where I grew up, she would be going out with her girlfriends, shopping at the mall, counting the days until she could get her driver’s license. In fact, much about her wasn’t all that different. Her favorite band was “The Westlake Boys,” one that, upon having her grab the cassette tape, I found to be very much like every other bleach blonde boy band around the world. She told me she had never had a boyfriend before, and when I asked her why she told me that she didn’t think she was old enough yet.

I talked with many girls like this. I would ask them questions about how this work made them feel inside – if it hurt them to have to do what they do everyday. But my efforts seemed futile. Something in their heads must click when they began working in these brothels … something that helps them block out the pain they experience. Consider stories you’ve heard about women here in the West who have been raped and the emotional trauma they are left with. Most of the time, it was a single event that has scarred them so deeply. In reality, these girls – these little, timid girls – are raped every day, one to six times a day. The kind of strength that it must take to go on through this and to be able to hide their emotion is something beyond my understanding. But this strength is far from being recognized or respected where they’re from – where they’re not even thought of as people but as objects. “No more than a table or a chair,” as one Burmese man put it for me.

But what is the answer? When I come upon hardship like this, my first inclination as a journalist is to document it … to record what I’m seeing or feeling in order to bring to light what is happening to a larger number. But my next tendency is to try finding a way to fix it – to correct the injustice. In order to do this, it would seem that we need to get at the root problems. Like killing an invading weed or taking care of a mold problem, you have to go at the source and correct first what is wrong there. Why are these girls subjected to this? First, their parents are poor, and have to eat to live. They sell their daughters into this virtual sex slavery because they need the money. But often times it is not money for food that the parents are requiring, it’s money for drugs. How can this deficiency be reconciled? Sustainable food subsidy programs and working drug rehab centers. There are a few in the area, but they are often so expensive that it’s more economical to stay addicted.

Another reason for the exploitation of these girls comes as a three-part twist of bad news, those being men’s drive for sex and a culturally-low respect for women mixed with an utter lack of governmental control on the prostitution industry, if it’s even worthy of being called that. It seems to me much more like employed rape. The solution for this? Obviously more governmental crackdowns, though it would be difficult to persuade a government which gets a large amount of its GDP from sex tourism (Thailand) or whose government isn’t really a government at all, but a military junta hell bent on achieving nothing but drug production and making its leaders rich (Burma). And the other two problems – sex drive and a low respect for women – what is the answer here? To remain honest here as a journalist, I must admit that I am a man of faith in a higher power, and believe this to be the answer to both of these problems. It seems to me that it is only once we are able to see each other as brothers and sisters under the same being that we will be able to really treat each other with respect and learn to curb our appetites in decent ways. Perhaps you don’t agree, but it sure does make a lot of sense to me.

When I left the brothel that day, one of the girls begged me to stay. She wasn’t making any money from me, but then again, there wasn’t much business anyway. It was a Buddhist holiday and their normal customers were at the temple, paying their respects. But her reasons for wanting me to stay were more than this. She said that I was the kindest man she had ever met. This floored me. What had I done for her? We had done nothing more than talk about friends and music and skirt around discussions about feelings. But I had shown her a kind of love that she had likely never truly felt from a man before. I had sat down with her and cared. I hadn’t told her to do anything for me – anything that, no matter how deep down the pain was – things that hurt her. As I was picking up my bag to go, the brothel owner, a sour-faced, well-fed woman, started barking something at my translator. “She wants more money for letting you talk to the girls,” he said. I had bought a couple of overpriced sodas to be allowed to sit and talk, but now the woman was demanding more. At this, the little girl stood up and with an angry look on her face, like a teenager arguing with a parent about getting grounded, began yelling something back at her “owner.” I asked my translator what was happening and he told me that the girl was yelling at her that I would not pay. That she would not let me. She then turned back towards me with tears in her eyes and, looking down at the dirt floor, began pushing me towards the gate as her owner looked on scowling.

These girls are everywhere. Child prostitution is not a problem specific to Burmese border towns or Southeast Asia. It’s everywhere. And no matter what you believe, you must believe that it needs to be stopped.