Controversial Cambodian Activist Fights Southeast Asian Sex Trade

Controversial Cambodian Activist Fights Southeast Asian Sex Trade – AFP, May 23, 2012
…This position, which underpins Mam’s reliance on brothel raids as a tool to fight trafficking, enrages other activists, such as the Asia Pacific Sex Worker Network, which argues consenting adult sex workers need “rights not rescues.”
Sweeping raid-and-rescue operations and police round-ups of street-based sex workers are not only ineffective, experts say, but lead to “systematic violations of sex workers’ human rights,” New York-based Human Rights Watch said in 2010 report.
Mam’s organization, AFESIP, has also been criticized for accepting sex workers picked up during Cambodian police roundups which HRW has said constitute “arbitrary arrests and detentions of innocent people.”
Mam dismissed HRW’s assessment…