# 82 More questions for Scott Neeson

Dear Scott

Unsurprisingly, you have not responded in any way to my email of six days ago.

As a filmmaker who understands a little about how films are put together it is clear that CAMBODIA’S CHILD PREDATORS is an ‘infomercial’ – an hour long commercial for Samleang Seila (Action Pour les Enfants) and yourself (representing the Cambodian Children’s Fund). 

This ‘infomercial’ tag may be a little unfair to the filmmakers who, despite their failure to carry out some very basic online research, check their facts, must at least be credited with having highlighted the problems inherent in the mushrooming of the number of ‘orphanages’ in Cambodia. In the absence of oversight of any kind, those who run these ‘orphanages’ are free to indulge in whatever legal and human rights abuses they wish with impunity.

You are in the ‘orphanage business’ Scott. Yes, you have in place a variety of programs in place but it is your ‘orphans’, 700+ of them, that are what attract the attention of your sponsors and donors. By ‘orphans’ I mean children who reside in a Cambodian Children’s Fund institution who have one or more living parents. These children are your drawcard and you rely on photos of them, photos of you cuddling them, to tug at the heartstrings of sponsors and donors and induce them to not only open their hearts but their wallets also. The message you want your sponsors and donors to hear (and that you go to great pains as a marketing person to transmit) is:

“Those poor kids, if it were not for that wonderful Scott Neeson, what would become of them?”

One answer to this question:

“Yes, Scott Neeson would be a wonderful man if he were helping these kids within a family and community context; if he were helping the mums and dads of these kids and their other siblings who are not in CCF residential care.”

As anyone who asks a few questions in and around Steung Meanchey will discover, most of the kids in residential care at CCF have one or more parents. In many cases these parents (and other siblings) are still working in the Phnom Penh rubbish tip for a combined family income of around $1000 a year.

The $1,000 a year family I am referring to (and with which I have done a lot of filming) has three children in residential care at CCF. Given that all three children have sponsors who pay at least $150 a month to CCF, the Cambodian Children’s Fund earns $450 a month, more than $5,000 a year whilst the rest of the family, including children working in the dump, must survive on $1000 a year. The family receives no financial assistance from CCF. 

If the father of such a materially poor family becomes ill, cannot work, falls one month behind in the rent they pay for the CCF hovel they live in ($12.50 per months), you lock them out of their own homes. I have filmed one instance of this and been told of many others. See:

http://cambodianchildrensfund.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/25-scott-nesson-locks-poor-family-out.html

The most impressive person to speak in CAMBODIA’S CHILD PREDATORS is James Sutherland from FRIENDS. As James points out, and as is well known from numerous studies conducted worldwide, it costs up to nine times as much money to keep a child in an institution as it does to support this child within his or her family and community. In other words, for every child you have in residential care at the Cambodian Children’s Fund you could be helping up to 9 children within a family and community context. Instead of publishing a seemingly never-ending stream of photos of you with happy children (almost always young girls) in your arms CCF could be publishing photos of these same children with their mums and dads, with their siblings, within their communities.

Rather than plying the role of hero-rescuer you could be sending a very different message to your sponsors and donors than the one you do right now. This could be summed up as:

“Over the past year your donations have enabled this family to move back to the village they had to leave as a result of debts incurred when the mother became ill. Your donations have made it possible for the father to buy seed to plant rice and vegetables, to put in a well, to buy school uniforms for the children and to pay medical expenses that have arisen over the year. This family is well on the way to becoming self-sufficient and we thank you for the contribution you have made.”

I am not, incidentally, suggesting here that a return to village life is going to be the answer to the problems faced by all poor families working in the rubbish dump. There will be as many different solutions to particular family’s problems as there are families. However, for each and every family, removing the children should be the very last option explored and only then if there are cogent reasons why the children cannot be cared for by their parents and relatives or anyone else within the community they were born into.

Getting back to CAMBODIA’S CHILD PREDATORS.

In relation to employees at the Cambodian Children’s Fund you say, onscreen:

“We don’t take on anyone who doesn’t have professional qualifications.”

What qualifications does James Mc Cabe have to run a Child Protection Unit? And does Alan Lemon have any of the relevant qualifications needed to work with children? Or are they both amateurs whose previous jobs, working for the Australian Federal Police, provides them with none of the relevant skills required?

In the case of James Mc Cabe, who appears in CAMBODIA’S CHILD PREDATORS,  his criminal record and time spent in jail would, in Australia or pretty well anywhere in the ‘developed’ world, make it impossible for him to head up a child protection unit. Yet here he is, in CAMBODIA’S CHILD PREDATORS, speaking as an expert in his field.

When you and Samleang Seila were talking with the producers of CAMBODIA’S CHILD PREDATORS did you mention to them that Mc Cabe had a criminal record? I wonder if they knew this fact when CAMBODIA’S CHILD PREDATORS went to air this month? Or have they, as appears to be the case, blindly accepted everything you and Samleang Seila have told them as statements of fact; as the truth? Have the producers of CAMBODIA’S CHILD PREDATORS, through their own carelessness, by not doing any independent research, unwittingly defamed David Fletcher and others?

I will end this latest email to you with the same question I asked of APLE’s Samleang Seila.

It is clearly imperative, on both legal and human rights grounds, that children should not be coerced by NGOs into giving false testimony. And, of course, nor should men such as David Fletcher be convicted as a result of the false testimony of children so coerced.

Would you agree, does CCF’s Child Protection Unit agree, that  protocols and procedures need to be set in place such that all children interviewed in the course of an investigation only need to do so once; that all such interviews with children be videotaped in the presence of trained professionals; that these trained professionals should not be in the employ of any NGO that has a vested interest in the outcome of whatever trial may ensue as a result of the children’s testimonies being used as evidence?

I will add here, lest the point has not been made clearly enough, the reason why interviews should not be conducted by those with a vested interest in the outcome of any criminal proceeding that may arise from them. APLE, CCF’s CPU, SISHA, CEOP and all NGOs whose income is dependent on the successful prosecution of sex offenders should not even be confronted by the temptation to encourage children to provide false testimony in videotaped interviews – especially if, as should be the case, these occur once only. Without appropriate protocols and procedures in place the implementation of once-only videotaped interviews, controlled by unscrupulous NGOs, could make matters worse rather than better for men unjustly accused of sex crimes.

best wishes

James Ricketson