# 213 Media complicity in the illegal removal of Cambodian children from their families

Citipointe church’s Pastor Leigh Ramsey steals children from impoverished Cambodian families.

Both the editors of the Cambodian Daily and the Phnom Penh Post knew this in 2008.

“Surely not!” I can hear you exclaim, “An Australian-based church kidnapping children in Cambodia! It cannot be.”

Judge for yourself. The document below is to be found on the “SHE Rescue” website in Dec 2016.

Note the date on which the SHE Rescue Home entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – June 2009.

Note also the date upon which the SHE Rescue Home entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Ministry of Social Affairs, Veterans and Youth Rehabilitation (MOSAVY) – Nov 2009.

Now look at the 'contract' that Citipointe's Pastor Leigh Ramsey induced the impoverished mother of two young girls (photo above) to sign on 31st July 2008. Here is the document in Khmer, with the translation below:

There are three points worthy of note here, as I pointed out to both the Cambodia Daily and Phnom Penh Post back in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013 and 2014:

(1) The 'contract' was entered into between the mother (Yem Chanthy) and SHE Rescue Home 11 months before Pastor Leigh Ramsey had entered into an MOU with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and 16 months before the church entered into an MOU with MOSAVY

(2) The contract is not signed by any representative of Citipointe Church or The SHE Rescue Home and so carries no legal weight - even if the SHE Rescue Home was a legal NGO in July 2008.

(3) The parents believed that they were entering into an agreement with LICADHO such that the SHE Rescue Home could provide temporary respite care for the two young girls during the week; allowing the girls to return to the family home on the weekends.

TRANSLATION

                              KINGDOM OF CAMBODIA

Nation Religion King

name: YEM CHANTHY, age 21, and name: CHAB VANNA, age 52, job: morning glory seller, address: along the riverfront street, Central market.

TO

Director of CT Point International Rescue and Care Organization

Objective: request for my child or grandchild, name: CHANTHY ROZA, sex: female, age: 6 and name: CHANTHY CHEATA, sex: female, age:3 to stay in the center of CT Point International Rescue and Care Organization.

As mentioned in the objective, we, both are mother and grandmother of the above two children, would like to inform the Director that: nowadays, we have no house, living along the street and have no job and cannot provide enough food for feeding the two children. Moreover, we would like the two children to have safe shelter and get enough food, as well as education.

As mentioned, please the Director permits our two children to live in the care center by favor.

Please the Director receives the great respect from us.

Phnom Penh, Date: July 31, 2008

Mother's thumbprint                           Grandmother's thumbprint

So what was the legal status of Citipointe Church's removal of the young girls from their parents' care between July 2008 and June 2009?

The answer is clear: 

Citipointe Church had no legal right to remove the young girls from their family in July 2008 - particularly since, during those  11 months, the parents repeatedly asked that their daughters be returned to them.

Citipointe Church refused to return the girls, citing the 'contract' Yem Chanthy had entered into as legal justification! At one point, when Chanti 'stole' her own children back, Citipointe called the police and asked them to get back the children they had stolen. The police complied.

Cambodian law is clear about the crime of illegal removal of children from their families:

Law on Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation

Article 8:Definition of Unlawful Removal

The act of unlawful removal removal in this act shall mean to:

1)    Remove a person from his/her current place of residence to a place under the actor’s or a third persons control by means of force, threat, deception, abuse of power, or enticement, or

2)    Without legal authority or any other legal justification to do so to take a minor person under general custody or curatorship or legal custody away from the legal custody of the parents, care taker or guardian.

Article 9: Unlawful removal, inter alia, of Minor:

A person who unlawfully removes a minor or a person under general custody or curatorship or legal custody shall be punished with imprisonment for 2 to 5 years.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/7259345/Law-on-Suppression-of-Human-Trafficking-and-Sexual-Exploitation-15022008-English

I provided the Cambodia Daily with all the above information (plus copies of documents) but the newspaper published nothing. 

The Phnom Penh Post also had all this information at its disposal and published nothing.  In the Post's defence Citipointe was, at the time, threatening to sue the newspaper if it published anything further about the SHE Rescue Home's illegal removal of children.

The same principle applied with LICADHO. Naly Pilorge knew that the young girls had been kidnapped, stolen, illegally removed from their family by Citipointe Church but did and said nothing.  Both Citipointe and Yem Chanthy (whom I know as 'Chanti') insisted that LICADHO was involved in the signing of the illegal 'contract'. Naly Pilorge has neither confirmed nor denied her involvement, but nor did she, at any point during the following six years, do anything (despite repeated requests from myself) to assist Chanti and her husband in their quest to have their daughters returned to them. It would have been clear to any NGO at the time interested in illegally removing children from their families that LICADHO would not lift a finger to stop them. LICADHO'S silence, along with that of the Cambodian media, provided unscrupulous NGOs with their tacit approval in the the stealing of children

The same applied with Helen Sworn of Chab Dai - an evangelical NGO to which Citipointe Church allied itself before it had even entered into an MOU with Cambodia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Helen Sworn not only knew that the young girls had been illegally removed (I provided her with the documented evidence) but endorsed SHE Rescue Home's activities in Cambodia:

“Please be informed that I will not be in correspondence with you regarding this case. Citipointe are a member of Chab Dai and are autonomous in their own right as an organisation.  They are carrying out a good program here in Cambodia…”

And then there was the Global Development Group, headed up by Geoff Armstrong, and also complicit in the illegal removal not only of the two young girls already mentioned but of a dozen or so other girls by Pastor Leigh Ramsey in 2008. Despite his knowing that Citipointe was illegally removing girls from their families, Geoff Armstrong provided both financial and moral support to Citipointe Church's SHE Rescue Home. 

I would like to think that the illegal removal of children from their families was a practice that had been abandoned by evangelical Christians (saving souls for Jesus Christ) and others who are in the 'orphanage business' because there is a quick and easy buck to be made.

Alas, it is not so.  The heinous practice of illegal removal and detention of children from impoverished families in Cambodia continues and both the Cambodia Daily and the Phnom Penh Post pretend that it is not happening. Both newspapers are happy to expose corruption that can be seeded back to the Cambodian government (child labor in brick factories) and make front page news of it but will not touch, with the proverbial barge pole, the corruption that is rife within the NGO industry in Cambodia.

Take a look at the following from the SHE Rescue Home website in Dec 2016: 

$22,000 to take care of one girl for one year! This is around 20 times how much it would cost to support the girl's entire family. Only the most gullible of sponsors and donors could possibly believe this figure.

How many of the girls currently in the SHE Rescue Home have in fact been rescued from the sex trade? Is there even one? Is this a question that some journalist from the Daily or Post might like to ask?

Back in 2008 and 2009, when I was doing serious battle with Citipointe over the church's kidnapping of Chanti's two young daughters, there was not one (NOT ONE) girl in the SHE Rescue Home who had been rescued from the sex trade. They had ALL been 'rescued' from their impoverished families under the same false pretences (phony 'contracts') of the kind that Chanti placed her thumb print on. 

And then there is this from the SHE Rescue Home website:

The logic is clear: 

An impoverished family might sell their daughter into the sex trade so all Cambodian girls from impoverished families,  aged 11 to 18, being technically 'at risk' can thus, with a clear Christian conscience, be 'rescued' by Citipointe church! ANd the church reaps a $22,000 financial harvest!

The supply of such young girls in Cambodia will remain endless for  unscrupulous NGOs such as the SHE Rescue Home for as long as extreme poverty endures in Cambodia.

If any enterprising journalist from the Post or Daily who might be reading this wishes to take a closer look at the SHE Rescue scam, you might like to start by asking how it is, in Dec 2016, that SHE claims to be working with SISHA - an organisation that ceased to exist at least 2 years ago!

This hypothetical enterprising journalist might also like to ask of LICADHO why this human rights group shows no interest at all in the illegal removal of up to 9,000 children from their impoverished families by sham orphanages and evangelical Christians.

Yes, it is great that LICADHO is exposing the exploitation of child labor in brick factories but it is time for LICADHO to expose the exploitation of the children of impoverished families placed in residential care in sham 'orphanages' and Rescue Centres.