Angelina Jolie has joined Ben Affleck and Demi Moore in an effort to highlight the plight of desperate women in Third World countries by narrating a video about a teenage Cambodian sex slave.
The Oscar winner and United Nations Goodwill Ambassador agreed to front the hard-hitting film after being moved by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof’s stories about the death, mutilation and despicable discrimination against young women and teenagers in the world’s poorest places.
In the video, shot by Kristof and aired on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show on Tuesday, Jolie, whose adopted son Maddox is Cambodian, reveals the girl was kidnapped from her village when she was just 13, sold to sex slavery and forced into prostitution before she had experienced her first period.
The tragic teen in the video also revealed she was electrocuted twice a day for arguing too much, and tied up at night so she couldn’t escape.
Through a translator, she revealed her virginity was sold four times before she managed to escape and she was “stitched up three times”.
Jolie revealed, “Virgins bring in hundreds of dollars for brothel owners are are in high demand by men with Aids, who believe having sex with a virgin will cure their disease.
“Because these enslaved girls are forbidden to request condoms, they’re vulnerable to STDs (sexually-transmitted diseases), Aids and pregnancies.”
The girl fell pregnant twice and was forced to abort both children – the second when she was four months gone.
Jolie picked up the story: “(She) was in so much pain after her second abortion she asked for a few days rest.” But the madam at the brothel showed no mercy, and instead stabbed her in the eye with a metal rod.
Jolie added, “As her wound became more infected, her eye began oozing blood and puss. Now, considered mutilated and worthless by the brothel, her captors mercilessly discarded her on the streets.”
Kristof, who was appearing on Oprah to promote his new book Half The Sky – which recounts the terrible truth about the world’s most desperate teenage girls and women – revealed the girl found help, but hers is one happy ending in a global sex trafficking and slavery industry that he estimates has ensnared three to tens of millions of young girls.
Kristof returned to the site of one of the brothels that housed the Cambodian teen and her fellow sex slaves with one reluctant former child prostitute, who showed him the basement which acted as a torture chamber for the most unruly girls.
From a translated script, Jolie explained what the girl was telling the journalist: “There must be many girls who died in those rooms. I spent two years in a place like this.” »
