# 24 Scott Neeson complicit in 'Stolen Generation' of Cambodian children?

Scott

You know this family. You wanted to take the baby from its mother and grand-parents and raise Tath Raksa in your CCF nursery; present Raksa to the world as a child you had ‘rescued’ from poverty.

Raska is a good looking child so his smiling face would have melted the hearts of sponsors and donors and the money would have flowed in – both swelling CCF’s coffers and your own ego: Scott Neeson, the $1 million a year film executive who gave up his high life in Hollywood, hob nobbing with Mel Gibson and other superstars, to help poor families working in the Phnom Penh rubbish dump!

This is how your post-Hollywood life began, Scott, and I have no reason to doubt the purity of your original intentions. Things have gone badly awry, however, and you are now trapped by the all-too-successful funding model you have created for the Cambodian Children’s Fund. You need a constant supply of children to ‘rescue’ to feed the appetite of your sponsors. Otherwise they may lose interest or take their charity dollars to some other NGO  that is also in the business of ‘rescuing’ children – from poverty, child exploitation and the sex trade.

The cuter the child the more in need of rescue it is!

Unfortunately, the model you have in place necessitates that you remove many of these children from their families. Housing them in an institution makes for great photo opportunities – gaggles of smiling kids in class, eating food, playing sport.  Always smiling. (No shots of the dormitories in which they sleep 3 and 4 to a bed though!) 

Your funding model must create the illusion that you are offering these children a much better life (albeit institutionalized) than any alternative available to them. Without you, without the enormous sacrifice you have made, giving up your Hollywood life,  their lives would be miserable! This is where you are wrong, Scott. So wrong. Worse than just wrong!

Take the family in this photo, for instance. You know their story. Raksa’s mother, Lim Kheav Eak is intellectually handicapped. She was raped a couple of years ago. Nine months later Raksa was born. Eak loves Raksa. So do her parents – That Pheng (grandmother) and Tath Kim (grandfather). Grandma and grandpa, along with Eak, work in the Phnom Penh rubbish tip. During the day, Raksa is taken care of by an 8 year old girl, whose name escapes me just now.

The Cambodian Children’s Fund offered to take Raksa off the family’s hands, raise him in the CCF nursery and give him a ‘good life.’ CCF did not offer to help the whole family – only the one cute member of it; only the one that could be used as propaganda in your relentless pursuit of more and more money from sponsors and donors.

Yes, the family would have loved some help from CCF but they love baby Raksa and would not give him up to CCF. The result? No offer of help for the whole family! The message you sent to this family was: “Give us Raksa or you’ll get no help from us.” They opted for ‘no help’.

Many other parents do not take the ‘no help’ option, They choose, instead, to give their children to the Cambodian Children’s Fund in the hope that their children will be well fed, get a decent education. The Cambodian Children’s Fund then gets most of these parents (but not all) to sign a contact – the terms of which they do not have explained to them. The parents are not given the option of showing the contract to a lawyer or human rights group or anyone who can point out the fine print to them before signing it.

Once the parents have signed the contracts with their thumb prints, they are not allowed to retain a copy of it. CCF retains the only copy and is then in a position to tell the parents, further down the track, that the contract contains whatever conditions and clauses suit CCF. The parents are then intimidated into silence.  If they kick up any kind of fuss, they will be punished by CCF. The instances in which this has occurred are numerous. As with the Mafia, you only need to knee-cap one person for their neighbours to get the message that you don’t mess with the Mafia.

These poor illiterate mothers and fathers have no idea of their legal rights and this is just how you want it. Mothers and fathers aware of their rights are not so easily intimidated. And one of the legal rights that these parents have, under Cambodian law, is to have their children returned to the family if such a request is made to CCF. This does not occur, as I discovered when Ka and Chuan asked for their daughters to be returned to their care and you refused, citing the contract you had entered into with them. They claimed that there was no contract. You refused to produce us so who knows if there is a contract or not. However, regardless of what the contract says, if there is one, they were entitled (as are all parents of children in Cambodia) to have their daughters returned to them whenever they asked for this to occur.

CCF has become so confident in its capacity to abuse the human rights of parents that it often does not bother with the formality of entering into any contract with the parents of kids it takes from families. No doubt, upon reading this, you will ensure that your staff get contracts with all mums and dads quick smart.

I have asked this question before but I’ll try again:

“Could you please make public, Scott Neeson, the contents of the pro forma contract that you get parents to sign before removing the children from their families and raising them in one of your many institutions?”

One day, when true democracy comes to Cambodia, I hope that a legal class action suit is initiated - suing the Cambodian Children’s Fund and all other NGOs who have engaged in the theft of children from their families; in the creation of a Cambodian ‘Stolen Generation.’