For some holidaymakers, Cambodia is synonymous with Angkor Wat, with the ruins of the Khmer kingdom in the north-west of the country, with huge temple complexes and trails in a place where the sky glows in the evening and hundreds of cameras wait for the sunrise in the morning.
The motives of their remoteness take the tourists with them, their beauty characterizes the country's reputation in the West.
Elena Witzeck
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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The capital of Cambodia is Phnom Penh.
Phnom Penh is also huge, a metropolis whose traffic situation makes German visitors shudder, with urban areas where mountains of rubbish pile up for miles and people live under shacks, areas where children roam the streets with wooden carts from the early morning and into the earn money for their families at night.
Anyone who has been to Phnom Penh can imagine that childhood is not a common term here because children have to grow up quickly.
The "Y-Kollektiv" research team, a group of young journalists who produce reports for YouTube and Funk, went on a difficult search in Phnom Penh for information on the abuse of children by holidaymakers.
The collective publishes a report every week, sometimes about overwhelmed doctors, sometimes about North Sea islands.
The task, but above all the findings to be expected from this research, had a different potential for stress, which is also described by Frederik Fleig, who does the research work on site and otherwise works for the radio station 1 Live.
Prostitution in the back room
A study by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child found that a third of prostitutes in Cambodia are minors.
Prostitution is forbidden.
In Thailand and the Philippines, pressure has increased on authorities to prosecute sex tourism and child sexual abuse.
Cambodia, on the other hand, has long been a paradise for pedophiles.
NGO employees are primarily responsible for the educational work, as Fleig notes.
But nobody wants to talk to him about it.
It is said that reporting on the sexual abuse of children harms the country's reputation.
With such interviews, the NGOs would also put themselves in danger.
Instead, Fleig meets several men who are willing to tell you how they ended up having sex with very young women in Cambodia.
In red-light districts he encounters older white men and Cambodian children selling flowers.
"I'll pay for the flower," says one.
"But only if I get a kiss for it." Fleig learns that since the ban on brothels, child prostitution has shifted to the back rooms of beer gardens, karaoke bars, massage parlors and hotels.
In a boarding house he is offered girls: the younger, the more expensive.
Virgins are the most expensive.
If a family sells their daughter's first sex, they can live on the money for up to two years.
For the girl, the path to prostitution is mapped out.
At first nobody wants to talk
Eventually Fleig finds an NGO after all.
It is called APLE and is supported by the Cambodian government.
APLE employees have permission to shadow suspects.
The reporter drives with them to a suburb, observes an American, his young Cambodian wife and their ten-year-old daughter.
But there is still not enough evidence of the abuse of the girl, the investigators are moving on.
Two types of perpetrators are familiar to NGOs, men with pedophilic tendencies and those who seize spontaneous opportunities.
Some of them arrive with sweets and small gifts, some sneak into the trust of entire villages.
The children are on average twelve and a half years old.
"Some of the convicted perpetrators do not show the slightest remorse," says Seila Samleang, head of APLE.
You're talking about a fair deal.
The abuse of boys in particular is taboo, reports Chamreun Yaim, head of the NGO First Step Cambodia.
Boys are particularly often blamed, beaten or even denied.
Some dissociate, separating the memory from their consciousness.
That helps with survival, says Yaim.
The reporter meets two affected boys himself. Before the interview, he seeks advice from a therapist – and then, after a few questions, decides to play soccer with the boys.
The reporter addresses his dismay with honest dismay: "You see so many things that just don't make sense." The means of self-reflection in selfie mode is a comprehensible approach to the difficult material, even if it tilts into self-examination here and there when Fleig again sitting on a scooter with blowing hair or musing about disgusting old men in a hotel bed.
All the more drastic are the moments when he can't speak.
"He was like you. A white man, only fatter," says one of the boys on the soccer field.
It's the hardest moment of the reportage.
Also for the spectators.
Y collective: child abuse in Cambodia as a travel destination
in the podcast in the ARD Audiothek and on funk.net