Many of the women don't realize this. On non-meeting days, Chan Dina and the other peer educators fan outinto the brothels, armed with literature on safe sex. They are comfortable with us. With an estimated 40 percent of the country's sex workers HIV-positive,AIDS awareness is a priority for the union's members. But AIDS is not the only threat.
Women come to meetings with tales of beatings and abuse.
Brothel owners frequently accuse the women of not earning enough money and punish them by forcing them to work around theclock or locking them up with out food, says Tia. Although the union cannot offer the women physical protection, she says, it encourages them to keep a record of their earnings as a smallmeasure of protection. Although more attention has been focused in recent years on the plightof Cambodia's sex workers, Kien Sereyphal says there has been nomeasurable improvement in their lives, mainly because their number hascontinued to grow. Cambodia's commercial sex market has exploded since the country tradedcommunism for a free market and multi-party democracy in the early 1990s. Tuol Kok mushroomed with the United Nations peace-building mission, drawing women like Chan Dina, who left her brothel in a northern Cambodian town and came to Tuol Kok during preparations for the 1993 election.