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Gateless: A Story of Child Sex Abuse in Cambodia's Temples

http://bit.ly/2UZxenN Two young men sit under the shade of trees in Takeo, Cambodia; Se Bros wears a button-up shirt and jeans and Monk Ry wears his deep orange garb. Did he ever touch you?" Bros asks over the steady drone of insects, but Ry remains silent. "I believe he has done something like this to a lot of other children. It's you, me, and other children," Bros says. In Cambodia, Buddhist temples are regarded as places of refuge and rehabilitation for the community, but for Bros it was the site of his sexual abuse as a child. The perpetrator was Saravuth Tan, a Cambodian-American who investigators would later find had abused at least 17 young boys sometime during his 14 years' living at the temple. Soon Bros will be testifying against Tan, who he says raped him dozens of times. "I used to feel ashamed, lost all confidence, I lost focus in my studies, and lost time," says Bros. "Sometimes I felt physically sick because he used to do something bad to me." But for Monk Ry, Tan was his beloved godfather, someone who cared for him after he escaped his abusive family and became homeless. Tan provided him with food, a home and anything else he needed. "He loved me as if I am his own child," Ry says. "I don't know where I'd be right now if he hadn't adopted me, maybe not where I am right now." More than 200 cases of sexual abuse in Buddhist temples have been reported worldwide in the last decade. An increasing number of temple abuse incidents have been reported in Southeast Asia but experts believe most cases remain hidden. According to Socheat Nong, a child social worker, the problem of sexual abuse in Cambodia is a silent one. "In general, people in Cambodia don't believe or accept the fact that sexual abuse happens to boys," she says. "Even those who work with children, including counsellors and social workers, know very little about how to help boys who have been abused." As the Tan investigation unfolds, a more unsettling truth comes out: a chief monk says that the monks at the temple knew about the problem all along. Gateless follows two young survivors reckoning with their pasts, and what happens when child abuse is treated with a blind eye.

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