Wednesday, August 6 at 8.30pm
It’s a business that’s enabling one of the darkest crimes of this century and Australians are unwittingly helping the business to grow and flourish.
It’s the twisted world of orphanage tourism in Cambodia, where ‘orphans’ – around 75% of whom have parents – are used as pawns in an industry that turns over huge amounts of money annually, much of it coming from well-intentioned Australians.
The desire of tourists to ‘help’ orphans – either as day tourists, volunteer tourists or donors – means there’s a huge amount of money on offer if you can start up an orphanage. And many Cambodians are doing just that: stocking them with children they rent, buy or borrow from extremely poor parents (often in rural areas) with promises of a better life in the city.
Australian Steve Morrish is trying to fight the problem head-on. The ex-detective from Melbourne has formed SISHA, an organization designed to hunt down people or groups who try to exploit children. SISHA works with locals and police but their core focus is investigations – hunting down the bad guys – and that’s what Sabour goes over to get involved in.
A case has come up that involves a group of missing children in the capital city. Steve Morrish been tipped off that an orphanage director, whose orphanage was shut down by SISHA a year ago for abusing kids, has now rounded those kids back up and taken them to a new orphanage – but no-one knows where.
SISHA starts tracking down every lead and once they have one, Steve enlists Sabour to go undercover to confirm where the children are being held. But Sabour’s desire to find the kids ends up getting him into a situation that is far more dangerous than he could ever have imagined.
