"You want girl?" he asks in broken English as the scent of cheap perfume wafts in. A shirtless boy, who is maybe 10, pushes himself to the front and gestures for me to roll down the window. None of them looks older than 14, but they come on like seasoned streetwalkers, licking their lips and thrusting their tiny chests forward. Wearing tight clothes and bright lipstick, several sashay over to the car. What look like rundown garages lining a back alley are really brothels full of young girls. Our car turns right down a steep and bumpy hill, and at the bottom we are jolted back to reality. Back in March, the government had closed most of the 50-odd Svay Pak brothels - known for housing underaged Vietnamese girls - in an effort to clean up the country's growing image as a pedophile's paradise. Perhaps the Cambodian government's crackdown on the child-sex trade is having an effect. Promisingly, there doesn't seem to be much activity along the road on this hot summer night. It's very dark - there are no street lamps and the only light comes from flickering candles set in small Buddhist shrines on the roadside. IT'S AFTER MIDNIGHT and we're cruising slowly along the potholed road that leads to Svay Pak, Phnom Penh's infamous brothel district.
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