Just thought you's might like to read this.

[Clermont]

Dark night in Cambodia fuels ex Aussie cop's mission to halt child sex trade

[Clermont]

The article wont let me copy and paste, protected. Go to 9 News Philippine, the article is to long to highlight and post, but worth reading. The PI's have a good mention in there on this deplorable crime.

[Guy F.]

No working link in the OP.

[BrettGC]

3 minutes ago, Guy F. said:

No working link in the OP.

Read the post directly above yours. 

[Jollygoodfellow]

Copy and paste worked for me 

Dark night in Cambodia fuels ex Aussie cop's mission to halt child sex trade

 

Former Victorian policeman Glen Hulley won't ever forget the night evil quietly brushed up against up him and tapped him on the shoulder. The experience changed him immediately, and dramatically altered the direction of his life.

In 2013 Hulley was travelling through Southeast Asia while he recuperated from an injury he had suffered while training for Australia’s national karate team. Inside a bar in Phnom Penh, Cambodia's bustling capital city of 1.5 million people, Hulley was approached by a local man. The man, a tuk tuk driver, asked Hulley, then 37, if he wanted to hire a prostitute for the night. 

When Hulley declined, the determined Cambodian pitched him another deal - this time a much younger girl. "It was clear a child was being offered," Hulley tells Nine.com.au. "That shocked me." 

Hulley wanted to find out where the child was located, so he told the driver to take him there. "It probably wasn't the wisest thing to do," Hulley recalls. 

But after 13 years with the Victorian police, including undercover investigative work, Hulley’s instinct pushed him on towards the unknown. The pair exited the bar and, with Hulley in the back of the noisy tuk tuk, the two men sped through the busy night time Phnom Penh streets. Eventually the tuk tuk pulled up outside a house, and Hulley was led inside.

The man presented him a girl. Hulley recalls her being no older than 11 or 12, too young for high school. The tuk tuk driver told Hulley that for just USD $20 he could take the girl away and bring her back in an hour. "I had to come up with an idea to get out of there," Hulley says. "The way I did that was by saying she was too old for me, and I wanted a younger child."

Hulley remains haunted by the young girl. "She wouldn’t look at anybody in the room. Clearly this wasn't the first time this had happened."

Hulley now leads a small team of local investigators and support staff. But in the beginning, following that alarming night in Pnomh Penh, Hulley operated as a kind of lone wolf. In 2014 and 2015, Hulley worked on his own, conducting operations in Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia and the Philippines.

"It is a very difficult job," he says.

He fed evidence and intelligence to local police and law enforcement agencies, so they could apprehend men involved in child prostitution and online cybersex operations. The gruelling work, alone inside the trenches, taught Hulley a lot. The school of hard knocks was priceless.

He discovered corrupt police officials would sometimes tip off offenders ahead of raids. He got his head around local laws, especially what evidence could be collected by someone who wasn't a citizen of that country, let alone a man without a police badge. He found crippling poverty at the heart of the exploitation problem. And inevitably he came across heartbreaking, unforgettable scenes.

BREAKING A SEX SLAVE RING

At the end of 2014, Hulley raided a brothel in Batam, Indonesia.

Just a short ferry ride from Singapore, and easily accessible from Malaysia, Batam is home to a notorious red light district.

Based on a tip-off, Hulley believed a number of child prostitutes were being held captive inside the brothel, forced to have sex with men – tourists and Batam locals. Over several weeks Hulley and a small team of locals covertly ran surveillance on the building. 

They established that each day, at about the same time, a guard would leave his post at the door for 10 or 15 minutes. The guard would wander offf into nearby streets, buying food, drink and cigarettes, before returning to work. One day, while the guard was off running his daily errands, Hulley decided to launch a raid on the premises.

Inside the brothel, Hulley discovered 15 young girls, aged between 12 and 16. There were dirty mattresses on the ground. Items of lingerie were scattered around the room. Like a Third World jail cell, a single pot on the floor was being used as the toilet. Some of the girls had been handcuffed, to stop them running away.

"These children knew we were there to help," Hulley recalls. "It was a very emotional situation. I had two children clinging to my leg and they just wouldn't let go."
Hulley and his team faced an agonising dilemma.

"If we had been discovered there we probably wouldn't have come out because this was a criminal syndicate running the operation and corrupt police were also involved.

"If I'd have even taken one of them with me the whole operation would have been jeopardised. They would have been moved away and we would have lost the rest of them."

Hulley chokes up momentarily, before he composes himself. "One of the hardest things was to walk away," he says.

Hulley made the decision to leave and he took the team's evidence to police. It took police a further three weeks to gather more evidence and obtain an arrest warrant.

"It was one of the hardest three weeks I've ever had," he says. "I got very little sleep knowing every night those children were there waiting to be rescued and we couldn't do anything about it."

When Indonesian police swooped on the brothel the girls were freed and the mamasan who ran the sex slave ring was arrested and jailed for seven years.

'CHILD RAPE HOLIDAYS'

Since setting up Project Karma, Hulley has learned that, however painful, it is sometimes necessary to play the long game. 

It was Hulley who set in motion a chain of events that led to Australia's federal government passing laws to stop convicted Aussie pedophiles travelling abroad. The legislation, which last May moved through Canberra at lightning speed, was championed by Senate crossbencher Derryn Hinch. 

Hinch had cleverly come up with the explosive phrase "child rape holidays" to illustrate how it appeared too easy for Australian pedophiles to travel into Southeast Asia. The Victorian senator had taken up the cause with great vigour, following a meeting with Hulley in late 2015. Hinch would later describe that brief encounter with Hulley as "the most disturbing coffee break of my life".

What Hulley had told Hinch was how convicted Australian pedophiles were boarding low-cost flights and travelling freely into Asian countries to take advantage of impoverished children. He described how fixers, just like the tuk tuk driver in Phnom Penh, would offer up young boys and girls for less than the price of a movie ticket.The data documenting international travel by Aussie pedophiles which Hulley had shown Hinch was astonishing. Some 250 registered child sex offenders had entered the Philippines from Australia in 2014. On average, 25 registered pedophiles were crossing into Bali each month from Australia.

https://www.9news.com.au/national/2018/07/31/13/40/dark-night-in-cambodia-fuels-ex-aussie-cops-mission-to-halt-child-sex-trade