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Phnom Penh: She looks dirty, dishevelled and miserable and is labelled a sex worker.
Many Australians responded to a plea to save the pretty Cambodian girl called Pisey from child predators. "Teach a sex worker to sew," declares a glossy internet advertisement for Sunrise Cambodia, an Australian charity that has raised millions of dollars each year for Cambodia's orphanages.
"Your donation of $500 will get Pisey off the street and into the sewing room with the skills to start her own micro-business," it says. But Pisey is not her real name and she is not a sex worker.
Her portrayal in a campaign that has raised more than $200,000 in Australia in five weeks has prompted a firestorm of criticism in Cambodia and raised new questions about "poverty porn" and "pity charity", the practices where charities use hard-hitting images, such as malnourished children, to draw empathy and donations.
"Pisey" is a village girl whom Sunrise Cambodia paid to be the poster-girl for its latest fund raising campaign, which critics say is unethical. A photograph portraying her as a sex worker will remain on the internet and in the public domain forever, critics say. So too will photographs of a boy with the fake name "Soksan", who is portrayed as a "trafficked kid" and a vulnerable-looking girl named "Srey Mai", who is supposed to be a "homeless teen."
By giving $500, donors are told, they can help give sex workers a second chance, keep Cambodia's youth out of trafficker's grasp and teach homeless "teens to cook like a world-class chef".But more than 20 NGOs and individuals have told Sunrise Cambodia's board of directors the images of children in the campaign and accompanying captions are degrading, exploitative, sensationalised and do not represent children in a dignified manner.
They wrote in a letter that it is highly concerning that an organisation with a focus on child protection has demonstrated such a blatant disregard for the children's best interests in their marketing and fundraising campaign.
Leigh Mathews, an Australian child protection specialist, told Fairfax Media that Sunrise Cambodia should immediately remove the campaign from its website and issue a statement of apology.
"Unfortunately, the campaign has also been sent to thousands of supporters across Australia in hard copy," she said. "Whilst the young girl pictured may have given her consent for her image to be used she will also have to live with the ramifications of being labelled a sex worker."
Ms Mathews, co-ordinator of ReThink Orphanages, which works to prevent the institutionalisation of children, said the campaign breached ethical standards by labelling clearly identifiable children as "trafficked", "sex worker" and "homeless" and "utilising children that are visibly unclean and unkempt to promote pity".
"Fundraising campaigns should only ever show their beneficiaries in the most dignified light. Using degrading images and labels in order to shock and manipulate generous people into donating is highly unethical," she said.
Sunrise Cambodia's chief executive, Lucy Perry, defended use of the children in the "Rebuild Brains Trust" appeal. She said they were recruited as "models" and their stories have been "tweaked".
"The poverty porn debate is misinformed. People need to see the problem in order to respond to the need. Simple," she told Fairfax Media after tweeting "it's the only way to bring the horror home ... [people] won't donate if you show a photograph of a seamstress looking happy."
Ms Perry declined to provide any of the children's personal details, such as their real names or where they live, saying it would be a "breach of their privacy". But she told the Phnom Penh Post the children were "real people" who live near a Sunrise orphanage and healthcare centre.
Ms Perry said the appeal was tested with donors before it was launched and the feedback was that the images were "beautiful and brave"."It shows the background to the problems, the real need, the positive outcomes and tangible cost to train a school leaver."
Ms Perry, who raised $7 million in less than three years for a network of hospitals and a midwifery school in Ethiopia before joining Sunrise Cambodia, said there was no need for successful advertising to shock people.
"You have to touch their hearts ... I think the images we used did that," she said."Sometimes it requires a little bit of discomfort."
Asked whether it was proper to portray a young girl as a sex worker, Ms Perry said: "It's a scenario."
She said the children were treated ethically and photographed in their usual clothes "and in their normal context with appropriate consent". She denied Pisey's face was smeared with mud.
The campaign portrays Cambodia as a country that still has not recovered from Pol Pot's 1970s genocide and "needs your help to rebuild the brains trust and restore one of the basic tenets of a prosperous society: education".
Geraldine Cox, a 70-year-old Australian who founded Sunrise orphanages in 1997, defends the Pol Pot pitch even though the atrocities occurred decades ago and says Cambodia has been run for 30 years by a corrupt and brutal regime, some of them former Khmer Rouge cadres.
"Age and time doesn't lessen the cruelty and suffering," she said, adding children have heard the horror stories and remain fearful.
Ms Perry insists the campaign, which aims to raise $500,000 by June 30 to provide vocational training for 1000 children, was created within a code approved by the Australian Council for International Development (ACFID), a grouping of Australia's non-government aid and international development organisations.
But critics disagree. The code states, in part, that images of women and men and boys and girls must respect the dignity, values, history and culture of the people portrayed.
A Department of Foreign Affairs guideline on ethical photography states that images must be an honest representation of the context and facts and no payment or any other form of compensation should be provided to subjects in exchange for their photographs.
The controversy comes after Cambodia's world celebrity anti-child sex slavery campaigner Somaly Mam was forced to resign from her foundation over revelations she fabricated child-sex slave stories to raise hundreds of millions of dollars.
Sebastien Marot from Friends International, an organisation that has campaigned for decades to raise awareness about Cambodia's orphanages, said a large number of organisations get sucked into using children to raise funds, such as making them speak in front of a camera about the abuse they survived, having their picture in a pitiful situation published for everyone to see and allowing non-professional visitors to physically interact with institutionalised children.
He acknowledged that the organisations were trying to get the income they needed in an environment hungry for emotional stimulus. But he said in the worst cases the truth was distorted or the stories invented to attract more compensation and money.
"The impact on the lives of these children is terrible," he said. "If they come from an abusive situation, such a process re-traumatises them and in any case it stigmatises them forever."
Mr Marot said the organisations should be protecting children from abuse and re-abuse, which often means erasing a negative past so they can start again with a clean slate.
He quoted one victim used in an advertising campaign as saying: "You know, my reputation has been lost because of this video ... everyone looks down on me."
