by Bob Couttie
Charles Manning , a 67-year old Baptist missionary has been imprisoned for one year by a Cambodian court for sexually molesting three underage boys with the help of his adopted Cambodian son, San Veasna, 27. Child protection activists believe that the one year sentence handed down by the court is far too short.
Manning had previously founded the Maranatha Baptist Church in Singapore before setting up the Victory Baptist Church in 2003 in Sihanoukville, a popular Cambodian tourism destination. His activities included taking boys to a local lake in a national park to ‘cleanse them of their sins’.
The arrest of the two perpetrators on May 16, 2013 followed a tip-off by the child protection NGO, Action Pour Les Enfants, APLE, after its investigators received a report of suspicious activities by the priest. Police decided to act after the three boys involved confirmed the abuse. The boys also said they had received money after being molested.
Manning was arrested at his rental house, said I Sokha, director of Sihanoukville’s anti-human trafficking and juvenile protection department.
They later arrested Cambodian San Veasna while he was attempting to escape to Phnom Penh, Sokha said.
During questioning, Manning admitted to luring three boys, aged 13, 14 and 15, into having sex for money, but argued that it was consensual, while Veasna initially denied the claims but later confessed. Manning also confessed to ‘unlawful acts’ with his adopted son.
This is hardly the first time that Manning has been accused of sexual impropriety. In 1989, while acting as a missionary in Singapore for the First Baptist Church of Winter Haven, he was arrested in Florida for ‘fondling and exposing himself’ at Saddle Creek Park near Lakeland. On that occasion, he was fined $158.75.
Like many impoverished countries, Cambodia attracts paedophiles who come from all over the West, secure in the knowledge that even if they get caught, their sentences will be far shorter than they would typically be in Western nations. Sentences in the U.S. tend to be particularly harsh. Furthermore, convictions in places like Cambodia are difficult to secure, especially without a confession. The Cambodian legal system remains quite inadequate, having been destroyed during the country’s Khmer Rouge “reign of terror” which saw most people with legal skills and education put to death.
A conviction for indecent acts against children brings a sentence of one to three years as opposed to a sentence of 15 years for securing child prostitution. The courts tend towards leniency, however.
In another case, a convicted French paedophile demanded and got a retrial after being tried in absentia in February for the sexual abuse of two boys inside a guesthouse. He argued that he was absent from the proceedings because he was in prison at the time of the trial having been sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for sexually abusing five boys in Siem Reap in early 2012.
APLE is understandably urging the court to change the charge to securing child prostitution which does seem logical because the under-aged boys are typically remunerated.
Inasmuch as Manning has been operating his church in Seam Reap for the past 10 years, it’s certainly possible that he has victimized more than just the three teenage boys whose molestation led to his present conviction and imprisonment. Arguably, his one-year sentence seems little more than a slap on the wrist and suggests that he may well return to his old ways after his release from prison.
Furthermore, his hypocrisy in claiming that his role in the boys’ lives was to ‘cleanse them of their sins’ is deeply offensive to anyone with even a modicum of common decency.
Although boys are the targets of a fair proportion of the western-born child molesters, uneducated and poverty-stricken young girls are at an even greater risk of being sexually exploited. According to a recent estimate, there are an estimated 57,000 commercial sex workers in Cambodia. It is unclear how many of them are children.