By GEMMA BROWN gemma.brown@hexham-courant.co.uk

Published at 13:09, Thursday, 23 October 2008

THE sex trade is a grim fact of life for many young girls in Cambodia.

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At an age when most Western girls are looking forward to starting school, a frighteningly large number of Cambodian children are sold by their families to sex traffickers.

Now a 21-year-old from Tynedale is doing her bit to encourage the children away from their sordid lives of shame – from 6,000 miles away in Corbridge.

Entrepreneur Rosie Dobby and business partner Jennifer Graham (23), from Merseyside, are already celebrating their first year of trading as Freed Fashion Ltd, an ethical, fair-trade clothing company, which aims to assist young women in Cambodia to leave the sex trade voluntarily.

Their campaign is a massively daunting one for two girls in their early 20s to take on, but it’s clear that both Rosie and Jennifer were hugely influenced by six months spent in Cambodia with the faith gap year organisation World Horizons.

Former Queen Elizabeth High School student Rosie explained: “Jennifer and I met through World Horizons and found we were both like-minded in what we wanted to achieve.

“I spent six months in Cambodia from January to July last year and left feeling like I wanted to do something to make a difference.”

During her time in the country, Rosie became aware of the enormity of the problem of sex trafficking, and came to understand that many young girls, often at the age when they should be looking forward to their first day at school, would be sold off to the sex trade by their families.

“It is really terrible what some of these girls have to go through. But I worked with some of the lucky ones,” Rosie explained.

During her six months she helped in an orphanage on behalf of an organisation called Care for Cambodia, which aims to offer a stable environment for many young people aged from five to 10.

Rosie said: “Care for Cambodia is all about training the young people how to look after themselves, and each other.

The precise scale of Cambodia’s sex trade is difficult to quantify.

International organisations –such as UNICEF and Save the Children – say that anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 women and children are involved.

An estimated 30 per cent of the sex workers in the country’s capital, Phnom Penh, are under the age of 18, according to the United Nations, although activists say the actual figure may be much higher.

Rosie, who had already completed a diploma in fashion at the London College of Fashion, came back to the UK last summer armed with a plan.

She said: “I knew what I wanted to do and started chatting to some of the people I’d met through World Horizons on Facebook when I got home.

“I knew I wanted to start a fair-trade fashion company and was just looking for someone else to come on board.

“Then Jen got back in touch and said she was interested.”

Before they knew it, both girls were back in Cambodia, and with the help of a non-governmental organisation called Daughters – which offers help and resources to support women in their efforts to leave the sex-trafficking industry – the girls began building their business.

“Daughters have been fantastic,” Rosie explained.

“They have let us use the top floor of a building they have, which is in the middle of an area full of brothels, and the kind of girls we are trying to offer help to.”

With the help of a business plan master-minded by her aunt and uncle, Lesley and David Skews, Rosie had a clear vision of where she wanted the company to go.

“My uncle, who spends a lot of time in Singapore himself, really helped me get down to basics and plan exactly what it was I wanted to do, and to create a business model.”

With a father who is a product designer and a grandmother who was a tailoress, Rosie also had her natural talent to get her through.

The girls spent much of July and August last year in Cambodia buying equipment and fabric.

Again, with help from Daughters, they took on four young women aged between 18 and 26, and began training them in the art of silk-screening and T-shirt making.

“The first week in Cambodia I spent all my time training myself, because I was new to the machines we bought and was just learning as I went along,” Rosie explained.

From then on, Rosie and Jennifer spent all their time with their new employees, trying to overcome the language barrier and pass on their newly found knowledge.

Rosie said: “Because we knew we couldn’t be there to oversee things all the time, we wanted to spend as much time as possible giving the girls the best training we could so they could deal with any situation when we weren’t there.”

Rosie and Jennifer also took time to discuss pay and conditions with the girls, and to ensure they were given proper contracts.

This would see them earning enough money to support their families and to get access to proper health care, among other things.

“We spent eight weeks getting to know our new staff, and arranging for a member of the Daughters staff to act as a project manager and oversee things when we were away. But we can’t wait to go back,” Rosie said.

Since their last trip, Freed Fashion Ltd has begun selling T-shirts online and through regular stalls at events around the country.

With the help of several organisations, they are now ready to officially launch their first product – the humble T-shirt – to an audience for the first time.

A launch party, to be held next week in a trendy London nightspot, will not only give the girls a chance to celebrate the success they have had in Cambodia, but it will also give people the chance to learn about the country and to see, try and potentially buy the first Freed Fashion product.

Rosie said: “In the future we’d love to have our own purpose-built fashion house out in Cambodia where we can help the women and girls on a much larger scale.

“We’d also like to be able to secure more outlets for our products and, with Hexham hoping to become a fair-trade town in the future, it would be great to get some of the local retailers on board.”

For more information log on to www.freedfashion.com.

Published by http://www.hexhamcourant.co.uk