As part of a campaign against racy images, three men in the capital are briefly detained for transferring pornographic videos onto their mobiles.

Photo by:

SOVANN PHILONG

A Phnom Penh internet cafe owner demonstrates the ease with which pornographic videos can be loaded on a mobile phone. 

POLICE on Tuesday briefly detained three men believed to have transferred pornographic videos onto their mobile phones, a move that one official described as the latest development in a national campaign against the proliferation of racy images of women.

The three men, all in their 20s, were picked up by police at a stall near Phsar Doeum Thkov High School in Chamkarmon district, said Keo Thea, head of Phnom Penh's Anti-Human Trafficking Police.

"Since it was their first time being arrested, we just educated them and advised them to stop doing that, and we confiscated the material so it could be destroyed," Keo Thea said.

Suon Vilay, 28, who works at the stall where the arrests occurred, said the business is one in which customers pay to transfer files from a single desktop computer onto their mobile phones.

"Most of my clients are youths, they are students, but sometimes they are old men, too," he said. "I charge 500 riels (US$0.12) for one file, and music is the same price."

A broader effort

The campaign to curtail the proliferation of racy images of women was prompted by remarks from first lady Bun Rany, who in a February speech blamed the Ministry of Information for failing to stamp out such images, particularly in magazines.

"The Ministry of Information has to close magazines that have pornography in order to avoid letting them have a bad impact on readers," she said at the annual meeting of the National Committee on the Promotion of Morality, Women and Family Values in Phnom Penh.

Kong Kanpara, chief of the film department at the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, said the viewing of pornographic videos on mobile phones was as sinister, and had a similar impact to, broadcasting them in cafes, which is also illegal.

"A lot of suspects in rape cases said they committed their offenses because they watched sex movies," he said.

Minister of Women's Affairs Ing Kantha Phavi said the transferring of sex videos was symptomatic of a mentality in which women are viewed "as goods that can be bought on the market".