Paying for the damage cannot remove the injury of sexual abuse and exploitation, but of course it may partly compensate for it. Most of the time, there are compensation orders from the courts, but the actual money that the convicted criminal pays becomes rare because they have no visible money or assets or are simply not willing to pay.
Thanks to the active work of APLE’s court support team, on 26 October 2016, a boy victim and a civil plaintiff received full compensation from the convict through the prosecutor – approximately 1.000 USD – at Kandal Provincial Court.
The victim and family were excited with this because currently they are very poor and are in debt. The boy is working as a construction worker with daily income of 7.5 USD, and his mother is a housewife and jobless. The boy hopes that this compensation will enable him to acquire a skill and have a small capital to run a small business by himself. With this money, the family could also pay for their debt and the mother will buy baking utensils for the boy to learn baking so that he has a good skill and can run his small business at home. They were very grateful to the APLE team who always supported them through the court process; without this support, they would not have been able to see the abuser put in jail.
