Dark night in Cambodia fuels ex Aussie cop's mission to halt child sex trade

Former Victorian policeman Glen Hulley won't ever forget the night evil quietly brushed up against up him and tapped him on the shoulder. The experience changed him immediately, and dramatically altered the direction of his life.

In 2013 Hulley was travelling through Southeast Asia while he recuperated from an injury he had suffered while training for Australia’s national karate team. Inside a bar in Phnom Penh, Cambodia's bustling capital city of 1.5 million people, Hulley was approached by a local man. The man, a tuk tuk driver, asked Hulley, then 37, if he wanted to hire a prostitute for the night. 

When Hulley declined, the determined Cambodian pitched him another deal - this time a much younger girl. "It was clear a child was being offered," Hulley tells Nine.com.au. "That shocked me." 

Hulley wanted to find out where the child was located, so he told the driver to take him there. "It probably wasn't the wisest thing to do," Hulley recalls. 

But after 13 years with the Victorian police, including undercover investigative work, Hulley’s instinct pushed him on towards the unknown. The pair exited the bar and, with Hulley in the back of the noisy tuk tuk, the two men sped through the busy night time Phnom Penh streets. Eventually the tuk tuk pulled up outside a house, and Hulley was led inside.

The man presented him a girl. Hulley recalls her being no older than 11 or 12, too young for high school. The tuk tuk driver told Hulley that for just USD $20 he could take the girl away and bring her back in an hour. "I had to come up with an idea to get out of there," Hulley says. "The way I did that was by saying she was too old for me, and I wanted a younger child."

Hulley was banking on the pimp thinking he was “some kind of weirdo or freak”, registering disgust and that would be the end of that. "But it was the complete opposite," Hulley says. "The man said that was fine and he could organise that."

So, Hulley left the girl standing in the house and the two men jumped back on the tuk tuk. The driver started the engine and he began to make some calls on his mobile phone. Before long, they met up with a second tuk tuk driver. On they pushed, deeper into the night, further away from the centre of Pnomh Penn.

At around 1.30 in the morning, both tuk tuks came to a halt somewhere in a sprawling slum. Hulley remembers stopping outside "a very run down home". The two men escorting Hulley knocked on the door. An old woman answered. Hulley was shown inside, the woman motioned to sit on the floor and he waited.

"She went out through a curtain and came back with a young girl I would estimate was about four years old," Hulley says. The girl was still wearing her nightie. "She'd clearly just been dragged out of bed," he says.

Hulley remains haunted by the young girl. "She wouldn’t look at anybody in the room. Clearly this wasn't the first time this had happened."

The anger and sadness that Hulley could feel rising inside him would later fuel his mission of hunting down pedophiles and men exploiting kids across SouthEast Asia. But at that moment, in that room, Hulley knew there was nothing he could do for the girl.  He weighed the options. He contemplated taking her and running. "It wouldn't have ended well for me or her."

Hulley switched tack. He told the men he didn't trust them, that he feared it was some kind of sting. He said he needed time to think. Lying, he told his tuk tuk driver to meet him in the bar they had met tomorrow night. He gave his driver $50, got dropped back in the city centre and walked back to his hotel.

"I didn't sleep that night," Hulley says. "It really affected me". The following morning Hulley left Phnom Penh and continued his travels. But the disturbing encounter stuck with him, and always will.

MILLIONS OF KIDS EXPLOITED

Sit with Hulley for a while and you quickly realise the word "shocking" pops up in conversation with unsettling regularity. It's an indication of where his work takes him, and a tragic reflection on the kind of things he has seen.

After returning from his travels in Southeast Asia, Hulley set forth on a mission to stop the exploitation of children in some of the world's most impoverished countries. To do this, he set up a charity called Project Karma, which focuses on child protection.

Hulley has had to sell everything he owned to continue the fight. There were times, he says, when close friends and family thought he was mad, that the problem was just too big for one man to make a difference.

It is difficult to be accurate, but UNICEF estimates two million children are exploited globally in prostitution or pornography every year. UNICEF states there are 60,000 child prostitutes working in brothels across the Philippines, where Hulley focuses much of Project Karma's work. 

In trying to tackle the exploitation problem, Project Karma executes three strategies:

1. Prevention awareness and education in local villages and schools.
2. Investigating and prosecuting pedophiles and pedophile networks
3. Aftercare and rehabilitation of victims who have been rescued

Hulley now leads a small team of local investigators and support staff. But in the beginning, following that alarming night in Pnomh Penh, Hulley operated as a kind of lone wolf. In 2014 and 2015, Hulley worked on his own, conducting operations in Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia and the Philippines.

"It is a very difficult job," he says.

He fed evidence and intelligence to local police and law enforcement agencies, so they could apprehend men involved in child prostitution and online cybersex operations. The gruelling work, alone inside the trenches, taught Hulley a lot. The school of hard knocks was priceless.

He discovered corrupt police officials would sometimes tip off offenders ahead of raids. He got his head around local laws, especially what evidence could be collected by someone who wasn't a citizen of that country, let alone a man without a police badge. He found crippling poverty at the heart of the exploitation problem. And inevitably he came across heartbreaking, unforgettable scenes.

BREAKING A SEX SLAVE RING

At the end of 2014, Hulley raided a brothel in Batam, Indonesia.

Just a short ferry ride from Singapore, and easily accessible from Malaysia, Batam is home to a notorious red light district.

Based on a tip-off, Hulley believed a number of child prostitutes were being held captive inside the brothel, forced to have sex with men – tourists and Batam locals. Over several weeks Hulley and a small team of locals covertly ran surveillance on the building. 

They established that each day, at about the same time, a guard would leave his post at the door for 10 or 15 minutes. The guard would wander offf into nearby streets, buying food, drink and cigarettes, before returning to work. One day, while the guard was off running his daily errands, Hulley decided to launch a raid on the premises.

Hulley has shared footage of the raid with nine.com.au, some of which you can view in the video at the top of the page.
Hulley tells me, that in his line of work, there are a certain few moments that will remain etched into his memory for the rest of his life. "This one will always stick with me," he says.

Inside the brothel, Hulley discovered 15 young girls, aged between 12 and 16. There were dirty mattresses on the ground. Items of lingerie were scattered around the room. Like a Third World jail cell, a single pot on the floor was being used as the toilet. Some of the girls had been handcuffed, to stop them running away.

"These children knew we were there to help," Hulley recalls. "It was a very emotional situation. I had two children clinging to my leg and they just wouldn't let go."
Hulley and his team faced an agonising dilemma.

"If we had been discovered there we probably wouldn't have come out because this was a criminal syndicate running the operation and corrupt police were also involved.

"If I'd have even taken one of them with me the whole operation would have been jeopardised. They would have been moved away and we would have lost the rest of them."

Hulley chokes up momentarily, before he composes himself. "One of the hardest things was to walk away," he says.

Hulley made the decision to leave and he took the team's evidence to police. It took police a further three weeks to gather more evidence and obtain an arrest warrant.

"It was one of the hardest three weeks I've ever had," he says. "I got very little sleep knowing every night those children were there waiting to be rescued and we couldn't do anything about it."

When Indonesian police swooped on the brothel the girls were freed and the mamasan who ran the sex slave ring was arrested and jailed for seven years.

'CHILD RAPE HOLIDAYS'

Since setting up Project Karma, Hulley has learned that, however painful, it is sometimes necessary to play the long game. 

It was Hulley who set in motion a chain of events that led to Australia's federal government passing laws to stop convicted Aussie pedophiles travelling abroad. The legislation, which last May moved through Canberra at lightning speed, was championed by Senate crossbencher Derryn Hinch. 

Hinch had cleverly come up with the explosive phrase "child rape holidays" to illustrate how it appeared too easy for Australian pedophiles to travel into Southeast Asia. The Victorian senator had taken up the cause with great vigour, following a meeting with Hulley in late 2015. Hinch would later describe that brief encounter with Hulley as "the most disturbing coffee break of my life".

What Hulley had told Hinch was how convicted Australian pedophiles were boarding low-cost flights and travelling freely into Asian countries to take advantage of impoverished children. He described how fixers, just like the tuk tuk driver in Phnom Penh, would offer up young boys and girls for less than the price of a movie ticket.

The data documenting international travel by Aussie pedophiles which Hulley had shown Hinch was astonishing. Some 250 registered child sex offenders had entered the Philippines from Australia in 2014. On average, 25 registered pedophiles were crossing into Bali each month from Australia.

In 2015, when that data had first been given to Hulley, he had struggled to make sense of it. How were convicted child sex offenders travelling in and out of Australia with apparent ease?

What he learned was that a convicted child sex offender could travel abroad if Australian Federal Police (AFP) did not deem that person to be high risk. The only encumbrance on the AFP was to notify the other country's immigration that a convicted Australian was coming. It was then up to that country if that pedophile would be let in. And the statistics had shown that people were being waved through customs.

Hulley set up meetings with immigration officials in Jakarta, Manila and Bangkok. He started to dig into the paper trail. There were notifications from various law enforcement agencies around the world advising of convicted child sex offenders travelling into those countries.

"I was finding AFP notifications unopened, three months old," Hulley says. "A child sex offender from Australia had entered that country for two weeks. But we had no idea where he went, what he did, who he harmed.

"This to me was a huge problem."

He flagged the issue to Senator Hinch. Two years later, the law prohibiting child sex offenders from leaving Australia or holding Australian passports was passed. 

By withdrawing the universal human right to hold a passport, the legislation was controversial. Australia's then Attorney-General George Brandis was believed to harbour concerns about the impact of the law on first-time offenders.

Not surprisingly, Hulley, the sentinel, is unflinchingly unrepentant.  

"There are some times in this world when human rights have to take a back seat to child safety." 

To find out more about Project Karma's work visit www.projectkarma.org.au

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