“This is the youngest right now,” Ali tells me as she picks up this sweet girl to carry her as we walk through the slums to greet others. “She’s five years old, and she can hardly walk sometimes. She can’t sit down and she usually walks kinda funny with her legs all spread apart … She’s even come with blood on her dress before.”

I look at her sweet little body and I am totally incapable of grasping what this precious little girl has already been through in her short life. When she should be tucked into bed and sung to sleep each night, she is repeatedly raped numerous times by many men each night. To make it worse, they’ve paid to be with her.

“We’re working hard to try to get her out,” Ali says. It’s a long and difficult process, and I can see the pain in Ali’s eyes when she tells me about this precious child.

Dateline did a report on the very place we stand, trying to tell the world the reality these kids live in. Formerly a major “brothel,” the building has become a meeting place where children’s programs are held and a national pastor and his family now live. Quite the transformation, if you ask me.

The common myth is that prostitution no longer exists in this particular slum area, but anyone who lives or works in Cambodia can tell you otherwise.

Seated just off the main highway only a short distance from Phnom Phen, the capital, there is easy access for both locals and foreigners to access the girls.

“You used to be able to drive down the streets and see these really young girls all dressed up with caked on makeup, obviously being sold for sex,” another friend tells me. “ … But now, it’s all just a little more hidden. They’ve gotten more creative, that’s all.”

There are a number of anti-trafficking organizations all based right here in Phnom Phen that are working hard to get these girls out. However, the system is so corrupt that every time they’ve done a recent raid, they show up to find everyone cleared out. Why? … Someone tipped them off. Someone from within the system … most likely a police member.

We walk around the slum to visit a handful of different people, kids swarming us every step of the way. They are more eager for attention and affection than any of the kids I’ve ever met in the U.S. Many of them don’t even really know what appropriate affection is because they’ve never experienced it, and while it often means casually redirecting their affection, I’m just excited to not be the “norm.”