Pisey Ly of the Women’s Network for Unity in Phnom Penh disagreed. Speaking with AWID, she explained that the contestants were used as tools to draw public attention to the issue but did not receive actual benefits from their participation. “Aside from being sat for make up, holding flowers, smiling uncomfortably and preparing themselves for the photographers’ gaze and press interviews,” she said, “the participants did not receive the kind of education, health care, jobs, social supports and legal protection from discrimination to make their lives better.” Instead, she remarked, their beauty was “used” and claimed as “empowerment.” For her, empowerment would not be possible without local participation in the design of and ownership over the program.

Another women’s rights advocate, who worked directly with the pageant participants and asked to remain anonymous, said that the girls went along with it because a foreign organization asked them to do so – reiterating women’s rights advocates concerns that this is yet another project in which transnational power dynamics go un-interrogated. She reported that the pageant’s organizers claimed that they wanted to show the world that girls without limbs are still beautiful and have survived the awful things that have happened to them. The girls thought foreigners would not discriminate against “girls like them” and thus trusted them with their best interests.

This anonymous source also remarked that there was no training or any sessions that prepared the girls to understand what was happening and what it meant, apart from when some local advocates like herself helped the foreigners translate to the girls what they wanted them to do and why.