 Women for Education Education and the fight against child exploitation FRIDAY 12 OCTOBER 2007
Few subjects are more harrowing than child abuse. This discussion revealed just what a serious issue it is, particularly in South East Asia. Moderator Karine Guldemann began the session by citing a few statistics that illustrated the size of the problem in chilling detail. The sex industry in South East Asia, and that includes money made from the sexual abuse of children, is worth between six and seven billion dollars a year, she said. “It’s bigger than the trade in illegal drugs,” she explained. This huge money-making machine wrecks the lives of millions of the region’s children. “Over 30 percent of children born in South East Asia are sexually exploited and of these kids, 50 percent of them are under 16,” she said. Didier Bertrand works in Laos for AFESIP, a non-governmental organisation that tries to help women and girls who are ensnared by the sex industry break free and build new lives. His job is not an easy one, he explained. One of the biggest problems is the often very close relationship young girls develop with the pimps who exploit them. Often the poorly educated girls who end up working in the sex trade see these abusers as friendly, helpful people who have found them work and will often allow them to send money back to their families. It can take months of painstaking psychological work to encourage girls to see the pimps for the manipulative abusers they really are and find the courage to leave them, Bertrand argued. The authorities in Laos are also not as helpful in tackling the problem as they might be, he added. “There is no point asking the police to raid a bar where child prostitutes are working, they just won’t do it,” he said. Many women in Laos also seem unwilling to try to help girls who have become trapped in a life of prostitution. This is particularly true of members of Laos’ ruling communist party, Bertrand said. “Women are extremely tough on the girls. You will often hear that these girls are losers, that they are lazy and do not want to do a proper job,” he explained. The AFESIP director also said that in recent years he had seen a worrying trend of younger and younger girls ending up as child prostitutes. “We now quite often see girls as young as 12 or 14,” he explained. One of the main reasons for this development was the demand for virgins among men visiting Laos on business. “The demand for virgins is constant, especially in areas where you find Chinese businessmen,” he said. Bertrand said AFESIP has set up a number of projects designed to offer young girls an alternative to prostitution. One scheme helps train girls to become hairdressers or beauticians. Another has helped set up a factory that produces artificial flowers. For her part, Jacqueline Bruas explained the work of her organisation ACPE, which fights child prostitution and is particularly concerned with the problem of children caught up in the sex tourism industry. “For three milligrams of sperm you can destroy a child,” she said in a bid to explain how sex tourism can be so damaging. Bruas said she wanted major international companies to do more to explain to employees who may be sent on expatriate assignments that sexual tourism was in no way, shape or form just a bit of harmless fun. When it concerned children, it was a very serious criminal offence for which the perpetrator could go to prison. “Sexually exploiting children is a crime and so is watching images of other people sexually exploiting children,” she said, pointing out that people who look at child pornography should not think they are exempt from prosecution. So far, her efforts to encourage firms to support her campaign had met with mixed success, she explained. “Of course when I go and speak to firms they support what I’m doing. But then they say, ‘of course we have no such problems in our company’,” she said. “I am still looking for three major companies to sign a charter on this,” she said, arguing that such a commitment would really help to get the ball rolling for her campaign. Bruas also said that people engaging in sexual tourism ran a very real risk of contracting serious sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS, which they could bring back to their home countries and pass on to wives or girlfriends. _________________________________ |