SATURDAY, DECEMBER 08, 2001
One-third SE Asian prostitutes are children: UNICEF
BANGKOK, Thailand: An estimated one-third of the sex workers in Southeast Asia are children, and poverty is driving more minors into the sex trade, said a report released Friday by UNICEF.
"What experienced child protection workers sense is that the problem is growing, fueled by conditions of poverty, illiteracy, AIDS and drug abuse," said UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund.
The report Children on the Edge: Protecting Children from Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking in East Asia and the Pacific was released as part of preparations for the 2nd World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, to be held December 17-10 in Yokohama, Japan.
The congress will consider how to protect the victims of sexual exploitation and reduce the demand for child sex workers.
UNICEF's report notes that it is difficult to ascertain the exact scale of the problem because of its illicit and usually underground nature.
But it said that surveys by various government and private organization have found vast numbers of children working in the sex industries of the Mekong sub-region.
UNICEF said the surveys found that 30-35 per cent of all sex workers in the region, which comprises Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, and Yunan and Guangxi provinces of southern China, are between 12 and 17 years old.
It also said that about 60 per cent of Indonesia's 71,000 registered sex workers are between the ages of 15 and 20, and that non-governmental organizations estimated there are hundreds of thousands of children involved in the sex trade in Thailand, even though government estimates put the figure at 12,000-18,000.
UNICEF said one indicator of the vast size of the sex trade was an International Labor Organization estimate that it accounts for 14-16 per cent of Thailand's total gross domestic product.
It said most of the girls and women entering the sex trade do so to escape poverty, or physical, sexual or mental abuse at home.
"Many have been raped or abandoned by a boyfriend or husband... given the cultural, economic and individual complexities of their situation, it is hard to suggest that these women and children have any real freedom of choice. The sex trade feed on the despair, ignorance and poverty of those it seeks to exploit."
The report also said that sex tourism, well established in Thailand, has increasingly become a problem in Cambodian and Vietnam, but that the region's sex trade and demand for underage sex is driven mostly by local clients.
"Moral double standards prevail in many countries in the region," it said. "While female prostitution is condemned as shameful, the practice of both married and single men using prostitutes is culturally acceptable."
UNICEF charged that even though the scale of the sexual trade in children is clearly huge, "their abuse is denied for shame or fear of retribution, covered up and disguised, so even now the world has no true way of knowing how widespread is their exploitation." ( AP )
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