RIGHTS: Zero Tolerance for Sexual Exploitation of Children – UNICEF

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Dec 13 2001 (IPS) - The international community possesses the legal instruments necessary to protect children from commercial sexual exploitation, but the application of these laws is being delayed, say inter-governmental institutions and civil society groups as they prepare for a global conference on the matter next week.

Compliance with the commitments countries have made to eliminate this scourge has been “poor” – meanwhile, a million children enter the sex industry each year, according to Save the Children, an international alliance that promotes children’s rights.

Delegates from around the globe will put together an updated assessment of the problem at the second World Congress against the Sexual Exploitation of Children, to be held in Yokohama, Japan, Dec 17-20.

A report released Wednesday by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) underscores the fact that the sex trade in general is a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Traffickers coldly select children for the trade based on how much profit they think they can earn by exploiting them, says the UN agency.

In many countries, the sex industry fuels the expansion of the tourism industry and is a significant source of revenues, says the report, presented by UNICEF executive director Carol Bellamy.

A study of the illegal economy in Thailand found that prostitution represented 10 to 14 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) in the 1993-1995 period.

According to UNICEF calculations, a third of the female prostitutes in Thailand are minors.

The first alarm about the international scope of this problem was sounded in Stockholm, in 1996, at the first World Congress against the Sexual Exploitation of Children.

That congress sent the world a clear and unequivocal message: there will be no more tolerance of these reprehensible abuses of children’s rights, abuses that have constituted a horrible secret for much too long.

Nevertheless, the policy commitments made in Stockholm “have not generated effective actions that match the scale of the problem worldwide,” says the Save the Children study directed by Ola Florin, of Sweden.

The countries represented at the congress have a “poor overall record of developing national action plans, establishing data bases and systems of reporting back on progress,” said the expert.

New international legislation was adopted in 1996 and some countries have improved their national and local laws on sexual offences against children, but the “concrete impact of legislation is largely unknown and/or remains to be evaluated,” says Save the Children.

Florin stressed that several important factors behind children’s vulnerability to trafficking, prostitution and pornography either have remained in place or have been exacerbated in the past five years.

These factors include unemployment, poverty, lack of education, and migratory pressures like armed conflicts or environmental disasters.

Also contributing to the problem are lax law enforcement, the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the misuse of advances in information technology, particularly the Internet.

Organised crime and the abuse of new technologies are increasingly related to the rise in child prostitution and the trafficking of children in the countries of Europe and Central Asia, according to a conference that included the participation of 43 countries from those regions.

A UNICEF study conducted in the United States found that one in five children who regularly use the Internet are approached by strangers for sex.

Another study revealed that an estimated 104,000 children become victims of sexual abuse each year in the United States.

The document prepared by Save the Children for the upcoming Yokohama congress asserts that the “advertising and entertainment industries – including legal adult pornography – and the media are powerful agents in the reproduction of attitudes towards sex and gender in general and at times explicitly depict children as sexual objects.”

But the report also recognises that the media play an important role in efforts to stop children from being sexually exploited.

Save the Children underscores the effects of racism and ethnic discrimination, saying that they “enable adults from dominant groups to justify exploitation of both women and children from ‘inferiorised’ groups.”

Bellamy issued an appeal to the participants in next week’s congress in Yokohama for “zero tolerance”, which she said means “ending the trafficking of children, their sale and barter and imprisonment and torture.”