People at Gasi Beach in Kwale County, on Kenya's Indian Ocean coast, wait for fishermen to buy the daily catch. Credit: Diana Wanyonyi/IPS

By Diana Wanyonyi
KWALE, Kenya, Nov 28 2016 (IPS)

It’s Saturday morning and Hafsa Juma* is seated on a traditional mat known locally as a mkeka under the scorching sun outside her homestead, located near Gasi Beach on the Kenyan coast.

Clad in a traditional Swahili dress known as a dera, complemented by a mtandio wrapped around her head, Hafsa, 15, says she has been suffering from flu and headaches for more than a week. She hoped the hot sun might ease her chills and shivering, since her parents are unemployed and too poor to pay for a doctor visit."As much as I don’t like what I do, I'm forced to do it because we need to survive.” -- Asumpta, age 14

Hafsa is one of many girls who barter their bodies for fish and a little money at Gasi Beach on the Indian Ocean, in Kwale County. The oldest of three siblings, she is the breadwinner for her family.

Living near the beach, she is easy prey for male fishermen. She said started sex work two years ago.

“I completed standard eight [the final year of primary school] in 2014,” she said. “My parents are not well and that is why there is no food to eat at home. I’m forced to go and look for something small to bring home. I leave at around 8 p.m. and I come back to the house at around 12 a.m. Every night, I have one client. After he agrees to my demands, he gives me 200 shillings (about two dollars) and half a kilogramme of fish,” she said, avoiding eye contact.

Hafsa described being forced by her parents, especially her mother, to provide food for her family by offering sexual favours to male fishermen.

“I usually go to Gasi beach every day,” the teenager said. “In a month, if I work well, I get 5,000 Kenyan shillings (equivalent to 50 dollars) and I don’t have a problem with that.”

Walking with Hafsa along the shore of the Indian Ocean, our conversation is interrupted by a green wooden fishing boat with fishermen from the deep sea approaching the shore, where women, men and children with baskets eagerly wait to buy fresh fish from the fishermen coming in from the night catch.

Most of Hafsa’s clients are fishermen from the neighbouring country of Tanzania, who travel to Gasi once a year during the northeast monsoon winds and stay there for three months, from December to March, to fish and sell their catch.

After the monsoon season is over, and the foreign fishermen go back home, her clients are mostly motorcyclists who carry passengers, locally known as bodaboda.

“When I want to go to any given place away from home, I just board a motorcycle. When I’m almost at my destination, the bodaboda rider agrees to have sex for money. He gives me 100 shillings, and I also do the same with different bodaboda men to return home.”

Iddi Abdulrahman Juma is vice chairman of the Gasi Beach Management Unit, and a beneficiary of training from a non-governmental organisation known as Strengthening Community Partnership and Empowerment (SCOPE) that works to end commercial sexual exploitation of children in Kwale County. Juma blamed parents and guardians for making children vulnerable by sending them to buy fish at the beach.

“We’ve been seeing like 10 children coming here to the beach to buy fish, which is also dangerous. Some of them are already pregnant and others infected with deadly diseases. The age group of children who indulge in commercial sexual exploitation is between 12 and 17 years old,” he said.

Twenty kilometers from Gasi, in the Karanja area of Kwale County, 14-year-old Asumpta Pendo* sweeps out a thatched mud shanty. She says it is a mangwe — a place where palm wine known as mnazi (a traditional liquor) is sold.

Just like Hafsa, Asumpta also indulges in sex for money with clients, often drunk, just to put food on her family’s table. She is also forced by her mother to sell mnazi.

“I dropped out in class seven because my mother was unable to educate me and we live in poverty. Life is hard,” she said. “Most of my clients are palm wine drinkers. In a day, I usually get one or two clients. Some of them prefer to use condoms, while others refuse. They usually give me money — between a dollar and 12 dollars a night.

“If I refuse to sell palm wine to male customers here at home, my mother beats me and goes to the extent of denying me food. As much as I don’t like what I do, I’m forced to do it because we need to survive,” Assumpta said.

A 2009 baseline survey conducted by the End Child Prostitution in Kenya network, an umbrella of various civil society organisations, found 10,000 to 15,000 girls living in the coastal areas to be involved in child sex tourism.

To address this problem, SCOPE has partnered with the organization Terre des Hommes (TDH) from the Netherlands to implement a programme aimed at ending the commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) in Kwale County and three sub-counties, Matunga, Msambweni and Lunga Lunga.

The strategy includes creating awareness among the general community and calling on local citizen constituencies to raise their voices against these abuses.

The coordinator of SCOPE’s End Commercial Sex programme, Emanuel Kahaso, said that the problem is serious in Kwale County, popular with tourists for its clean, sandy beaches.

“In 2006, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) reported that there were more than 50,000 children in Kenya who have engaged in sexual exploitation and 30,000 who are selling their bodies along the beaches in coastal Kenya,” he said.

“As an organisation, we also found out that more than 15,000 children here in the Kenyan south coast are used for commercial sex work in tourism,” he said. “Because of traditions and taboos, parents do not talk openly with their children about reproductive health and some of the perpetrators who are found guilty of the vice are not arrested because of these taboos.”

Emerging hotspots such as drug dens, nightclubs and discotheques, as well as an increase in bodaboda transport, have lured many children into commercial sex. According to local sources, in many instances, early marriage and commercial sex work have been initiated by parents, as well as child sex tourism and prostitution along the beach areas.

The problem is further exacerbated by the cultures and traditions of the local tribes, which are gender-biased and support various forms of sexual exploitation of children. Illiteracy is high, the economy is poor and laws to protect children are rarely enforced.

At Msambweni Referral County Hospital, Saumu Ramwendo, a community health worker for SCOPE, empowers and counsels young girls on health matters and fighting commercial sexual exploitation. The group has so far been able to reach 360 children who are the victims of sexual exploitation and 500 others considered at risk.

*Names have been changed to protect their identities.

NGOs and government data suggests that a child goes missing every eight minutes in India. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

By K. S. Harikrishnan
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India , Sep 4 2014 (IPS)

In a country where well over half the population lives on less than two dollars a day, it takes a lot to shock people. The sight of desperate families traveling in search of money and food, whole communities defecating in the open, old women performing back-breaking labour, all this is simply part of life in India, home to 1.2 billion people.

But amidst this rampant destitution, some things still raise red flags, or summon collective cries of fury. Child trafficking is one such issue, and it is earning front-page headlines in states where thousands of children are believed to be victims of the illicit trade.

The arrest on Jun. 5 of Shakeel Ahamed, a 40-year-old migrant labourer, by police in the southern state of Kerala, created a national outcry, and reawakened fears of a complex and deep-rooted child trafficking network around the country.

Ahamed’s operation alone was thought to involve over 580 children being illegally moved into Muslim orphanages throughout the state.

“Many families are unable to afford the basic necessities of life, which forces parents to sell their children. Some children are abandoned by families who can’t take care of them. Some run away to escape abuse or unhappy homes. Gangsters and middlemen approach these vulnerable children." -- Justice J B Koshy, chairperson of the Kerala Human Rights Commission
Experts tell IPS that children are also routinely trafficked to and from states like Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), child trafficking is rampant in underdeveloped villages, where “victims are lured or abducted from their homes and subsequently forced to work against their wish through various means in various establishments, indulge in prostitution or subjected to various types of indignitiesand even killed or incapacitated for the purposes of begging, and trade in human organs.”

Available records show a total of 3,554 crimes related to human trafficking in 2012, compared to 3,517 the previous year. Some 2,848 and 3,400 cases were reported in 2009 and 2010 respectively, as well as 3,029 cases in 2008.

In 2012, former State Home Affairs Minister Jitendra Singh told the upper house of parliament that almost 60,000 children were reported as “missing” in 2011. “Of those,” he added, “more than 22,000 are yet to be located.”

It is not clear how many of these “missing” children are victims of traffickers; a dearth of national data means that experts and advocates are often left guessing at the root causes of the problem.

NGOs and government agencies often cite contradictory figures, but both are agreed that a child goes missing roughly every eight minutes in the country.

Human rights watchdogs say there are many contributing factors to child trafficking in India, including economic deprivation. Indeed, the 2013 Global Hunger Index ranked India 63^rd out of 78 countries, adding that 21.3 percent of the population went hungry in 2013. According to the World Bank, 68.3 percent of Indians live on less than two dollars a day.

“Socio-economic backwardness is a key factor in child trafficking,” Justice J B Koshy, former chief justice of the Patna High Court and chairperson of the Kerala Human Rights Commission, told IPS, adding that a political-mafia nexus also fueled the practice in remote parts of the country.

“Many families are unable to afford the basic necessities of life, which forces parents to sell their children,” Koshy stated. “Some children are abandoned by families who can’t take care of them. Some run away to escape abuse or unhappy homes. The gangsters and middlemen approach these vulnerable children. In some cases, good-looking girls are taken away by force.”

An action research study conducted in 2005 by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) found that a majority of trafficking victims belonged to socially deprived sections of society.

It is estimated that half of the children trafficked within India are between the ages of 11 and 14.

Some 32.3 percent of trafficked girls suffer from diseases such as HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and other gynaecological problems, according to a 2006 report by ECPAT International.

This is likely due to the fact that most girls are trafficked for purposes of sexual exploitation.

A government-commissioned study conducted in 2003, the last time comprehensive data was gathered, estimated that the number of sex workers increased from two million in 1997 to three million in 2003-04, representing a 50-percent rise.

Many of these sex workers are thought to be girls between the ages of 12 and 15.

Sreelekha Nair, a researcher who was worked with the New Delhi-based Centre for Women’s Studies, added that parents coming from poor socio-economic conditions in remote villages sometimes readily hand over their children to middlemen.

Some parents have been found to “sell their children for amounts that are shockingly worthless,” she told IPS, in some cases for as little as 2,000 rupees (about 33 dollars), adding, “law and order agencies cannot often intervene in the private matters of a family.”

Rajnath Singh, home minister of India, told a group of New Delhi-based activists headed by Annie Raja, general secretary of the National Federation of Indian Women, that a central agency would conduct a probe into the mass trafficking of children from villages in the Gumla district of the eastern state of Jharkhand over the past several years.

The group had brought it to the attention of the minister that thousands of girls were going missing from interior villages in the district every year, while their parents claimed ignorance as to their whereabouts.

Raja told reporters in New Delhi this past Julythat developmental schemes launched by individual states and the central government often fail to reach remote villages, leaving the countryside open to agents attempting to “sneak teenage girls out of villages.”

Experts point out that implementation of the 1986 Immoral Traffic Prevention Act remains weak. Many believe that since the act only refers to trafficking for the purpose of prostitution, it does not provide comprehensive protection for children, nor does it provide a clear definition of the term ‘trafficking’.

Dr. P M Nair, project coordinator of the anti-human trafficking unit of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in New Delhi and former director general of police, said that investigations should focus on recruiters, traffickers and all those who are part of organised crime.

The ‘scene of crime’ in a trafficking case, he said, should not be confined to the place of exploitationbut should also cover places of transit and recruitment.

“Victims of trafficking should never be prosecuted or stigmatised,” he told IPS. “They should be extended all care and attention from the human rights perspective. There is a need for the mandatory involvement of government agencies in the post-rescue process so that appropriate rehabilitation measures are ensured” as quickly as possible, he added.

NGOs like Child Line India Foundation help provide access to legal, medical and counseling services to all trafficked victims in order to restore confidence and self-esteem, but the country lacks a coordinated national policy to deal with the issue at the root level.

Experts have recommended that the state provide education, or gender-sensitive market-driven vocational training to rescued victims, to help them reintegrate into society, but such schemes are yet to become a reality.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Julio T is a 15-year-old vendor of handcrafted costume jewellery in Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro, near the FIFA Fan Fest. He says sales are good during the World Cup because there are a lot of tourists. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 24 2014 (IPS)

The FIFA World Cup being played in Brazil has sounded a warning for organisations fighting exploitation of children and adolescents, during an event that has attracted 3.7 million tourists to the 12 host cities.

As well as revenue, business and employment opportunities, the football World Cup also increases the risks of labour and sexual exploitation of children under 16, according to social organisations and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

“We do not have statistics to quantify the problem, but factors surrounding the World Cup create more vulnerability to exploitation” among children and adolescents, Flora Werneck, the coordinator of Childhood Brasil, told IPS.

The wave of tourists between Jun. 12 and Jul. 13 in the cities where FIFA (International Association Football Federation) World Cup matches are being played has multiplied temporary demand for services and increased child labour and the vulnerability of children’s rights, Werneck said.

Childhood Brasil has been combating sexual abuse in this Latin American country for the past 15 years.

In Werneck’s view, the fast pace of construction and infrastructure projects for the World Cup created dramatic growth in temporary jobs, migrant workers and family evictions, and the school holidays are now another risk factor.

Children and teenagers may be coerced into illegal activities like selling drugs and child prostitution. “They are more exposed to these and other risks,” Werneck said.

Violations of children’s rights are exacerbated by social factors that increase vulnerability, such as inequality, poverty, lack of access to education, consumerism and the culture of machismo, said Werneck and other experts consulted by IPS.

The sexual exploitation of children related to major sporting events is a problem that has been silenced and neglected by public policies.

A 2013 study carried out by Brunel University, in London, commissioned by Childhood Brasil in association with the Oak Foundation , pointed to factors determining increased numbers of cases of violence against children, due to the existence of “significant risks” to children around major sporting events.

In addition to this year’s World Cup, Rio de Janeiro will host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games.

The lack of data measuring the magnitude of the risks does not mean these do not exist, the study says. “We should not assume that no data = no problem,” it states.

The experts consulted say that there is a profound lack of data related to child exploitation in Brazil. The figures that exist are from the Human Rights Secretariat of the Presidency’s rights abuse hotline “Disque Denúncia Nacional” (Dial 100).

In 2013 the hotline received more than 120,000 denunciations of violations of children’s rights.

Five of the 12 states that are hosting matches in this World Cup are at the top of the list for child abuse complaints: São Paulo (17,990), Rio de Janeiro (15,635), Bahia (10,957), Minas Gerais (9,565) and Rio Grande do Sul (6,269).

“No child should suffer because a football stadium is built, nor should they be victims of exploitation through sex tourism. There are no firm data that can prove that mega events are related to a rise in child abuse,” Alessandro Pinto, the coordinator in Brazil of the Save the Dream campaign, told IPS.

But, he said, “we are here to watch this phenomenon closely in Brazil for the next two years.”

Save the Dream is a joint initiative of the International Centre for Sport Security (ICSS) and the Qatar Olympic Committee.  Pinto said that the campaign will attempt to gather concrete data about the link between mega sporting events and violence against children until the 2016 Olympics.

“Sport has a great responsibility towards human beings, society and human rights,” said Pinto.

On Jun. 20 Pinto took part in an event to publicise the preliminary results of the Proteja Brasil (Protect Brazil) campaign against sexual exploitation of children, under the auspices of UNICEF and the Brazilian government in the framework of the World Cup.

One of the strategies to encourage reporting acts of violence against children was the creation of an application that can be downloaded free to smartphones and tablets. The Protect Brazil app is an unprecedented initiative worldwide, said Ideli Salvatti, the minister of the Human Rights Secretariat.

The app aims to make use of the more than 70 million cell phones in Brazil, a country of over 200 million people, to spread reporting of child abuse. It is available in Portuguese, English and Spanish.

Casimira Benge, chief of UNICEF’s child protection programme in Brazil, said that as Brazil is a country of mega events, violence against its 56 million children and adolescents is also on a large scale.

“We learned a lot from the World Cup in South Africa in 2010. Children had no classes because the schools closed during the championship, and so they were left unsupervised. Here in Brazil we are working to provide accompaniment and support for children, even during the school holidays,” Benge told IPS.

Since the launch of the online app on May 18 until Jun. 20, it has been downloaded 60,000 times and 3,800 telephone calls were made to child protection agencies. According to UNICEF, in just one month the campaign reached 40 million people.

Analysis of reports to the Dial 100 hotline found that nearly 50 percent of victims were female, 60 percent were Afro-Brazilian, and victims of violence were mainly aged 8-14, with 65 percent of the aggressors belonging to their immediate family.

Sexual violence ranked in fourth place among the Dial 100 complaints in 2013, at 26 percent. In 2012, when there were over 130,000 reports, one-third of them were related to sexual violence.

In Benge’s view, the best strategy against violence is prevention and enabling reporting of incidents.

Sexual violence is classified in two categories, she said: domestic abuse of a minor, like statutory rape, and sexual exploitation for profit, like prostitution. In 2013 there were 28,552 reports of abuse and 10,664 of sexual exploitation.

Benge said cities in the north and northeast of Brazil, like Manaus and Ceará, deserve special attention because they are more vulnerable.

“There must be vigilance in all 12 host cities, but greater attention must be paid to those with a higher incidence,” she said.

Since the FIFA World Cup began there have been no reports of arrests in the host cities for offences of this nature, but two weeks beforehand the police closed two venues in Rio de Janeiro, allegedly for child sex exploitation.

Teenage girls in low-income areas of Egypt are vulnerable to trafficking. Credit: Cam McGrath/IPS.

By Cam McGrath
El HAWAMDIA, Egypt , Aug 5 2013 (IPS)

Each summer, wealthy male tourists from Gulf Arab states flock to Egypt to escape the oppressive heat of the Arabian Peninsula, taking residence at upscale hotels and rented flats in Cairo and Alexandria. Many come with their families and housekeeping staff, spending their days by the pool, shopping, and frequenting cafes and nightclubs. Others come for a more sinister purpose.

In El Hawamdia, a poor agricultural town 20 kilometres south of Cairo, they are easy to spot. Arab men in crisp white thawbs troll the town’s pot-holed, garbage-strewn streets in their luxury cars and SUVs. As they arrive, Egyptian fixers in flip flops run alongside their vehicles, offering short-term flats and what to them is the town’s most sought-after commodity – underage girls.

Each year, in El Hawamdia and other impoverished rural communities across Egypt, thousands of girls between the ages of 11 and 18 are sold by their parents to wealthy, much older Gulf Arab men under the pretext of marriage. The sham nuptials may last from a couple of hours to years, depending on the negotiated arrangement.“The girl may have 10 siblings, so the family considers her as a commodity.” -- Sandy Shinouda, a Cairo-based official at the IOM’s Counter-Trafficking Unit

“It’s a form of child prostitution in the guise of marriage,” Azza El-Ashmawy, director of the Child Anti-Trafficking Unit at the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM) tells IPS. “The man pays a sum of money and will stay with the girl for a few days or the summer, or will take her back to his country for domestic work or prostitution.”

The girl is returned to her family when the marriage ends, usually to be married off again.

“Some girls have been married 60 times by the time they turn 18,” says El-Ashmawy. “Most ‘marriages’ last for just a couple of days or weeks.”

The deals are hatched in El Hawamdia’s myriad “marriage broker” offices, identifiable by the conspicuous presence of air-conditioners in a ramshackle town with intermittent power.

The brokers, usually second-rate lawyers, also offer a delivery service. Village girls as young as 11 are brought to the Arab tourists’ hotel or rented flat for selection. Arab men travelling with their wives and children often arrange a separate flat for such purposes.

The temporary marriages offer a way to circumvent Islamic restrictions on pre-marital sex.

“Many hotels and landlords in Egypt will not rent a room to unmarried couples,” explains Mohamed Fahmy, a Cairo real estate agent. “A marriage certificate, even a flimsy one, allows visiting men to have sexual liaisons.”

Engaging in sexual relations with minors is illegal in Egypt. Brokers can help with that too, forging birth certificates or substituting the identity card of the girl’s older sister.

A one-day mut’a or “pleasure” marriage can be arranged for as little as 800 Egyptian pounds (115 dollars). The money is split between the broker and the girl’s parents.

A summer-long misyar or “visitor” marriage runs from 20,000 Egyptian pounds (2,800 dollars) to 70,000 Egyptian pounds (10,000 dollars). The legally non-binding contract terminates when the man returns to his country.

The “dowry” that Gulf Arab men are prepared to pay for sex with young girls is a powerful magnet for impoverished Egyptian families in a country where a quarter of the population subsists on less than two dollars a day.

A NCCM-commissioned survey of 2,000 families in three towns near Cairo – El Hawamdia, Abu Nomros and Badrashein – found that the hefty sums paid by Arab tourists was the main motive for the high rate of “summer marriages” in these towns.

Some 75 percent of the respondents knew girls involved in the trade, and most believed the number of marriages was increasing.

The 2009 survey indicated that 81 percent of the “spouses” were from Saudi Arabia, 10 percent from the United Arab Emirates, and four percent from Kuwait.

The International Organisation of Migration (IOM) too has been studying these “marriages”. “The family takes the money, and the foreign ‘husband’ usually leaves the girl after two or three weeks,” says Sandy Shinouda, a Cairo-based official at the IOM’s Counter-Trafficking Unit.

“The unregistered marriages are not recognised by the state and afford no rights to the girl, or any children that result from these unions.”

Shinouda, who formerly ran a shelter for victims of the trade, says most of the young girls come from large families that see marriage to an older, wealthier foreigner as a way to escape grinding poverty.

“The girl may have 10 siblings, so the family considers her as a commodity,” she says.

Parents may seek a broker to arrange a marriage once their daughter reaches puberty. In about a third of cases the girl is pressured into accepting the arrangement, the NCCM study found.

This can have a profound psychological impact on the girl’s mental health, says Shinouda.

“The girls know their families have exploited them…they can understand that their parents sold them,” she says. “Reintegration is a big challenge because in many cases if you return the girls to their family the parents will sell them again.”

Egypt’s 2008 Child Law criminalises marriages to girls who have not reached the legal age of 18. Another law prohibits marriages to foreigners where the age difference exceeds 25 years.

But the laws are poorly enforced, concedes NCCM’s El-Ashmawy. Anecdotal evidence suggests the trade has grown since Egypt’s 2011 revolution as a result of worsening economic conditions and an ineffectual police force.

“It’s not simply about poverty or religion,” she asserts. “It’s cultural norms that support this illicit trade – people believe it is in the best interest of the girls and the families at large. And brokers succeeded in finding common ground with families in order to exploit young girls.”