Child Sex Trade Thrives Despite Nations’ Many Laws, Promises

It’s as if Rama never had a childhood. She was a bride at 9, and a few years later, she was selling her body in the warren of squalid alleys and tenements that is Sonagachi, Calcutta’s largest and oldest red-light district.

Millions of children all around the world are robbed of their youth in the same way.

Year after year, governments and social activists vow to stamp out the highly organized and lucrative child-sex industry. Last year, India was among more than 100 nations at a conference in Sweden that pledged to cooperate more closely to protect children from prostitution.

Despite such pledges, the situation in India and elsewhere only may worsen.

Populations are soaring in developing countries, where a host of other problems often take precedence. More and more people are drawn to cities, where prostitution feeds on a mix of poverty and modern consumer values. At the same time, the global communications explosion is creating high-tech links between those seeking sex with children and those who run the brothels that provide it. The problem is so entrenched and complex that some experts wonder whether truly effective measures are possible.

“The good wishes of you or me [are] not going to change society,” said Dr. Smarajit Jana, who runs a clinic and AIDS-education program for prostitutes in Sonagachi.

Child prostitution flourishes mainly because local men desire it and others profit from it. Foreign “sex tourists” may make the headlines as abusers of underage prostitutes--and become the targets of well-publicized crackdowns--but the worst exploiters are at home.

Among those who profit, for example, in India:

* Entire villages where the main source of income is prostitution, passed from mother to daughter as a traditional, religion-based trade.

* Traffickers with cross-border networks.

* Corrupt police bribed to look the other way instead of enforce laws like the ones India passed more than 40 years ago that declared sex with anyone younger than age 16--with or without consent--rape and a crime punishable by life imprisonment.

* The children’s families, whether they admit to themselves how money sent home from the big city is earned or not.

The United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that every year at least 1 million children, most of them girls, become prostitutes.

And the problem is not limited to developing countries, where conventional wisdom blames poverty. UNICEF’s estimate includes at least 100,000 children in the United States. In Japan and other industrial countries, middle-class high school girls turn to prostitution to earn money for designer clothes.

In some places, the pressures of modern life are blamed. In Kenya, the rush to urbanization and industrialization has created a class of desperate children. Corrupt police and politicians ignore or exploit the problem--Kenyan government officials in the East African country only recently admitted child prostitution existed there.

Elsewhere, child prostitution has grown out of ancient tradition. Families in Ghana offer up daughters to appease animist gods, and shrine priests use them as concubines. Similar practices in India have lost all religious significance over the years--now the girls are peddled as prostitutes. It remains a shameful trade that few people want to admit exists.

Rama says she sends money to her destitute parents, who live in the countryside west of Calcutta, as often as she can, telling them she earned it working as a maid.

She claims to be 20 years old, but her wide-eyed face is that of a teenager. As she talks, she plays with her jewelry, unraveling the metallic threads of one of the dozens of bracelets that climb her arms.

Rama, who gave only her first name, has a room in a dilapidated building that houses dozens of prostitutes. She fears being sent to one of the country’s notorious juvenile detention centers, where caretakers are regularly accused of abusing their charges.

Nayanita Sardar, a social worker in Sonagachi, says many girls end up as prostitutes because, like Rama, their marriages have failed. Childhood marriage is still common in rural India, and girls take on adult responsibilities as soon as they enter their in-laws’ household.

Rama left after six months, accusing her new family of beating her. Back home, she worried she was a burden and turned for help to a neighbor who had gone to Calcutta and returned with money and tales of good work in the city.

The woman promised Rama a job cleaning houses. Instead, she deposited her at a brothel three years ago. Then Rama was told she owed the madam 10,000 rupees (about $280)--the fee paid to the agent for feeding another girl into Sonagachi.

Sonagachi, a Bengali word that means “the place where gold grows on trees,” has been known as the place to find prostitutes for more than 200 years. Visitors not here to buy sex are few and unwelcome, so ideas from the larger world are slow to penetrate.

On a recent weekend morning, women shopped among the pink and glistening wares of fishmongers spread on the sidewalk or sat combing their hair in the sun. Younger prostitutes were out of sight.

Sarala Gopalan, the top administrator in India’s federal department of women and child development, estimated there are at least 100,000 child prostitutes in India.

“A complete social awakening is needed” to combat child prostitution, she said.

“Recognizing that there is a problem is the first step. Earlier, there wasn’t even that recognition,” Gopalan said. “The whole culture has to change, so it will take two or three generations.”

The Indian government has moved slowly, both because sexual matters must be addressed delicately in a conservative society and because political will seems to be lacking.

Gopalan’s department and other agencies completed a study of child prostitution in 1994. Parliament has yet to act on the main recommendations: strengthening anti-prostitution laws and building homes where children believed to be at risk of becoming prostitutes could be cared for and educated.

Brazil followed a similar pattern after President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a sociologist, declared a nationwide campaign against child prostitution in 1995 and ordered Brazil’s 26 states to submit a plan of action. The states have been slow to respond, because what they are being asked to do is costly and difficult.

Last year, Thailand’s government passed a law that allows the prosecution of parents who sell their children into the sex industry and increases fines and prison terms for procurers, brothel managers and patrons of child prostitutes.

But as Thai social critics point out, a country ranked among the world’s major centers of child prostitution already has plenty of laws and plans, but little enforcement. Activists estimate more than 1 million prostitutes work in Thailand, and as many as 40% of them are children.

The government of the Philippines is waging a publicity and education campaign against the problem, following President Fidel Ramos’ admission that his country had a shameful reputation as a center for child prostitution. Critics say the laws against child prostitution are good, but enforcement is weak.

Rama knows most young women never escape Sonagachi. They die of sexually transmitted diseases or, spurned by their families, are reduced to begging after they lose their youthful allure.

When she came to Calcutta, Rama hoped to get a good job, meet a man, have a family.

“I still have that dream,” she said.