Painful Profiles in Prostitution

Child prostitutes can be found in cities across the globe, some bewildered by what has happened to them, others hardened by life in the streets. They are the victims of broken families, social injustice and criminal exploitation. The stories of three:

Manila

Nica a short-haired girl with drooping eyes says bitterly that her mother sold her to a female pimp four years ago when she was 10.

“Why me?” she asks. “There are so many other children. Why did she have to be my mother?”

Nica worked for two years as a prostitute in Manila’s San Andres red-light district, earning money for her jobless mother, who was abandoned by Nica’s father when the girl was still a baby.

Nica was usually paid the equivalent of $20, but once made about $190 for staying a week at a resort with a Swiss man, her pimp and the pimp’s two children, a boy and a girl.

Since her pimp was arrested two years ago, Nica has lived in a government shelter for sexually abused children. She’s in the fourth grade at the shelter school, where she and about 250 other children are taught crafts and housekeeping.

“We could not find a relative who could take care of her because they are all into this rotten trade,” said Noemi Sanchez, the shelter’s psychologist.