Commentary Poor children targets of sex
exploitation
By LAURA J. LEDERER
Special to the National Catholic Reporter
Rosario Baluyot was born in Manila, the Philippines, the youngest
of eight children. She died at age 12, the victim of a European sex exploiter.
Like other children without families, she became a street child when she was 8
years old, gravitating to the U.S. Naval base at Subic Bay, where there were
about 1.2 million children under age 16 trying to scrape by.
She was picked up one night by Heinrich Stefan Ritter, an Austrian
physician. Sex with minors is illegal in his country, so he traveled to the
Philippines to find what he wanted. He invited her to his hotel room, promising
her money and food. There he had sex with her and then forcibly inserted a
vibrator into her vagina. The object broke, fragmented and lodged inside
Rosario's cervix. She had seven months of agonizing pain and infection before
she died.
Ritter was tried in court and sentenced to life imprisonment by a
Philippine court for the rape and death of a child, but the charges were
reversed on a technicality. He returned to Austria where he is still free
today.
Rosario's story has become a symbol for a growing international
movement to stop child sexual exploitation. She is only one of hundreds of
thousands of children used in child prostitution and child pornography in
Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, South America, Mexico, Eastern Europe and
several other regions. And Ritter is but one of thousands of men from the
United States, Canada, Japan, France, Italy, Sweden, Denmark and many other
developed nations who travel from their home countries, where sex with young
girls and boys is prohibited, to countries that have no laws or laws that are
rarely enforced against child sexual abuse.
$5 billion industry
According to a recent study by the International Commission of
Jurists, the sex market for minors under 16 is a $5 billion industry including
agents, madams, pimps and criminal organizations. It is an industry driven by
poverty, greed and a callous demand for sex.
In a call to action, UNICEF and the government of Sweden hosted
the first World Congress to End Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in
Stockholm, Sweden, in August. The aim was to bring government officials, law
enforcement agencies, nongovernmental organizations and interested individuals
together to address the problem.
The congress focused on Article 34 in the Convention on the Rights
of the Child. This article addresses the problem of child sexual exploitation
and urges all nations to take steps to prohibit child prostitution and child
pornography.
The congress met for five days during which over 100 governments,
intergovernmental agencies and national and international nongovernmental
organizations presented information on the situation in various regions of the
world, the action governments are taking to prevent or reduce child sexual
exploitation, and the advocacy work of the many nongovernmental organizations
around the world. The congress may not have solved the problem but it brought
to light the urgency of the issue. Several important themes emerged.
Media reports would have us believe that commercial sexual
exploitation is confined to a few poor regions of the world. But new evidence
demonstrates that every country, rich or poor, North or South, produces its own
child sexual abusers. In addition, citizens of affluent, developed nations are
traveling to poorer countries to exploit children. The focus of this
"sender-receiver" trafficking has been mainly on Japanese sex tourists, but
organizations like ECPAT -- End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism -- report
that just as many tourists come from the United States, Canada, Australia and
over a half-dozen Western European countries as from Japan. The United States
-- which has treated the problem as if it were happening to some poor people
"over there" -- was named by ECPAT as one of the nations with the largest
number of sex tourists traveling abroad.
Laws are inadequate
Laws and law enforcement to prevent child sexual exploitation are
hopelessly inadequate.
One example is child pornography, a form of child sexual
exploitation. Laws prohibiting the production, distribution and possession of
child pornography are important in order to address both the supply and demand
side of the child pornography industry. A recent survey by the Center on
Speech, Equality and Harm at the University of Minnesota Law School found that
of 165 countries surveyed, only 31 had laws prohibiting the production,
distribution and possession of child pornography.
This lack of protection and lack of coordination among nations has
been exploited by traffickers, who identify places that have no such laws or
have laws that are rarely enforced (for example, most countries in Southeast
Asia, Eastern Europe and the Caribbean). They produce child pornography in
these countries and ship it to countries where it is illegal to produce it but
legal to possess it, for example Sweden, Finland, France, Ireland, the
Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy.
These countries then become the stopping off points for further
distribution, using Internet and other advanced telecommunications technologies
in Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and other countries.
Clearly, Internet and the World Wide Web are wonderful new
resources for international communication. But there is a dark underbelly.
These new technologies are being used to traffic women and children for mail
order brides, prostitution and slave labor. As experts testified at the World
Congress, it is now possible for a child pornographer to transmit a single
child pornography image to thousands of sites instantaneously and
simultaneously. Encryptation allows a new level of private and secret trade in
child pornography.
In addition, computer morphing allows pornographers to create
child pornography by altering images -- using one child's head and another's
body.
It has become increasingly clear that, as in drug trafficking and
gunrunning, child traffickers are organized. Reports from human rights groups
say international motorcycle gangs are trafficking in Filipino women in
Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland and other Scandinavian countries.
From UNICEF and UNESCO come reports of internationally organized
criminals in Eastern Europe and Russia moving into, among other things, child
prostitution and child pornography. Women's organizations report Italian mafia
trafficking in Albanian and other Eastern European women.
Definitions vary
Around the world, the definition of a child varies so widely as to
make it impossible to have a cooperative effort protecting children from sexual
exploitation. In Tanzania and the Philippines, the age of majority is 12; in a
dozen other countries, it is 14: over 100 countries set the age of majority at
18. But these same countries have variations on age of consent to sexual
relations.
Thus, what may be illegal sexual relations or statutory rape in
England may be legal in a Southeast Asian country. A country that prohibits
child prostitution but makes the age of majority 12 has no protection for a
teenage child targeted by an adult exploiter.
While most countries are addressing the problem, renewed effort is
needed. Countries must examine their definitions of child and the age of
consent for sexual relations. As much as possible, nations should regularize
these definitions, taking into account what we already know about the universal
physical, psychological and emotional development of a human being. Only an
international campaign can make cooperation among law enforcement agencies
feasible.
Laura J. Lederer is director of the Center on Speech, Equality
and Harm at the University of Minnesota Law School. Her research was presented
at the Stockholm congress.
National Catholic Reporter, November 22,
1996
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