NEWS
CHILD PROSTITUTION 

THE NEWS INTERNATIONAL, Pakistan, 08 June 2000 Thursday

UNITED NATIONS: Grinding poverty and a sense of duty to family can push some girls as young as seven across national borders and into prostitution, according to experts at a UN global women's conference.

At a discussion on trafficking of women and girls on Tuesday, one activist referred to these elemental forces in the case of girls taken from their homes in Nepal and into brothels in the big cities of neighbouring India. "In these circumstances (of extreme poverty), there were parents who were willing to let their daughters go, because they found that if they let one daughter go, for three years they would sustain the rest of the family, and the daughters agreed because they wanted to be dutiful daughters," said filmmaker and activist Ruchira Gupta.

A US State Department report said between one and two million women and girls were coerced each year into prostitution, manual labour and domestic service that amounted to virtual slavery. Some 800,000 of these were forced into sex work in India, and thousands more faced the same fate in Thailand, the Philippines, Cambodia and parts of Africa. In Mali, where children are trafficked to neighbouring Ivory Coast, the minister of women's affairs, Diara Afoussatou Theiro, said only a regional strategy would help solve the problems. "We have to have regulations for the movement of children, because children move between countries in the region," Theiro said, speaking through a translator. "We have to work together, because if one country is working toward the elimination of child trafficking and the other country is doing absolutely nothing, the country that's making the effort is not going to win," Theiro said. In parts of Nepal, where many young girls are taken from villages and sent to brothels in India, teenage ex-prostitutes have become an effective force of border guards on the lookout for trafficking in young girls, Gupta said.

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