Colombia – Child Prostitution

                                                                                                                                                                             

                “A child
in danger

                          is
a child that

                                  cannot
wait”

     

          -Kofi Annan, former Secretary General,
United Nations

                                                                                                                                                                        

 

Colombia is a land of contrasts, as anyone who’s read Gabriel Garcia
Marquez can attest. This fourth-largest country in South America, with a 2005
population of 45.6 million, is known for its rich economic resources and its
guerilla fighters, its natural beauty and its syndicated crime, its
high-quality heart surgeons and its drug traffickers. The economy is doing well
under the leadership of President Alvaro Uribe, and, as of 2000, it was home to
two thirds of the world’s kidnappings.

A
volatile country, if anything.  A colorful country. Colombia is attracting
increasing numbers of tourists as well, as the World Tourism Organization,
which is having its November 2007 conference in Colombia, can attest. And
underneath it all, in the shadows of the cartels, the syndicates, the beauty
and the wars, are more than 1 million girl children earning a living by selling
their bodies.

Children
become prostitutes for a variety of reasons. Poverty is often at the core:
families prostitute out their girls in order to have enough income to survive;
others sell their children to brothels and trade networks for the same reason.
Other children independently flee abusive domestic situations for the promise
of a better life and find themselves in the sex industry; still others were
soldiers or otherwise affected by one of Colombia’s wars and, now displaced,
find themselves with few options for surviving. Still others are kidnapped, or
refugees from other regions. 

Prostitution
takes on different guises here. Some children end up in local brothels; others
are placed into regional and international prostitution trade networks. These
networks are often run by bigger syndicates also involved in narcotics, weapons,
and counterfeiting. Children may be traded to neighboring countries like
Venezuela, or to markets in countries as distant as Spain or
Germany.     

Whether
instigated by adverse conditions at home or involuntary actions, child
prostitution in Colombia is insidious as it is widespread. Colombia is known as
a human supply company for prostitution networks abroad, the country itself is
a known sex tourism destination, and prostitution is firmly embedded into the
economy as a means of making a decent living wage. Still, as the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of the Child, the CRC, which Colombia signed and
ratified in 1989 and entered into force Sept. 2, 1990, suggests, children need
to be protected. This is not only for their own well-being—child prostitution
is correlated with illness, infertility, post-traumatic stress disorders,
homelessness, and other afflictions—but for the good of the entire society.

While
the U.S. government helped to write sections of the CRC, the U.S. Senate has
still not completely ratified the international treaty on the Rights of the
Child because of ongoing contentions concerning sections of the Convention
which prevent jurisprudence and sentencing against children under the age of
18. Currently inside the United States, numerous separate states continue today
to charge and sentence children under the age of 18, which clearly goes against
tenants of the treaty itself, leaving the U.S. laws far behind and outside the
guidelines and jurisdictions of the CRC.

The
Colombian government, in contrast, seems publicly to realize a greater need for
the guidelines provided by the CRC. National Police have rounded up child
prostitutes on several occasions and brought them to the Renacer Institute, a
nonprofit organization which offers child prostitutes room, board, and
education in exchange for a promise to stop working. Established as a nonprofit
in 1994, the foundation has two houses that can support around 60 children. The
Colombia Journal cites the example of Carolina and her sister, who ran away
from their impoverished Bogota neighborhood in their mid-teens in order to
escape familial abuse. It wasn’t long before the two girls were working the
streets of Bogota, making an income as prostitutes. Several months later, they
were rounded up by police and taken to Renacer. The National Police also run
“Colombia Without Prostitution,” a prevention program aimed at preventing child
prostitution through community and family education. The government has also
collaborated with various NGOs to create a Plan of Action on Child Sexual Abuse
in relation to its signing of the Convention of the Rights of the Child.
(gvnet.com)

That
said, the government’s role though has been unpredictable, fluctuating between
support of the children, neutrality, and enmity. According to Human Rights
Watch, police have periodically been suspected of waging war on street children
rather than helping them, sometimes even shooting them on the streets. The
government is also a major donor to Renacer, but has significantly cut funds in
the past.

Despite
difficulties, Renacer continues to be devoted to the cause of getting child
prostitutes off the streets. Stella Cardenas Ovalle, Founding Member and
Director of the Renacer Foundation, has, since 2001, been working hard to
influence government policy and to steady law enforcement policies. Ovalle is
building a long-term alliance of child protection organizations, like Renacer,
that are only now beginning to network together. Using the power of numbers and
statistics, the network will keep legal policy informed and work steadily to
stimulate public awareness. The alliance will, if Ovalle’s projections prove
correct, be today’s “most powerful catalyzing agent in the fight against
commercial exploitation of children.” (Ashoka.)

So
far, the Fundacion Renacer has worked with ECPAT International (End Child
Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual
Purposes), the Bogota
District Council for the Comprehensive Care of Child Victims of Abuse and
Sexual Exploitation, UNICEF, and many other organizations. Internally,
together, they protect child prostitutes through programs ranging from
vocational education to psychotherapy, with the ultimate goal of helping them
lead relatively settled lives in society.

Still,
there remains much work to be done, especially in light of the complexity of
the situation.

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________________________________________________

Sources
for this article include the BBC News, the New York Times, the United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime, Emory Law – U.S. 2006 Spring Symposium, the UN
Special Report on Violence Against Women (1997), the Houston Chronicle, Human
Rights Watch, The Colombia Journal, the Associated Press, YouTube, Ashoka,
and the World Tourism Organization.

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