Side Story
Child Prostitution

"... the use of a child in sexual activities for remuneration or any other form of consideration." (Source: Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child)
Sexual exploitation of children through prostitution is an age old and global problem. In some countries it has existed for centuries, embedded in historical and cultural practices.

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Phase 1: creating relationships of confidence with the local authorities (head of the municipality, chief of schools in the municipality, headmasters, teachers).

Phase 2: creating relationships of confidence with the village chiefs and locating the poorest families, mapping out high-risk children living under though circumstances and risking to become victims of trafficking.

A family is considered high-risk if:

a)    it is a single parent household (e g a mother who has been left by her husband and  who therefore has to bring up her children by herself).
b)    the adults of the family are old people to whom their daughters have left their own children to take care of. The young mothers “work” in Thailand or in the capital and only come back to the village to give birth before they leave again to get back to work. Sometimes, the young mothers are married and may represent a danger for their own girls, who may in their turn be sent after to come and work under the same conditions. It also happens that the parents who have left their child with the grandparents no longer contribute to the upbringing of the children they have left behind. They have started new lives elsewhere, with a new husband, a new wife, and new children – among the men, this situation is not unusual.

The children then become easy pray to traffickers, since they bear all of the following indications: living in poverty, victim of malnutrition and taken care of by old guardians. In a way they are orphans, abandoned by the parents, and the person who is responsible for them is no longer capable of working, so the child can quite easily be left to a third person by the grandparents who hope, most of the time, that the child will, at last, get sufficiently to eat.

Our job is to promote the children and to explain the danger of leaving them to somebody else (especially to strangers or to friends of friends, and most of all to women of a certain age, who always seem so ”sympathetic” and who criss-cross the villages), as well as to explain how schooling will open several doors to the child, and make possible a better job later, and hence more money for the family.