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28 Mar 2006 11:15:32 GMT

Report cites trend of more children in sex trade

World Vision Middle East/Eastern Europe office (MEERO)
By John Schenk - MEER Communications Manager-Russia is becoming a new destination for child sex tourism, just one part of a larger disturbing trend of more juveniles in all aspects of the sex trade, charges a report on human trafficking in Russia funded by the Canadian government and supported by six United Nations agencies and the International Organization of Migration (IOM).

Child pornography is also cited as a rapidly growing Russian industry with little restraint offered by light court sentences. The Russian variety tend towards a particularly cruel emphasis on scenes of child torture, write the authors of Inventory and Analysis of the Current Situation and Responses to Trafficking in the Russian Federation, a 150-page reported funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

"Like human trafficking cases of adults, the level of exploitation affecting children has become such that the problem has ceased to be just marginal, becoming institutionalised and operating as an established system. Mechanisms of such exploitation are becoming part of 'standard' economic and social practices and are operating relatively openly," says the report.

"The growing rate of child trafficking and other transactions involving minors is becoming a threat on a global scale. Transitional economies, which include Russia and the whole CIS region, are a 'breeding ground for trouble' in this area. Child trafficking is widespread both within these countries and across their national borders," write the report's authors.

Some experts claim approximately 20 per cent to 25 per cent of Moscow's between 80,000 and 130,000 sex workers are minors, says the report. The most conservative estimates claim not less than 17,000 minors are sex workers within Russia. The report notes that one in seven of the 92 criminal charges about "adults" coerced into prostitution in 2002 turned out to involve minors.

Canada, Great Britain and the United States have laws specifically against child sex tourism with penalties ranging from 10 to 30 years, the report says. It claims Russian laws citing "trafficking in minors" and "organisation of prostitution with deliberate use of minors" do not explicitly target child sex tourism and says "punishment envisaged for these offences" is only a maximum four-year prison term.

"There is an explosion of slavery in the world and of highly professional and sophisticated child exploitation in our region (MEER)," said Sharon Payt, advocacy director for MEER. "The traffickers have organized themselves, exploiting technologies like the internet. Global trends show human trafficking is increasing in such a way that we don't know where its going. It ranks as one of the major human rights abuses of this new century.

"We've got to be more intentional. A whole body of resources have become available in the last few years that could be organised to assist children. Our response will require our best thinkers and strategic co-operation," she said.

The Canadian-funded report says leading reasons children are being trafficked are for exploitation in sex tourism and pornography, cheap labour in manufacturing, agriculture and domestic environments and for begging. To a lesser extend they are used for organ and tissue transplants and illegal adoptions.

"Even in cases where they (women and girls) have entered the sex trade industry voluntarily, they are still vulnerable to more extreme types of exploitation that push conditions to a situation of sexual slavery," says the report. "In such cases of organised prostitution, most of it can be assumed to fall within the category of human trafficking."

The authors also cited official Russian crime statistics for 2002 which they said indicate disturbing trends in children as victims of sexual and violent crimes:

Every third violent crime of a sexual nature (36.9 per cent) was committed against a minor.
Every fourth rape victim (27.7 per cent of a total of 2,099 cases) and every second victim (43.5 percent of a total of 235,515) of violent acts of a sexual nature was underage
Every fourth victim of sexual harassment, including harassment of a homosexual nature (29.8 percent of 25 cases) was a minor
Every fifth victim of sexual killings was a child or an adolescent.

[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]

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