We all know about rampant child abuse, in fact you can hear about it on the news almost everyday. But there’s a related issue which rarely comes to the forefront and that is the commercial sexual exploitation of children, that is using anyone younger than 18 for paid sex acts or in pornography. Sounds so reprehensible that decent folks may consider it unthinkable, but a 2006 study found that it does happen in Belize and increasingly so in the tourism industry.
That’s why the National Committee for Families and Children is recruiting the media to raise awareness about the issue and bring public pressure on policy makers to enact laws the strictly and specifically prohibit the sexual exploitation of children. A half day workshop was held with media practitioners from across the country today. We found out what it was about from the ILO’s regional expert on sexual exploitation, Nidia Zuniga. She says commercial sexual exploitation of children is prevalent.
Pearl Stuart, Executive Director - NCFC
“The commercial sexual exploitation occurs with maybe younger kids where they are being photographed or put on the internet. You have adolescents that are “selling their services” for school fees, part of the word they use is to bling bling and that type of thing. And then unfortunately perpetrators are older people, men and women perpetrating on these young victims.”
Nidia Zuniga, Regional Expert
“At the beginning countries don’t like to talk about this, don’t like to say we have the problem, we have CSEC
inside our borders but this is the first step towards fighting against it.”
Pearl Stuart,
“I think that’s one of the reasons why we asked the media to be here because we want to make sure you are sensitized to the issue and that in fact it is out there as commercial sexual exploitation, not just child abuse. Now the other aspect of it indeed is that we want to make sure that we have something enacted, a law enacted to in fact prosecute these perpetrators. There is a draft bill that was presented in conjunction with the ILO-IPEC in November of 2007. What we are trying to do is to make sure that we do a fine tuning, we encompass all aspects of protecting the child in that bill.”
Nidia Zuniga,
“We’re working strongly to create awareness that this is a crime and that people shouldn’t buy sexual relations with children and this has been something that is normal. Once a girl reaches the girl of 12, people figure it is okay to have sexual relationships and if it is paid it is okay. So this is the message that we want to send: it is not okay, it is a crime, people shouldn’t do it.”
Pearl Stuart,
“In order for this to stop, we have to in fact prosecute and we can only prosecute if we have the laws but we want to make sure that we don’t have gaps, we don’t have loopholes. We don’t want to give fodder to those that may escape from this. So we want to make sure when we do it we do it right.”
There are currently no laws to deal specifically with the commercial sexual exploitation of children.
