Human Trafficking in [Honduras] [other countries]Street Children in [Honduras] [other countries]Child Prostitution in [Honduras |
Child Prostitution The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of
Children In the
first ten years of the 21st Century -
2000 to 2009
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CAUTION: The following links and accompanying text have been culled
from the web to illuminate the situation in ***
FEATURED ARTICLE *** If You Turn Up Dead, No One Will Wonder Why These girls, boys and teenagers are offered up as "merchandise" in brothels, photographed nude for Internet websites, or forced to perform in live sex shows. Most are poor, and all are utterly denied their right to a safe and happy childhood. In Honduras alone, between 8,000 and 10,000 girls and boys are the victims of sexual exploitation, according to a still unpublished Casa Alianza study conducted last year in Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. ***
ARCHIVES *** U.S.
Dept of Labor Bureau of International Labor Affairs INCIDENCE
AND NATURE OF CHILD LABOR - There is evidence of child prostitution in Bur of Democracy,
Human Rights & Labor - Country
Reports on Human Rights Practices - 2005 TRAFFICKING
IN PERSONS – Women
and children were trafficked into Concluding
Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) - 1999 [34]. While the Committee takes
note of the reforms to the Penal Code and of the training given to the municipal
children's defenders to prevent and combat sexual abuse and exploitation of
children, it expresses concern at the absence of data and of a comprehensive
study on the issue of sexual commercial exploitation of children as well as
the lack of a national plan of action to tackle this issue. Concluding
Observations of the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights [20] The Committee is alarmed
about the high number of children who are forced to work to support
themselves, and in particular about the serious situation of street children
and the existence of street gangs (maras). In this
regard, the Committee is also gravely concerned about the high incidence of
sexual abuse, exploitation and prostitution of children in the State party,
and about the lack of a national plan to address these issues. [40] The Committee urges the State
party to undertake urgent measures to introduce rehabilitation programs for
street children. The Committee also urges the State party to address the
issue of sexual abuse, exploitation and prostitution of children by adopting
a national plan to combat the problem, including collecting relevant data and
conducting a thorough study of the issue. [scroll down to Monday, July 14, 1997 Online
Edition 62] CHEMISTRY
OF PROMISCUITY - Representatives of Casa del
Niño, where I first learned about Chusito, mince no
words. "La Ceiba is the hub for child
prostitution. Tourists, possibly members of a loose organized crime confereration, regularly come to Honduras to exploit
minors. While there is no open child prostitution per se, networks exist that
supply children to pedophiles. The center is near the Parthenon Beach Hotel.
Many of the girls are well under 16. There is a street for boys, too...
Carnivals and other events attract large numbers of visitors who exercise
great stealth, pay cash and command the silence of their accomplices." According to Casa del Niño, there
are about 50 homeless children in La Ceiba, an
overly conservative estimate by their own accounting. "We've really no
way of knowing. Most are between 10 and 16. Most are boys. Illiteracy,
irresponsible paternity are all at work. Some families have not a gram of
conscience when it comes to procreation. Use of Resistol
among them is universal. It's sold freely in the Centro Commercial. Pimps and
sex tourists often pay the children with cans of the deadly shoe glue. It's a
case of turpitude further debased by criminal indifference...." - sccp GUATEMALA:
Where Sexual Exploitation of Minors Is Not a Crime But hers is not an isolated case.
Although no precise figures are available, in 2002 it was estimated that
2,000 minors were sexually exploited in Guatemala City alone, according to a
report by Casa Alianza (the Latin American branch
of the New York-based Covenant House, a child advocacy organisation)
and ECPAT (an international NGO working to end child prostitution, child
pornography and the trafficking of children). Of those 2,000 minors, 1,200 were
from El Salvador, 500 from Honduras and 300 from Guatemala itself. María
Eugenia Villarreal, ECPAT director for Latin America, says Central America is
a hub for trafficking in minors, child pornography and sex tourism. The women, mostly from rural, poor
villages in ECPAT: Fifth Report on implementation of the Agenda for
Action [DOC] www.ecpat.net/eng/Ecpat_inter/publication/other/english/Doc_page/ecpat_5th_a4a_2001_full.doc At one time this article had been
archived and may possibly still be accessible [here]
[B]
COUNTRY UPDATES – If You Turn Up Dead, No One
Will Wonder Why These girls, boys and teenagers
are offered up as "merchandise" in brothels, photographed nude for
Internet websites, or forced to perform in live sex shows. Most are poor, and
all are utterly denied their right to a safe and happy childhood. In Honduras Gets Tough On Child Prostitution www.hacer.org/current/Hondu03.php At one time this article had been
archived and may possibly still be accessible [here] The abuse has grown so blatant
that such willful disregard is no longer possible. Exactly how big the
problem is, no one is quite sure, only that over the past couple of decades
it has been getting worse and that western visitors are much to blame. In Tela, for instance, as many as 40% of the 120,000 annual
visitors to the town could be sex tourists. Child
Prostitution: A Growing Scourge A REGION OUT OF CONTROL - Promised jobs and scholarships,
Honduran girls, some as young as 13, are routinely being trafficked by crime syndicates
and sold to brothels in Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico. Most of the street girls rescued by Casa Alianza are victims of prostitution. HUGE PROBLEM, SCARCE ASSETS - Honduras Security Minister
Oscar Alvarez, who oversees his country's law enforcement apparatus,
acknowledges that child prostitution is out of control. He attributes his
agency's unexceptional successes to "acute" understaffing. UN General Assembly - Promotion And Protection Of
The Rights Of Children www.hri.ca/fortherecord2000/documentation/genassembly/a-55-297.htm At one time this article had been
archived and may possibly still be accessible [here]
[45] In January 2000, a court in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, sentenced three American men to jail
terms of between four and nine years for promoting the prostitution of minors
and profiting from the prostitution of others. [46] In April 1999 the Honduran Criminal
Investigative Unit and staff from the non-governmental organization Casa Alianza had investigated a night club operating in Underage teens are
abused in Honduran honky-tonks The arrests highlight what child
advocates say is a growing problem in the dirt-poor countries of Honduras: Child Prostitution On The Rise www.ecpat.net/eng/Ecpat_inter/IRC/articles.asp?articleID=205&NewsID=24 At one time this article had been
archived and may possibly still be accessible [here]
According to a recent report from
UNICEF and the Project for Communication and Life (COMVIDA), over 500 minors
are prostituted in the city of Child Sex Trade Rises
in Central America While some minors are pushed into
prostitution by families that are unable to support themselves, most underage
sex workers in Central America are street children, many of whom, studies
show, had fled sexual abuse at home. In Sex Tourism
Plagues Central America Street children who used to sniff
relatively inexpensive glue are now turning to crack, readily available in
the region as Central American military officials, no longer living high on
the hog from Child
rights advocate speaks at U.N. meeting on contemporary slavery [article on the right] . "If you are an
enterprising foreigner in Honduras, you can set up a bar and offer little
Honduran girls for sex to the other visiting tourists. Or in Costa Rica, if
you are a tourist, you can buy sex from little girls, but often only in the
morning as they have to go to primary school in the afternoon," he
added. In his presentation, Harris
described the worrisome boom of child sex tourism in Costa Rica and Honduras,
where more and more visitors are coming each year exclusively to have sex
with minors. Attacked by a complex network that involves Internet sites,
local hotels and bars, taxi drivers, and "professional" pimps,
numerous poor girls and boys -- as young as 10 years old -- are falling
victims to those sex predators, as they find in prostitution their only means
of survival. All material used herein
reproduced under the fair use exception of 17 USC § 107 for noncommercial,
nonprofit, and educational use. PLEASE
RESPECT COPYRIGHTS OF COMPONENT ARTICLES.
Cite this webpage as: Patt, Prof. Martin,
"Child Prostitution - |
Human Trafficking in [Honduras] [other countries]Street Children in [Honduras] [other countries]Child Prostitution in [Honduras