Governments should focus on demand for child sex: conference

Focusing on demand, rather than the poverty which generates the supply, can limit child prostitution which blights millions of young lives, participants told a conference in Madrid on Thursday.
The day-long international conference, organised by non-governmental organisations led by Spain's Intervida World Alliance and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), urged governments to face up to a problem they say has become a brutal, multi-billion dollar business. "Poverty is not the underlying cause," Intervida director general Joan Manuel Costa insisted as he opened the day-long forum.
According to NGOs including Intervida and UNICEF, there are as many as 300,000 minors who prostitute themselves in the United States and estimates of up to half a million in China and India, with the number on the increase in a globalised world of relatively cheap travel. But such is the nature of the problem, where victims often are unable or too ashamed to speak out for themselves, the figures could be far higher.
"The clandestine aspect of the sex industry allows only an estimation," the IOM's Senegalese deputy director general Ndioro Ndiaye, a former social welfare minister, explained. "Human trafficking is an affront," IOM counter-trafficking specialist Jonathan Martens said as participants strove to raise public awareness.
Maria Jose Chamorro, for the vulnerable groups unit of the International Labour Organisation, insisted neither the victims nor the countries suffering from extreme and widespread poverty should suffer the brunt of the blame.
"We must confront the demand. The existence of clients (for the sexual services of a child) is the primary cause" of a problem fuelled by sex tourism and which NGOs say affects some hundred million children across the globe.
Chamorro, an expert on exploitation in Central America, insisted women seeking to escape poverty should not be blamed for their situation and said she had identified in several societies "excessive tolerance" of abuse by both men and women.
Ndiaye told AFP governments were culpable of not getting to grips with the issue. "The government aspect is missing at a conference such as this. The responsibility of states really must be engaged in searching for a solution.