Child Prostitution is defined by the United Nations as "the sexual exploitation of a child for remuneration in cash or in kind, usually but not always organized by an intermediary (parent, family member, procurer, teacher, etc.)."313 The sexual exploitation of children is considered to be one of the worst forms of child labor and a form of bonded labor.314 Children who are sold, induced, tricked, or enticed into prostitution are too young to fully comprehend or consent to the acts that they are forced to perform.315 Most countries have penal laws against such activity and consider sexual relations with a minor under 16 years of age to be statutory rape.316
Important Links:
Convention on the Rights of the Child
Children and Prostitution--Literature Review
Street Children and Sex Trade in Asia
Child Prostitution In The Larger Context of Child Labor:
CHILD LABOUR: According to a 1996 survey Bangladesh
has 6.3 million working children between the ages of five and
14 years. UNICEF and ILO reports
indicate that of children six to 17 years of age, 21 percent of
boys and four percent of girls are working in paid employment
- children are commonly seen
driving rickshaws, breaking bricks at construction sites, carrying
market produce for shoppers. In the shrimp industry they can be
found as peelers, packers
and beachcombers. The majority of child workers perform unpaid,
working alongside other family members in small-scale and subsistence
agriculture.
Reports from human rights monitors indicate that child abandonment,
kidnapping and trafficking for labour bondage and prostitution
are also serious and
widespread problems. UNICEF has estimated that there are about
10,000 child prostitutes in Bangladesh. There is extensive
trafficking in children, primarily
to the Middle East, India, Pakistan and South East Asia, and also
within Bangladesh, mainly for the purposes of prostitution and
labour servitude. Children
are also used as camel jockeys, a cruel and dangerous ‘sport’
popular on the Arabian Peninsula. Few perpetrators are ever punished.
The Constitution
prohibits forced or compulsory labour but the laws are not rigorously
enforced. Some domestic servants, including many children, suffer
physical abuse,
sometimes resulting in death.
Protracted negotiations led in July 1995 to the signing of
a Memorandum
of Understanding (MOU) between the garment manufacturers
and UNICEF and the
ILO
to eliminate child labour in the export garment sector. Under
the MOU, the garment sector was to become child labour free by
31 October 1996, with
former child labourers enrolled in UNICEF-run schools, and follow-up
inspections of factories by ILO inspection teams. The children
receive a small monthly
stipend while attending school to help replace their lost income.
Under the MOU, more than 8,000 children were enrolled in over
300 UNICEF schools during
1997. The scheme has produced a significant reduction in child
workers in the garment sector. ILO inspections have consistently
found more than 80
percent of the factories in the scheme child labour free.
The Child Labor Deterrence Act was first introduced in Bangladesh in 1992. It came to be popularly known as the Harkin Bill. The introduction of this Bill by U.S. Senator Tom Harkin forced the garment factories of Bangladesh to dismiss all their underaged child workers to avoid an export-boycott. Ever since, the Bill has been widely criticized in Bangladesh. The Bill has been condemned as something being imposed on Bangladesh without any regard to the issue of child labor from the perspective of the country itself. The focus of the criticism was that the U.S did not take into consideration the plight of children to sustain themselves in a poverty-stricken country once they are thrown out of their jobs in the garment factories. Most of the child laborers in Bangladesh as in oher poor countries work to support their families. Without an income, they would have no other means of sustaining themselves. The Bill was termed unfair mainly because it demanded the dismissal of child laborers from the garment factories, while not actually offering an alternate plan to financially support the children dismissed. It has been strongly argued that besides its many shortcomings, by dismissing thousands of children, many among them girls, from their job in factories, the Bill was leaving some of the girl children with few choices but considering prostitution as a livelihood.