PRESS BRIEFING BY UNICEF

PRESS BRIEFING BY UNICEF

At a Headquarters press briefing this afternoon held to launch the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) publication "Profiting from Abuse", Kul Gautam, the Fund's Deputy Director, called for a coordinated global effort to, once and for all, stamp out the worldwide networks that sold millions of children as sex slaves.

Mr. Gautam, briefing corespondents on behalf of Carol Bellamy, the Fund's Executive Director, said the report offered an in-depth look at the commercial exploitation of children and detailed the scope and toll of that scourge, including testimonials from abused women and children.

The report's launch coincided with the convening of the Second World Congress against Commercial Exploitation of Children, which opens Monday in Yokohama, Japan, and runs through 20 December.  Mr. Gautam said during the Congress, co-sponsored by UNICEF, the Fund's call would be “zero tolerance” of children's sexual exploitation; for putting an end to the trafficking of children, their sale and barter, imprisonment and torture.  He recalled the tenets of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which clearly stated that children had the right to be free from abuse, to receive an education and to play -– all of which were casualties of exploitation.

Mr. Gautam was joined by two of the Fund's top regional officials who were set to head its delegation at the Second World Congress, Mehr Khan, Director of UNICEF's East Asia and the Pacific Regional Office, and Rima Salah, Director of UNICEF's Regional Office for West and Central Africa.

On his hopes for the Congress, Mr. Gautam recalled that the event was conceived as a follow-up to the First Congress, held in 1996 in Stockholm.  Global actors at that event had elaborated a Declaration, which called for all States to develop national plans to take specific action to combat the commercial exploitation of children.  There had been sporadic follow-up and implementation efforts, he added, and fewer than 50 countries had actually put together concrete initiatives.  With that in mind, he said that Yokohama should not aim to create a new agenda, but to reinvigorate international commitment to agreements made in 1996, including more active involvement of news media and non-governmental organizations

Mr. Gautam said the report highlighted two major weapons in the battle to end the commercial exploitation of children -- leadership and education.  Laws were needed to confront the various facets of exploitation and trafficking.  Those laws should be enforced with tough criminal penalties.  Education was vital, in that it empowered children to protect themselves.  Indeed, school could teach children to avoid high-risk situations.  The UNICEF, he added, would continue to work to ensure that international goals for the universal education of children would be met.

Responding to a question, he noted that, unfortunately, many of the statistics in the report were not very current.  The issue of exploiting children

for profit was sensitive, and it was often very difficult to get reliable figures.  But, the important thing was not precise numbers -- it was the obvious and easily discernable fact that the problem was growing rapidly, and that was cause for alarm.  He drew attention to several dangerous new facets to the problem, including trafficking, pornography and prostitution, all of which were sadly exacerbated by new information technologies like the Internet.

Ms. Salah echoed that sentiment, drawing attention to the growing problem of trafficking in the West and Central Africa regions.  Children were trafficked between countries in the region and beyond to work on plantations and in homes as domestics.  While it was unclear if all those children were being sexually exploited, her office believed that they were at risk of such abuse.  She added that protracted conflicts in those regions also adversely affected the children's situation there, so the initiatives aimed at addressing the issue of sexual exploitation would have to be modified.

Poverty, Mr. Gautam went on to say, was chief among the underlying causes of sexual exploitation of children, which also included gender discrimination and unemployment.  Armed conflict also created special risks of sexual violence and exploitation, possibly forcing women and children into prostitution or increasing the dangers for child refugees or displaced persons.  In that regard, he emphasized the importance of international conventions and treaties protecting the rights of children, particularly the International Labour Organization (ILO) treaty 182 on eliminating the worst forms of child labour.

He also noted that the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, on child prostitution and child pornography, had now received the requisite number of ratifications and would enter into force next month.  That would go a long way towards stemming the global sex trade in children, which generated billions of dollars each year and involved the trafficking of millions of children.

Ms. Khan said that while it was very difficult to get solid statistics on child exploitation, work with non-governmental organizations and other concerned actors had revealed that there were nearly 1 million children in the commercial sex trade in Asia alone.  In East Asia, the profits from that industry were so huge that the ILO estimated it accounted for between 14 and 16 per cent of Thailand's gross domestic product.  She said that, while much progress had been made in the region to eradicate poverty and other social ills, there were still glaring disparities between countries that needed to be addressed.

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