THE WORLD's first concerted attempt to stop the abuse and exploitation of children forced into sexual trade begins today in the Swedish capital, Stockholm.
The meeting of hundreds of charity workers, police, child care officials, sociologists, politicians and other concerned parties is horribly timely, following the grisly discoveries of child victims of a believed pornography network in Belgium last Saturday week. The revelations of the business run by father of three Marc Dutroux have focused the minds of many people, who, if they ever considered the practice of using children as young as four to enrich exploiters by peddling their immature sexuality, consigned it mentally to far away, underdeveloped countries which were comfortingly "other".
"It is your husband, or brother, or workmate. It is not some paedophile or person demonstrably different," says Dublin lawyer Ms Muireann O Briain, of the typical client of a child prostitute. Ms O Briain, who is in Stockholm for the World Congress on the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, has for the past two years acted as legal consultant to the main movement currently tackling the problem, ECPAT (End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism). ECPAT initiated this week's conference, which the Swedish government offered to host, and was then joined by Unicef as a prime organiser.
Ms O Briain says one of the messages she hopes will come across clearly at the Congress is how the people making the trade possible are often "ordinary" people.
I was at a dinner party here in Dublin after having written a newspaper article about sex tourism, and one of the guests, who I had not met before, said `I know men who do that'. We can't distance ourselves from it."
Senator Mary Henry, whose Child Sex Tours Bill comes before the Dail in the coming session, gives no specific instances of Irishmen being involved, but quotes Father Shay Cullen, who works with children in desperate circumstances in the Philippines, as saying he would be "very surprised" if no Irish people were taking part.
Last month an English computer analyst was jailed in the Philippines for 17 years after a history of molesting two boys aged eight and four. An Australian man in his sixties was also given a hefty jail sentence earlier this year. And in a high profile case which is the subject of a constitutional challenge, a senior Australian diplomat on child sex charges is contesting the powers of an Australian court to punish him for activities alleged to have been carried out while he was representing his country in Cambodia. This case will be watched with interest all around the world, in the growing number of countries, such as France, Germany and New Zealand, which have introduced "sex tourism" laws in recent years.
Ms O Briain says the special point about this congress is that it is the first time that governments and non government organisations have come together, with inter governmental organisations, to tackle one universal problem. This has caused certain dilemmas for example, Taiwan, which has taken a leading role in dealing with its child prostitution problem, could not be invited because the Swedish government one of the sponsors of the conference, does not recognise it.
Unicef, one of the main organisers of the Stockholm congress, estimates that one million children (under 18) are entering the prostitution trade each year this is not the total, but the new arrivals. The total number of children involved is obviously a multiple of this. And many of these are young children, pre puberty. In Nicaragua, one of many Latin American countries with a severe child prostitution problem, a 1992 study found that 92 per cent of all prostitutes were aged between 12 and 18.
One of the big factors enhancing the appeal of young children and teenagers as sexual satisfiers has been the spread of AIDS. In both developed and developing countries, says Ms O Briain, many men believe that they are safe from HIV with a "clean" young person. The reality is that many of these children come from social backgrounds where they have been born with the virus or been placed in a situation to contract it at an early age.
"HIV is what could concentrate governments' minds," says Ms O Briain, who has a distinguished career as a human rights lawyer. "Thailand has been one of the first to recognise that they are heading for a huge health problem and enormous costs in dealing with the result if hundreds of children every year are not only contracting the virus but passing it on.
This also has implications for the labour force. In Zambia, the incidence of AIDS is so high that it has been predicted that the workforce will be virtually nil by the year 2010. The society will consist of elderly and infirm people, and young children, with the middle years work force rendered inoperative by AIDS.
The likelihood in the Belgian case is that Dutroux and his accomplices were involved in an inter country ring which kidnapped young girls and smuggled them across borders for commercial sexual exploitation. Trafficking of children in this way is one of the main topics of the Stockholm congress, as will be pornography on the Internet, a problem growing at an alarming rate.
As well as Ms O Briain and Dr Henry, Ireland will be represented by Mr Austin Currie TD (for the Department of Justice) and Ms Mary Banotti, MER Ms Banotti chairs a European parliamentary committee on cases of abduction and trafficking of children, of which the official figure of less than 100 is said by experts to be a thousandth of the true number.
Many delegates who were in Dublin last week for the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (ISPCAN) have also travelled on to Stockholm. They hope they can persuade the countries which subscribe to Unicef's Convention on the Rights of the Child to pledge concrete action on a problem which has implications at social, economic and moral levels. They believe the sentiment expressed in uncharacteristic and touching capitals in a Colombian delegate's contribution to the handbook of the ISPCAN conference: "CHILDREN ARE SEEDS OF OUR FUTURE."