October 23, 2001	Tuesday	Shaba'an 5, 1422

BANGKOK: The spread of children’s clubs in Cambodia over the past year is fast gaining support as a sound way to deal with the exploitation of children in the country’s thriving prostitution industry.

In these clubs, which have so far attracted some 1,500 children in urban and rural areas, children learn about their rights through games, lessons and discussions, including engaging programmes that bring to light child prostitution and similar forms of sexual abuse.

“The clubs have helped, for children participating learn about the problem, the risks and how they should respond,” says Lawrence Gray, a child rights activist at the Cambodian office of World Vision, an international development agency.

“They also learn about the community strengths and how the people can help,” he adds. “It is an effort to instil confidence in them, to raise the profile of the child within the community.”

For child rights activists, this approach, which they describe as an example of “good practices,” is a sound preventive measure in a region that has an estimated one million children forced into the prostitution industry.

In other corners of South-east Asia, the plight of the girl child is as severe. In Thailand, for instance, ECPAT contends that there has been a 20 per cent increase in the number of child prostitutes over a two-year period, between 1998 and 1999.

In Vietnam, adds ECPAT, there were anywhere between 5,000 to 7,000 children forced into the prostitution industry in 1998. “A significant number of children are trafficked, both within the country and across borders to neighbouring nations.”

Indeed, countries in Asia need to stall such abuse through a proliferation of “good practices,” says Vitit Muntabhorn, professor of law at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University. “We need more preventive action, protective measures, examples of good practices” to show that the use of children and youngsters in the prostitution industry can be curbed from within the affected societies.

In Thailand, on the other hand, strong laws, like the Prostitution Act of 1996, have come to the rescue of the girl child in some parts of the country. Likewise, this act does not spare parents, spelling out that they will face severe punishment if they sell their children for sexual exploitation.

While no parent has been hauled before the Thai courts for violating the act, legal experts here have noticed a reduction in the number of children coming from poorer villages in northern Thailand as a result of it.

“Earlier they encouraged their children to go, since they could earn up to $US 400 a month from their daughters work in the prostitution trade,” says Wanchai Rooujanvong, executive director of the Thailand Criminal Law Institute. “Now we don’t see that kind of encouragement. They are aware of the law.”

Mehr Khan, regional director of the Asia-Pacific division of the UNICEF here, agrees that the laws can work both as instruments to punish offenders and to discourage child sexual abuse. “There is a need to deal with this as a criminal activity and we know that the legal remedy has worked.”

At the same time, she says, the reasons that have contributed to this form of child abuse — particularly poverty — require a response beyond the legal approach. “The region has 700 million people living on less that $2 a day.”

In December, child rights activists from Asia will be joining their peers from the rest of the world in the Japanese city of Yokohama to draft a course of action to stop the commercial sexual exploitation of children. This meeting will also look at the balance sheet of advances and set-backs since the first World Congress in Stockholm in August 1996.—Dawn/InterPress Service.