Sasha, a scruffy-looking long-haired resident of Moscow, has a lucrative profession. He sells the sexual services of small boys. His base of operations is a garden in front of Moscow's magnificent Bolshoi Theatre, where both local and foreign clients know to seek him out. Sasha pimps for a number of male teenagers who hang out with him near the Bolshoi, but his main "team" consists of three younger boys -- Marik, 8, and Volodya and Dima, both 9.
The three boys wound up in Sasha's clutches when they were cast into the street during the social upheaval that followed the collapse of communism. The ex-collective farmworker dresses them up in girls' clothes and sells their favors, given eagerly, he maintains, for as little as $20 a day. "I am helping them," he insists, flashing gold teeth set into a pockmarked face. "This type of work is profitable. The boys are grateful."
The exploitation of Marik, Volodya and Dima exemplifies the single most unsavory element of the worldwide growth in the sex trade: an explosion in child prostitution, driven in part by the fear of AIDS. In Moscow alone an estimated 1,000 boys and girls of tender age are selling their bodies. Three years ago, police say, there were only a very few. A similar rise in child prostitution has occurred in other Russian and East European cities. In the ( Third World the numbers are also staggering: an estimated 800,000 underage prostitutes in Thailand, 400,000 in India, 250,000 in Brazil and 60,000 in the Philippines. The newest international sites for child prostitution: Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, China and the Dominican Republic.
Everywhere, including affluent Europe and the U.S., the pattern is the same: kids run away to escape domineering parents or because they are being physically or sexually abused, or they are kicked out because their parents can't or don't want to take care of them. Some children fall into prostitution through abduction or trickery. Easy prey, they become chattel for the sex merchants. Sasha says Marik was sold to him for a case of vodka, while he found Volodya abandoned at the Moscow railway station -- together with thousands of other youngsters who have turned the terminal into a street urchin's paradise. Once victimized by the violent gangsters and pimps who control the sex trade, most children end up addicted to alcohol or drugs. Despair is the norm; suicide is common.
At 11, Sandra Patricia has not reached puberty and yet has been a prostitute in Bogota, Colombia, for two years. The youngest of eight children, she fled an abusive stepfather for what she describes as the "dangerous but exciting" life of the streets. A recent Chamber of Commerce study concludes that the number of prostitutes ages 8 to 13 in Bogota has quintupled in the past seven years -- while government funding of programs to help youth in trouble has declined. Sandra Patricia is riddled with venereal disease; her favorite pastime is sniffing glue. "I know I'm sick," she moans, "and people treat me like dirt, and sometimes I'd just like to die."