Reuters Health
December 19, 2006
Last Updated: 2006-12-19 11:23:12 -0400 (Reuters Health)

By Katie Nguyen

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenya's idyllic coastline of white sands and turquoise waters belies an alarming child sex industry, driven by widespread acceptance and even approval of the vice, a report said on Tuesday.

Up to 15,000 girls in four coastal districts are involved in casual sex for cash - about 30 percent of all 12-18 year-olds in these areas - according to a joint study by the U.N. children's fund UNICEF and the Kenyan government.  It said a further 2,000-3,000 girls and boys were engaged in full-time sex work, some of them paid to perform the "most horrific and abnormal acts".

Kenyans topped the list of abusers, accounting for 38 percent of the clients, while Italians, Germans and Swiss were the worst culprits among the tourists representi ng 18 percent, 14 percent and 12 percent respectively.

British, French, American, Ugandan, Tanzanian, Congolese, Japanese, Indian, Austrian and Arab clients were also recorded.

"While many children are driven ... because of poverty, the high level of acceptance ... makes it relatively easy for children to drift into casual sex in exchange for no more than extra pocket money," UNICEF representative in Kenya Heimo Laakkonen told a news conference.

Although tourism is Kenya's second biggest foreign exchange earner, the report said as much as two-thirds of revenues flow back to foreign-owned tour operators and airlines, with local communities gaining little.

Seventy-six percent of the beach boys, bar staff, waiters, hairdressers, curio sellers, elders and community leaders interviewed thought underage sex - as a source of income - was normal and tolerable, or even approved it for girls.  Some 60 percent thought it was acceptable for boys.

"JACK POT"

"Personally, I have never seen any African family that is disappointed in the presence of a mzungu (white man) in their lives," one elder was quoted as saying in the 87 page report.

"The folks will think they have hit the jackpot, little do they know of the misery their daughter undergoes. They think the mzungu is a saviour."

The report said clients were willing to pay up to 10,000 shillings ($144) for anal sex, about 100 times the daily rate a child might earn from casual labour.

More than 45 percent of the girls surveyed in Mombasa, Kilifi, Malindi and Kwale districts began selling their bodies for cash, goods or favours when they were 12-13 years old.

About one in 10 children were initiated in the sex trade before they had reached puberty , the report said.

Anal sex represented 12 percent of all sex acts, and 30 percent of sex acts with Italian men involved anal sex, while no condom was used during almost a third of all penetrative sex acts.

"There's a permanent core of child sex workers, so young and so vulnerable that they make decisions that put them at a high risk of HIV/AIDS," the report's author Sarah Jones told reporters. "They will play Russian roulette with their lives."

One sex worker told the report's authors that she fled Malindi because of the kinds of services that the mainly Italian clientele demanded such as performing sex acts with dogs.

The report, based on interviews with 230 people, mainly from the tourism industry, and the diaries of 84 child sex workers, urged the government to focus on protecting children and prosecuting adult perpetrators.