Jonathan Rugman reports on the child sex trade plaguing Kenya’s pristine white beaches, amid fears that up to 20,000 children are engaged in some form of under-age sex work – often with “muzungus”, white men.We have been on a harrowing journey – from nightclubs where European men pick up 12-year-old Kenyan girls; to an orphanage where children as young as six have found sanctuary after sexual abuse by foreign tourists.
Kenya’s beaches represent the best in tropical paradise, mutually beneficial for both the thousands of Europeans who head there and the locals who thrive from their tourism.
But Kenya’s coast has a seedier face – visiting white men who pay children, some as young as three years old, for sex. In a country where ten million people are going hungry, there are fears that this abuse is spiralling.
Foreign affairs correspondent Jonathan Rugman journeyed from around the villages of Mombasa, and then onto Mtwapa and Malindi.
Extracts from Jonathan Miller’s blog
Kenya’s beaches are the stuff holiday brochures are made of – mile after mile of glistening white sand, kissed by equatorial sun. Tourism is a major money spinner for one of the world’s poorest countries, but Kenya’s tropical paradise hides a dark secret.
We have been on a harrowing journey – from nightclubs where European men pick up 12-year-old Kenyan girls; to an orphanage where children as young as six have found sanctuary after sexual abuse by foreign tourists.
A journey into a world of cruelty and desperation, a world we could scarcely have imagined. And both talking and filming with children brutalised and traumatised by their experiences has not been easy.
WATCH VIDEO HERE: http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1184614595?bctid=41847358001Our journey began in the nightclubs on the outskirts of Mombasa. Visit the Mtwapa suburb after midnight, and white male European tourists are busy ogling and fondling teenage girls.
The teenagers wear high heels, or pay a bribe at the club door to get in. The ultimate prize is a “muzungu ” or white man, who will pay for sex five times what a Kenyan labourer can earn in a day.
But the price these girls are paying is nothing less than a stolen childhood.
Anastasia says she’s 13 now, and has been prostituting herself since she slept with a British tourist at the age of ten, a crime which in Britain would be classed as rape.
Her parents couldn’t even afford school shoes, so she set out for a better life amid the bright lights of Mombasa. That life is sharing a flat with a fellow prostitute, Leyla, who is 14. And both girls say the number of children involved is growing.
“When I started at the age of 12, I could go into a nightclub, and maybe I can get 10 or 20 girls,” Leyla told me. “At least you could count and say, ‘that one and that one, they are prostitutes’. But now there are many, all over the place. Sometimes I get stressed. I ask myself, or God, what I have done wrong? I am still a child and I am doing this.”
At that point in our interview, Leyla dropped her head in shame. Anastasia was crying.
Three years ago, a study by the UN children’s agency UNICEF warned that there were thousands of girls like Leyla.
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