Judith Matloff in Lusaka
Zambia’s stringent austerity measures have helped create a crisis in the sexual exploitation of children, with high numbers of under-age prostitutes roaming the streets, child advocacy groups say.
The groups, taking stock for an international conference on the sexual exploitation of children this month in Sweden, said that the combination of deaths as a result of Aids and migration to the cities had in many cases disintegrated the traditional, extended family.
The existence of 500 000 Aids orphans, coupled with the loss of tens of thousands of state jobs, free education and food subsidies during five years of a strict structural adjustment programme, means thousands of childrens have been forced to earn money on the streets.
No one knows how many children are surviving by selling their bodies — but local non-governmental organisations monitoring the situation agree the problem is worsening by the day.
“Sexual exploitation of children is Zambia’s silent problem. Poverty has gotten worse under the structural-adjustment programme and is actually contributing to the problem,” said Scholastica Chinsense, deputy director of the government’s Social Welfare Department.
Merab Kiremire, board secretary of Tasintha, a local NGO working with prostitutes, added: “They say prostitution is the oldest profession. Not here in Zambia. It’s gotten far, far worse with the economic crisis over the past five years.”
President Frederick Chiluba has been lauded by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank for his sticking to austerity programme guidelines. But for tens of thousands of families whose breadwinners have lost jobs in privatisations, the impact has meant misery and desperation.
According to Monica Shinganga, the national director for the Young Women’s Christian Association HIV/Aids prevention Project, women’s low status means families will often invest in boys’ education but not girls’. It is up to girls, who are seen as mere commodities, to act as breadwinners.
A typical story is told by Justine Kalandanya, whose decline began when she needed money to buy a school uniform after her father died. She was 12 years old and her mother sent her forth to find the money needed.
Within weeks she was walking the streets, selling her child-like body to men at bus stations. Now three years later, Kalandanya is raising her third child, the uniform long forgotten in a sordid chain of events which saw her become accustomed to sleeping with seven men a night and burying two other children that died of syphillis.
An average trick costs the equivalent of about R1,15 without a condom and R2 with one. Sometimes Kalandanya just settles for food or a bus ticket.
“I’d do anything to get a nice job or go back to school,” said Kalandanya, who looks closer to 10 than 15. “But I can’t.”
>From the shanty towns of the capital Lusaka to the copperbelt mining route, girls as young as nine are servicing truckdrivers, fishmongers, miners, soldiers, tourists and vendors. Guardians often collude by turning a blind eye to where a child’s proceeds are coming from.
Chinsense said that adding to the problem is the widespread myth that having sex with a young girl will cure Aids. This was encouraging HIV-infected men to seek ever-younger partners, including their own relatives.
An estimated 25 to 30% of Zambia’s urban population is infected with HIV, according to the Health Ministry. HIV infection rates for females aged 15 to 19 years are seven times that of the males.
The impact on the population-growth rate is staggering. While in many African countries it is as high as 3%, in Zambia it is expected to soon decline to almost zero.