SUNDAY OBSERVER Sunday Observer - Magazine
Sunday, 19 October 2003  
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Children

Allegations that the parents of a boy who was sexually exploited by a paedophile actually knew about it and seemingly acquiesced may appear to be the latest horror experienced by our country's children. But is it really something new? And, are foreign paedophiles the problem?

The news report last week of a case highlighted by the National Child Protection Authority (NCPA) involving a Netherlands citizen is only the latest such case. We do know that paedophiliac child exploitation has flourished for decades as a small scale industry, that is, as a business linked to tourism. When foreign tourism first began to boom in the late 1970s, Negombo, along with other Third World cities such as Bangkok and Manila, appeared on the 'destinations' map of First World paedophile tourists.

At the time, it came as a shock to Sri Lankans that paedophile travel booklets and internet websites were advertising our precious children as buyable sex objects. Children, both boys and girls, far below the legally accepted age for 'consensual sex' had become a Sri Lanka 'export' commodity and seems to have remained one ever since.

The even harder reality that is conveniently obscured by the spectacle of foreign paedophile exploitation is that the exploitation and abuse of children is quite home-grown and a social phenomenon that has existed in different ways in Sri Lankan society for centuries. That is, it is a Sri Lankan problem; our very own horror visited on our children by adult society.

Even today, leaving aside the very common employment of girls and boys as small as 10 years of age as household servants, girls just a little older are conveniently married off under the pretence that they are actually older.

This is a sad phenomenon among the poorest households and is prompted by a complex of compulsions and attitudes ranging from poverty and the inability to care for children (often due to the parents having to live and work outside the home), to social attitudes that consider girls as being destined to be no more than child-bearers and house-keepers and therefore not deserving of any education or personal vocational fulfilment.

Non-resident poor parents often calculate that it would be safer to marry off daughters as soon as they begin to 'blossom' as women rather than risk being manipulated and ravished by marauding males either in their own households or in the neighbourhood. After all, the fact that many rape cases involve uncles or brothers or cousins or even fathers is yet another Sri Lankan sexual phenomenon hardly acknowledged.

If it comes to statistics, surely the number of children victimised by foreign paedophiles cannot even begin to be compared with the stark numbers of Sri Lankan children exploited sexually and economically in these various ways by Sri Lankans themselves. It is feasible, if not likely, that in the foreign paedophile case reported last week the alleged concurrence by the boy's family was prompted by sheer poverty and perhaps greed.

An exploding phenomenon in many parts of the Third World is the desperate lengths that impoverished people go to escape their socio-economic predicament and seek prosperity, of a kind, in the First World or through the largesse of First World citizens. Selling one's own body or that of one's kin, even one's child, to achieve economic escape or social fulfilment is nothing new in adult human society.

We can only overcome these sins by confronting them with brutal frankness: the sexual and socio-economic exploitation of children is no less evil than their military exploitation. Even if they are not killed or maimed through their exploitation, they are yet traumatised, psychologically and culturally maimed and, deprived of their right to a decent and full life as humans. The sick horror is within and not something 'foreign'.

Call all Sri Lanka

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