Born Into Brothels

Earlier tonight I watched the documentary titled Born Into Brothels.

This is a heart breaking story of children from Calcutta, India who live in homes of prostitutes. Photographer Zana Briski spent two years working with these children, teaching them to take pictures and giving them the freedom and artistry to tell their story through their camera lens. The story line is heartbreaking, as Briski attempts to convince these children and their parents to allow them to attend boarding school. The education they received would give them a better life and future. What was most shocking to me was the abuse. The high level of physical and verbal abuse these kids endured by their mothers. I was shocked that a mother would speak to their children with such hatred and disdain.

Prostitution is defined as the act, practice or profession of offering the body for sexual relations for money. There are so many causes of child prostitution.

1- Misery and Poverty

Poverty is the most common reason why most families sell the services of their female children to augment their income in order to buy food or clothes and other necessities of life. The case of child labour is a typical factor that exposes children to prostitution. The hired female children are sent out to hawk food items on the streets, motor parks, and mechanic garages thereby exposing them to rapes as well as sexual harassments.

2- Unemployment

Unemployment of either the parents or the child results in unreliable source of income thereby forcing children into prostitution as an alternative means of income to support the family. According to the International Labour Organization, observes that a child’s ability to earn money is limited. It is estimated that the money earned by the child only contributes to approximately 10% of the family’s overall income and therefore has minimal effect on the family’s monetary gain. Due to high degree of unemployment, the brothels employ some female children who serve in their drinking spots to promote their business.

3- Human Trafficking

Human trafficking is another evil leading to child prostitution. It represent the world’s third largest criminal activity following only after drug and weapons trafficking is sometimes purported to send teenagers to other countries to work. These would be workers who sometimes end up prostitute actually work and repatriate money to their respective home countries. Many times, hard times hit these fellows as they are deported to come and continue this profession at home. Some of the female prostitutes come home to take some younger females to their places either to help them or to make them their servants and at the long run they get converted to prostitution, which is their boss’ profession.

4- Dysfunctional Family Environment

Children of broken homes sleep wherever they see space to do so in the day, and go to the disco and nightclubs in the night. The ill treatment of children at home might make them to take to the street in order to find solace. Then the end result may be the hawking of their body to support themselves.

5- Poor Education

Some children cannot support themselves materially in view of low educational training they received, so they resort to prostitution as their only profession. Girl-child Education Initiative In Africa highlights the effect of poor education in the whole of Africa. In connection with poor education, peer pressure, bad association and street ganging contribute to child prostitution. Identifiably, a girl may end up as a prostitute by her association, peer pressure and by running with a street gang.

6- AIDS

The high incidence of sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS make customers of prostitutes to look for children who are considered to be of low risk, and most probably virgins. Patrons of child prostitutes are willing to pay a great deal of money to be a girl’s first client. In the streets, brothels and drinking spots these days a lot of female children are being employed to help lure more male customers to their spots.

7- Rebellion and Feeling Independent

This is another factor promoting child prostitutions. Some girls are shamelessly bold. What is more, they feel that the body is theirs thus they should decide what to do with their body.

8- Pornography

Pornography also puts viewers at increased risk for developing sexually deviant tendencies.Pornography is identified as promoting “the rape myth” which is a belief that women cause and enjoy rape. Additionally, the repeated use of pornography interferes with the ability to enjoy and participate in normal marital intimacy. Dr. Victor Cline, who specializes in treating sex addiction claims that “deviant sexual acts results” when a viewer tries to act out the pornography-based fantasies.

9- Rape

Some youths were raped in their own homes, which act changed their outlook in life. Some of such ones give vent to prostitution. Two other closely related causes of prostitution are glamour associated with it and insatiable sexual urges in some females. Some prostitutes take to this lifestyle because of their innate desire for glamour or that they want to maintain a standard of life.

10- Sudden Exposure

Illicit love affairs in the presence of children may subject them to early prostitution. Some parents perform extra marital affairs in the presence of their wards. This exposes the children to early sex life. The premature death of one or both of the parents has also been discovered as one of the causes of child prostitution. Because of the chasm created by such loss, a teenage girl may be fraught with the onerous task of catering for herself and other family members. More importantly, no one may exist to give stern guideline on her.