CALCUTTA — It's as if Rama never had a childhood. She was a bride at 9, and a few years later, she was selling her body in the warren of squalid alleys and tenements that is Sonagachi, Calcutta's largest and oldest red-light district.
Millions of children all around the world are robbed of their youth in the same way.
Year after year, governments and social activists vow to stamp out the highly organized and lucrative child-sex industry. Last year, India was among more than 100 nations at a conference in Sweden that pledged to cooperate more closely to protect children from prostitution.
Despite such pledges, the situation in India and elsewhere only may worsen.
Populations are soaring in developing countries, where a host of other problems often take precedence. More and more people are drawn to cities, where prostitution feeds on a mix of poverty and modern consumer values. At the same time, the global communications explosion is creating high-tech links between those seeking sex with children and those who run the brothels that provide it. The problem is so entrenched and complex that some experts wonder whether truly effective measures are possible.
"The good wishes of you or me [are] not going to change society," said Dr. Smarajit Jana, who runs a clinic and AIDS-education program for prostitutes in Sonagachi.
Child prostitution flourishes mainly because local men desire it and others profit from it. Foreign "sex tourists" may make the headlines as abusers of underage prostitutes--and become the targets of well-publicized crackdowns--but the worst exploiters are at home.
Among those who profit, for example, in India:
* Entire villages where the main source of income is prostitution, passed from mother to daughter as a traditional, religion-based trade.
* Traffickers with cross-border networks.
* Corrupt police bribed to look the other way instead of enforce laws like the ones India passed more than 40 years ago that declared sex with anyone younger than age 16--with or without consent--rape and a crime punishable by life imprisonment.
* The children's families, whether they admit to themselves how money sent home from the big city is earned or not.
The United Nations Children's Fund estimates that every year at least 1 million children, most of them girls, become prostitutes.
