(IPS) feature

The spread of children's clubs in Cambodia over the past year is fast gaining support as a sound way to deal with the exploitation of children in the country's thriving sex industry.

In these clubs, which have so far attracted some 1,500 children in urban and rural areas, children learn about their rights through games, lessons and discussions, including engaging progammes that bring to light child prostitution and similar forms of sexual abuse.

"The clubs have helped participating children learn about the problem, the risks and how they should respond," says Lawrence Gray, a child rights activist at the Cambodian office of World Vision, an international development agency.

"They also learn about the community strengths and how the people can help," he adds. "It is an effort to instill confidence in them, to raise the profile of the child within the community."

For child rights activists, this approach, which they describe as an example of "good practices", is a sound preventive measure in a region that has an estimated one million children forced into the sex industry.

Robbed childhood

This kind of support is needed in the face of the robbed childhood of some of Cambodia's girl children in its capital, Phnom Penh. In noted brothel areas of the capital like Toul Kork, studies reveal that the young girls brought from the outskirts are often virgins.

"Pimps reportedly imprison children and do not put them to work until they've been presented to a series of bidders such as high-ranking military officers, politicians, businessmen and foreign tourists," according to a background note on Cambodia prepared by the international child rights advocacy group End Child Prostitution and Trafficking (ECPAT).

In other corners of southeast Asia, the plight of the girl child is as severe. In Thailand, for instance, ECPAT contends that there has been a 20 percent increase in the number of child prostitutes over a two-year period, between 1998 and 1999.

"The demand for child prostitutes from both Thai men and foreigners, including tourists, is still high," an ECPAT paper explains. "Children are trafficked to Thailand from Cambodia, through Koh Kong and Poipet, Laos, Burma and China."

In Vietnam, adds ECPAT, there were anywhere between 5,000 to 7,000 children forced into the sex industry in 1998. "A significant number of children are trafficked, both within the country and across borders to neighbouring nations."

Indeed, countries in Asia need to stall such abuse through a proliferation of 'good practices', says Vitit Muntabhorn, professor of law at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University. "We need more preventive action, protective measures, examples of good practices" to show that the use of children and youngsters in the sex industry can be curbed from within the affected societies.

'Child-sensitive' courts

Equally important, he stresses, is the law. "The legal remedy has worked in countries where it is applied. We have seen a rise of successful prosecutions," he adds.

The record in New Zealand stands out in this regard - between 1992 and 1999, it has had 10,745 convictions for violent child sex abuse.

This trend has been helped by many factors, ranging from strong laws, good law enforcement and 'child-sensitive' courts and legal procedures.

Child-sensitive courts in New Zealand have enabled children to give evidence through a close-circuit television system installed in all court rooms, thus preventing the sexually exploited child to be, as Vitit points out, "re-victimised again in the courtroom".

In Thailand, on the other hand, strong laws, like the Prostitution Act of 1996, have come to the rescue of the girl child in some parts of the country. Likewise, this act does not spare parents, spelling out that they will face severe punishment if they sell their children for sexual exploitation.

While no parent has been hauled before the Thai courts for violating the Act, legal experts here have noticed a reduction in the number of children coming from poorer villages in northern Thailand as a result of it.

"Earlier they encouraged their children to go, since they could earn up to US$400 a month from their daughters' work in the commercial sex trade," says Wanchai Rooujanvong, executive director of the Thailand Criminal Law Institute. "Now we don't see that kind of encouragement. They are aware of the law."

Beyond legal approach

Mehr Khan, regional director of the Asia-Pacific division of the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) in Bangkok, agrees that the laws can work both as instruments to punish offenders and to discourage child sex abuse. "There is a need to deal with this as a criminal activity and we know that the legal remedy has worked."

At the same time, she says, the reasons that have contributed to this form of child abuse - particularly poverty - require a response beyond the legal approach. "The region has 700 million people living on less than US$2 a day."

In December, child rights activists from Asia will be joining their peers from the rest of the world in the Japanese city of Yokohama to draft a course of action to stop the commercial sexual exploitation of children.

This meeting, called the Second World Congress Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, will also look at the balance sheet of advances and set-backs since the first World Congress in Stockholm in August 1996.

"Asian countries have some ways to go to meet the commitments made in Stockholm," says Vitit, the legal expert. "Less than 10 countries in the Asia-Pacific region have conceived national plans to address this problem."

But he concedes that there has been progress in preventive measures. "On the prevention side we have examples of 'good practices' involving many sectors, including the hotel industry" that in recent years has become more active in discouraging child sex tourism.