IWPR - May 16th, 2003

Poverty is leading many children into street prostitution and paedophile rings.

By Svetlana Kurs in Minsk

In a bid to escape poverty, abuse and alcoholism at home, an increasing number of Belarusian girls and boys are turning to prostitution in the capital Minsk.

According to some estimates around ten per cent of the prostitutes in Minsk are children and teenagers, and those dealing with the problem say the numbers are growing.

Alexander Sodatenko, who heads the police’s vice squad, told IWPR that police recorded 12 cases involving underage prostitutes last year.

But this figure is just the tip of the iceberg. There are 1,500 underage prostitutes in Minsk alone, according to Margarita Pryakhina, who heads the Children Not for Violence organisation.

Even a cursory look at the situation on the streets of Minsk indicates that there are many more children and teenagers involved in prostitution than the official statistics suggest. And because Belarus is a closed society, underage prostitution is not widely discussed in public.

“In the capital there are tens of thousands of homeless children and children from broken homes,” vice squad member Nikolai told IWPR.

“Most of them work as prostitutes, usually for between one and three US dollars, some chocolate, or something else to eat. They wander the streets and wait for cars to stop for them.”

Many of them come from provincial towns and villages near the capital. They travel in by train every day and go back home in the evening. You can see them on any busy street. They call it “going out for hire”.

Twelve-year-old Vera and 13-year-old Tanya travelled in to Minsk from the town of Stolbtsy. At a McDonalds restaurant in the city centre, three drunk men buy them hamburgers and fries. The childish expressions of the girls as they eat their Big Macs are in sharp contrast to their haggard look – they have puffed eyes, clumsily applied make-up and dirty hands.

In return for another Big Mac, the girls agree to speak to IWPR’s contributor while the men were in the toilet.

“We often do this instead of going to school,” they said. “We make money. What can you do in a small town? There’s no work, our parents drink, at home there’s hunger and poverty. Here in Minsk, life is fun, the streets are big, people are well-dressed, and you can even earn enough money to buy a CD player and sneakers.”

Their plan for the future is to remain “in business”. “When we finish school, we’ll come to Minsk and rent an apartment. We will keep doing it and we’ll get lots of money,” they said.

These two girls work independently, but many children have a pimp. This type of prostitution is kept especially well concealed because there are stiff prison sentences for involving children in crime. Other prisoners often beat, rape or even kill those convicted on child sex charges.

The vice squad says pimps work from apartments and have a small group of clients. If the customers wish, the pimps can deliver girls and boys to their summer cottage or sauna.

Seryozha lived with a paedophile pimp for about a year. He had run away from home, where his mother drank and made scenes. “A man in a nice car picked me up. I lived with him for a year. He slept with me himself and shared me among his friends,” he told IWPR.

“I didn’t want to go to the police, because he fed me and didn’t do anything bad to me.”

But now Seryozha is back living on the streets, begging for cash. Children such as Seryozha are increasingly being smuggled to Russia as part of the international trade in child sex. In 2001, police discovered an entire office in the village of Klimovichi in Mogilev region, eastern Belarus, which was in the business of trafficking girls aged between nine and sixteen to Moscow.

In Moscow, there are reportedly up to 30,000 underage prostitutes from Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova. Alya, a veteran prostitute of 16 currently being held in a detention centre for children, says that a seven-year-old virgin costs up to 750 dollars there. Children are also trafficked to western Europe, again through Russia.

In some cases, it is the parents who sell their children to foreign paedophiles via local intermediaries. Tamara Stepanova, a professor at Brest University specialising in child problems, told IWPR, “Buyers pay parents 120-150 dollars and then sell the children to foreigners. It is only possible to take a child out of Belarus if the child has a passport and written approval from both parents. But they can be taken to Russia without these formalities.”

Many children are used to create pornographic internet sites for Belarusian and western consumption. Some analysts believe that around half of all sites containing paedophile images are made in Belarus.

“A person (abroad) joins forces with a Russian to start a porn site in Russia, America or Europe to produce and put up photos of children,” a 23-year-old web designer from Gomel explained to IWPR. “In Russia there is no law that punishes people for child pornography, and Belarusians’ services are cheap. There are around 10,000 sites with child-related subject-matter on the internet, and they are virtually all Russian-language sites.”

“There are a lot of successful hackers and web designers here, as Belarusian universities give excellent IT training,” he said.

Child prostitution appears to be appearing everywhere in Belarusian society. Ilya, a nine-year-old Minsk schoolboy, says, “At our school, girls who don’t have money sleep with their classmates and then spend their money on cans of gin and tonic, game machines or internet cafes.”

Academics studying the issue say that changes in adult society - declining moral standards resulting from poverty - are largely to blame.

“Belarusian society is sick with poverty and fear of the future,” said psychologist and sociologist Kristina Sukhotko. “This condition is passed on to the children. It is like a feast during a plague - hungry and uncared-for children go on the street to earn money for chocolate and have fun in a nice car or apartment with a rich man.

“Their parents don’t have opportunities to sell their own time for money. They get minimal wages and waste them on vodka. Moral directives don’t work any more.”

Svetlana Kurs is an editor of the Belarusian Helsinki Committee’s magazine Chelovek, in Minsk.