The Depravity of Child Prostitution

1160 Words3 Pages

Child prostitution is a long-standing issue around the entire globe; the World Congress has gone so far as to label it a "contemporary form of slavery" (World Congress against the Sexual Exploitation of Children, 1996). While many felt that it was being contained in some manner, with today’s emerging platforms, the issue of child prostitution is growing at an unprecedented rate. Prostitution through webcams and child sex tourism are recent phenomena, whose evolution has brought the diffusion of child prostitution into an independent culture.
The "Computer Age" of the 21st century has initiated a revolution in technology, with the focal point of it's growth being centered on global connectivity and the World Wide Web. Although many recognize this era as progressive, it has also fueled the rise of a new form of child sexual exploitation. Prostitution through webcam, or child webcam sex tourism, is an epidemic of minors being paid to perform sexual acts via webcams (Terre des Hommes, 2013). Terre des Hommes (2013), a children's rights' organization, created a fictitious "computer-generated" 10 year old Philippines girl named Sweetie in order to investigate this phenomenon further.
"Sweetie" was entered into a total of 19 chat rooms, in which she was propositioned to perform sexual acts by 20,172 adult men from 71 different countries, who had been informed of her age. Terre des Hommes' (2013) informal "sting" operation identified 1,000 online predators in just 10 weeks, and estimated there to be 750,000 predators online, at any given time (Terre des Hommes, 2013). No computer hacking or illegal methods were used to identify the perpetrators, which raises the question: why is child webcam sex tourism growing so rapidly if c...

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