Uncovering sex crimes against children in Guatemala

For the last few years, it seemed as if there was at least one big series of arrests connected to child slavery in Guatemala each year. The ones I remember tend to relate to children forced to work the streets begging, selling trinkets, or engaging in sexual activity in order to provide some quota or percentage of quetzales for their masters. However, the crime is not just in Guatemala City and other urban areas, but throughout the country. While most of the children are from Guatemala, they also come from other parts of Central and South America.

CICIG and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) recently released a report on the extent of child sex trafficking in Guatemala. According to their report, thirty-three children are forced in these trafficking rings each day, some of them sold by their mothers.

Nearly 60 percent of the 50,000 victims of sex trafficking in Guatemala are children, according to a report by UNICEF and the U.N. Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), which estimates the industry to be worth $1.6 billion (1 billion pounds) a year. [~2.7% of Guatemala's GDP]

“We never imagined the magnitude of the number of children being sexually exploited. People were shocked by the figures, as were we,” Kagoshima said, referring to the recent U.N. report.

Girls as young as 12 work in brothels and are forced to have sex with up to 30 customers a day, while virgin girls are recruited at schools, she said.

The violence of sex trafficking in Guatemala is fueled by poverty, a culture of "social tolerance" and machismo, and sexual violence in the home. While sex trafficking is a global problem, I have a feeling that sex trafficking in Guatemala is worse than many other countries. However, the news story doesn't give anything to go on. Perhaps it is in the report.

Like other areas of the criminal justice system, Guatemala seems to have made some progress against sex trafficking, including the introduction of a 2009 anti-trafficking law. However, it is not entirely clear how robust efforts to prosecute traffickers have been.

When the report was released, several journalists and Guatemalans said that they were crying while listening to the stories contained in the report. While life is very tough in Guatemala, they weren't prepared for what the investigation uncovered.