opinion

These are the ‘choices’ that lead girls into sex work

IndyStar columnist Tim Swarens spent a year investigating the commercial sex trade of children, a lucrative business where more than 1 million kids a year are abused. This is the sixth of 10 columns in the EXPLOITED series.

NAIROBI, Kenya — For half of her life, Happy was a child of the streets, scrapping for survival in one of the world’s worst slums. Each day brought a fight for food; each night a fight against predators who exploit the vulnerable.

Today, as a young mother, she scraps for survival by working in the sex trade.

A baby in her arms and a toddler at her knee, Happy waits in the dusty street as we approach her shack. On our way here, a swarm of heroin addicts surrounded us in an alley, asking for money and offering us syringes. We passed men picking through a mountain of trash in a vacant lot. We also passed scores of children, in crisp uniforms, on their way from school.

Happy, the name she calls herself, motions for us to follow. We step over a garbage-clogged gutter, swarming with flies, and past a makeshift door that separates a dark corridor from the chaos of the street. Moving through a warren of passageways and ducking beneath laundry drying in the afternoon heat, we arrive at Happy’s home. It’s one small room, with rough-cut wood walls and a dirt floor. It lacks electricity, plumbing and running water. But it is better than the street.

Inside, we huddle in the dark as Happy tells us about her life. She is a mother of five. Her three oldest live in a shelter for children considered at risk of commercial sexual exploitation. The two youngest children, we’re told, are likely one day to follow their siblings to the shelter.

►EXPLOITED Part 1: Who buys a child for sex?

►EXPLOITED Part 2: Shattering the Lolita fantasy

One of our guides, Joseph Kimani, says he has known Happy since they both were children growing up in Kawangware, a slum that’s home, according to the 2009 national census, to more than 130,000 people. A recovering addict, Kimani now works for Uzima Outreach, an NGO that helps Happy and others wean themselves from drugs and alcohol.

We are here in Kawangware because of the street children. Although there’s not an official estimate, a Nairobi newspaper, the Daily Nation, reported in 2016 that based on NGO reports as many as 60,000 children in the capital and more than 250,000 nationwide live on the streets. They’re concentrated in slums such as Kawangware, where many of them steal recyclables to sell, sniff glue to numb themselves, and huddle together at night for warmth and protection.

UNICEF estimates that worldwide tens of millions of homeless, runaway, orphaned and abandoned children struggle to survive on the streets. Human traffickers — whether in Kenya, the United States or elsewhere — prey on vulnerabilities. And few children are more vulnerable than those living on the streets.

I ask Gentry Odongo, a field worker with Uzima, about the dangers street kids face in Kawangware.

“They sleep by the roadsides. They start taking drugs at an early age — sniffing glue, smoking marijuana. ... Some people want to take advantage of these kids. They sexually abuse them. Some people use kids for child labor; the child is just given a little bit of money to buy drugs,” Odongo says.

Are girls particularly vulnerable?

“Yes, some are raped,” Odongo, who grew up in Kawangware, says. “Some are given money to have sex.”

What are their ages? “We’re talking about ages 7 to 13.”

Taken aback, I ask Odongo if he’s sure about the ages. “Yes, the girls are 7 to 13,” he says.

As we talk inside Happy’s home, I think of a conversation I’d had months earlier on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Mass. Siddharth Kara, director of the Program on Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at the Kennedy School of Government, told me: “You may encounter a woman (working in the sex trade) at age 25, but she probably started at age 14. If she suffered 10,000 counts of rape from age 14 to 18, what options does she have now?”

Often our compassion drops as the age of the sex worker rises. It’s their choice, we say. It’s the life they’ve decided to follow.

But choices often aren’t simple. What options did Happy have on the streets as a child? What real choice does she have now as an adult who must provide for her children?

Some people sell themselves to survive. Some people buy others for pleasure. Some look on with indifference or disgust.

As we leave Happy’s home, I notice two words painted on the wall outside: Judge not.

“If a man discovers that he needs some money and he has a girl in the house, that’s an asset. He can sell her and have money…. Culturally, that’s the way things are done.”

Monica Nguata, a mentor and caretaker for 29 girls in a shelter near Ngong, Kenya, describing forced early marriage.

The heat and dust wear us down as we grind through traffic, traveling five hours but only 180 kilometers north of Nairobi into the Kenyan countryside. Fatigue is relative. Along the way, we pass strings of women and children walking for miles to collect water.

Children who become fodder for the sex trade come from Kenyan slums and American suburbs. And from impoverished rural areas like this one, where Elizabeth Kiende has devoted her life to helping kids in need.

When her husband died, Kiende was left with five children, in a country where the social safety net is a gaping hole. She found a job as a cashier at a seminary but still struggled to feed her family.

Her own problems, Kiende said, prompted her to think about others in need, including the street kids she passed each day on the way to work. “I asked myself, ‘Who is feeding these children?’ Nobody,’” she says.

Kiende decided she would do it. She began scrounging for bags of rice and other food for the street kids and her own children. She took girls into her already-crowded home for their protection.

Eventually, Kiende forged a partnership with Help Kenya, an NGO that assists children considered at risk of exploitation in the sex trade. She opened two children’s shelters in her home city of Kitale. Then a third, in this rural area outside of Nyahururu. (Help Kenya is affiliated with Remember Nhu, an international organization that aids at-risk children. My wife and I provide financial support for two children in Cambodia through Remember Nhu).

Life remains hard here. The home, like most in the area, lacks electricity. Water is pumped 200 yards up a hill from a natural spring, which also serves the local wildlife. One morning I walked to the spring with the shelter’s groundsman, who carried the small generator used to pump water to the house. Elephants had emerged from the forest in the night and drained the spring; water for the children would have to wait until evening.

But the 12 children who live here eat nutritious meals and attend school each day. They sleep safely each night. And the alternatives are unimaginably worse.

A 2015 report from the International Organization for Migration estimated that 20,000 children a year are trafficked in Kenya. “Girls are particularly vulnerable to trafficking for sex tourism,” the study found. “The price for trafficked girls aged 10 to 15 from Kenya is estimated at 600 (U.S. dollars).”

The study also found that children from Burundi, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda are trafficked into Kenya for prostitution and forced labor.

Girls are at risk of two other horrific types of exploitation — genital mutilation and forced early marriage.

►EXPLOITED Part 3: The sex trafficking victim who needs training wheels

On a hot afternoon, as Kiende sits in the shade slicing vegetables for dinner, she tells me about three girls — ages 9, 10 and 12 — she rescued from early marriages.

“The girls had been circumcised and they were waiting to heal,” Kiende says. “Then they would be given a man.”

Asked to intervene, Kiende said she dressed like a woman from the girls’ tribe and walked deep into the bush to find the children and to bring them back to a shelter.

Forced early marriage, although outlawed under international agreements, remains a scourge for girls in much of the developing world. The United Nations Population Fund estimates that 70 million girls will be sold or bartered into early marriages in the next five years. The International Labour Organization, in its 2017 report on modern-day slavery, estimated that 15.4 million people were held in forced marriages in 2016.

For many, the outcomes are devastating.

►What is forced marriage?

“Even a 70-year-old will marry a 13-year-old as a sixth or seventh wife,” Monica Nguata, a mentor and administrator at a Help Kenya girls home, says. “They are locked in poverty. They never go to school. They die so prematurely from childbirth.

“It’s very sad.”

Kiende, Nguata and others are fighting deeply rooted cultural and economic forces that place a value on what a girl can bring her family through marriage. Not on what she offers as a person.

“We still have a long way to go,” Nguata says. “A woman really has no say.”

“FGM is recognized internationally as a violation of the human rights of girls and women. It reflects deep-rooted inequality between the sexes, and constitutes an extreme form of discrimination against women. It is nearly always carried out on minors and is a violation of the rights of children. The practice also violates a person's rights to health, security and physical integrity, the right to be free from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and the right to life when the procedure results in death.”

World Health Organization

The women’s voices are united in song when we arrive at a Maasai village deep in the arid hills of the Great Rift Valley, and they dance toward us in a line as we step from the vehicles. It is a joyous welcome.

But we have traveled here because these women have taken a courageous stand against a barbaric tradition — female genital mutilation.

The World Health Organization estimates that 200 million women in the world have suffered “the cut.” And although the practice is outlawed in Kenya and other countries, millions of girls remain at risk of mutilation, often inflicted by using a razor or knife to remove all or part of the clitoris. At times, the inner and outer folds of the vulva are cut away as well. In extreme cases, the labia is cut and reformed to narrow the vaginal opening.

The pain is excruciating, and the risk of infection high. In most cases, it’s carried out by a midwife, without anesthesia. But doctors sometimes administer FGM in the belief that victims are less likely to suffer complications.

►What is female genital mutilation?

While concentrated in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, FGM is occasionally inflicted on girls in the United States. In April 2017, U.S. authorities charged Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, of Northville, Mich., with mutilating the genitals of two 7-year-old girls from Minnesota. A second doctor, Fakhruddin Attar, and his wife, Farida Attar, later were charged with assisting Nagarwala in the mutilations. Federal authorities say as many as 100 girls may have suffered the cut under Nagarwala’s supervision.

In Kenya, it’s estimated that more than 25 percent of women have endured FGM, and the practice has deep traditions among the Maasai. It’s likely that many of the women singing for us suffered the cut as girls. But their leader, Agnes Liorket, tells us that women in the village are adamant that the tradition will not continue among their daughters.

That stand has come at a cost. Liorket says her husband supports the women's decision, but other men withdrew financial support after their wives spoke out against FGM.

For those husbands and many others, FGM is seen as a necessary rite for a girl to marry and to become an adult. In a poor community, where a girl’s marriage can ease a family’s financial burden or bring compensation through a “bride price,” the decision to reject FGM can mean significant sacrifice.

Still, Liorket says she and the other women won’t waver. FGM and forced early marriage no longer have a place in their village.

As we talk, I see two young girls, in lacy dresses, playing in the dirt. They are lost in the fun of the moment.

But it is for their future, and for others like them, that the mothers of this village have taken a stand.

They are standing for a future where girls have options. A future where women’s choices are unbound.

Next: Where sex trafficking and toxic masculinity collide

The EXPLOITED project was made possible by a grant from the Society of Professional Journalists. Google, Eli Lilly and Co., and Indiana Wesleyan University provided additional support for public awareness efforts related to this project.

Contact Swarens at tim.swarens@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @tswarens. Friend him on Facebook at Tim Swarens.