BEHIND the stadium where next year's FIFA World Cup opener will beam out to 3.2 billion viewers, child prostitute Poliana plies her trade in a slumland shack.

Poliana is 14 years old and has been selling her body for only three months, but she is not short of clients.

Her customers are the men working on the $360 million soccer stadium, Arena Corinthians, in Brazil's largest city.

The World Cup host country is in a feverish rush to have the showcase arena in Sao Paulo ready for the June 12 opening match against Croatia, which will be watched by half the population of the planet.

Hundreds of single labourers from all over Brazil began arriving 18 months ago when work began on the stadium in the shanty town neighbourhood of the country's largest city.

With the employment boom came a child prostitution explosion.

Child sex gangs trekked to some of Brazil's poorest villages where they snatched or bought young girls from their families.

As local anti-child prostitution campaigner Matt Roper first reported in the Sunday Mirror, he has been told a sinister account of traffickers and the Russian mafia bringing in girls from around Brazil and even from Africa to work as sex slaves.

Roper told news.com.au when he travelled to Sao Paulo to personally investigate Sao Paulo's child prostitutes he learned police had largely ignored the scandal which was going on "in broad daylight".

Roper runs Meninadanca and the Pink House, a charity and safe house which takes child prostitutes off Brazil's "highway of hell", the country's main roadway where young girls prostitute themselves.

Drug syndicates were reportedly bringing in bus-loads of children to work as prostitutes among the city's 11.3 million population.

Others as young as 11 were, like Poliana, already living in the Favela da Paz in the impoverished suburb of Itaquera, where hundreds of families have no electricity or running water.

At night, girls wander out from the slum onto the Avenue Miguel Inácio Curi or another bustling thoroughfare where Brazilians drink and carouse at roadside stalls.

The illegal trade goes on in front of police, security guards and citizens of Brazil's business and financial capital.

Poliana's bed is scattered with stuffed toys in a tiny room crammed in a maze of alleyways, running with open sewage, which labourers come down each lunch hour to purchase girls like her.

Poliana sells herself to workers on lunchbreak for just under $4.70 a time.

The girls conduct business in nearby sex motels or rooms close to the perimeter fence abutting the giant stadium site.

Sao Paulo is the birthplace of Brazilian football and home to the nation's three most powerful clubs.

As the city pours millions into making it match-ready for the coming Brazilian summer, the crime syndicates are gearing up to cash in on the world's most watched sporting event.

They plan a massive wave of child prostitution organised around all the stadiums in more than a dozen Brazilian cities from the capital, Brazilia, to Rio de Janeiro where fans will flock for six intense weeks of the tournament.

Prostitutes like Thais, who at 16 is among the older girls, told Roper the World Cup would be good for business.

Thais is a crack addicted orphan who has moved into the favela with another young prostitute and operates out of a car garage where she has sex with up to 15 men a day.

"Nearly all my clients are from the [construction] works," she said. "They always pay up, but they don't always treat me well.

"But what can I do? My parents are dead, I need money. I call the girl I live with mum, but I'm not kidding myself, she's a crack addict too, I'm really all on my own.

"If it were not for the men working on the stadium, I don't know what I'd do.

"Tomorrow one of them has booked a whole day in the hotel for both of us, it will be a good day's work for me."

She expects "a lot of work from football fans" who she plans to charge $23, four times the current price.

"The conditions in the favelas were absolutely shocking and a lot of people there are crack users," Roper said.

"One of the things we were told was drug gangs recruit girls and addict them to crack as a way of enslaving them to prostitution."

Roper's visit to Sao Paulo and his report on the child sex trade around the stadium has prompted an inquiry, although as yet, no police action.

Sao Paulo's justice secretary, Eloisa de Sousa Arruda, told him of cases of underage girls arriving through the city's international airport from the Congo and Somalia, allegedly financed by Russian criminals.

The inquiry learned pimps were approaching men working at the stadium, offering them "very young girls" for sale.

"We left Sao Paulo desperately wanting to help these girls," he said.

"The authorities will have to take action, but as yet there has been no proper police raid.

"We know [from working with young prostitutes on the highway] it's about raising these girls' self esteem.

"They may be selling themselves, but they are still young girls. They just seem like teenagers, some even go to school.

"They want to be someone in life, but they are living this other nightmare."

Poliana, the 14-year-old from the Sao Paulo slum, told Roper she wasn't thinking of any way out of her life of prostitution. It had only begun three months earlier, the night her mother died.

"She admitted she lost it and just went out onto the streets that night."

As Roper reported in the Sunday Mirror, the young girl said:

"I didn't know how I would find money to eat or pay the rent. It didn't take long. There were lots of men from the stadium turning up looking for sex.

"When the World Cup begins there will be many more girls my age and younger. I'm often the oldest girl on the road."

Two weeks ago, she found out she was pregnant.

Nevertheless, each lunch hour, Poliana arranges to meet clients in one of the seedy hotels near the favela.

The owners of the pink-painted Hotel Palace know Brazilian law prohibits the entry of minors.

"They always let me in," she said.

Anyone wanting to help Matt Roper's Meninadanca charity and Pink House can contact him via the website meninadanca.org or email candace.sutton@news.com.au for information.

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