IF you want to, and you know where to go, and you have £20 or so to spare, you can buy a child for sex on the streets of Dublin. How has this happened? And why are we turning a blind eye?
Nobody knows how many child prostitutes there are in Ireland. There is ad agency to focus on their needs, no special units, no research. And, more worryingly, no shortage of officials to say it's not happening at all. A couple of nights on the streets would quickly kill their complacency.
A small, skinny young girl stands on a pavement just off Dublin's quays at 12.30 a.m., cocking her chin at passing cars. As a vehicle slows, her peroxide white hair, her flat chested white Tshirt and the two white stripes down the side of her black tracksuit bottoms are illuminated, shining bright under the glare of the headlights. She disappears into the shiny Ford with its 96-D reg.
"I'm 18," she insists later, before telling me to "get lost". But her tiny body, her voice, her little girl's face with its pathetically inappropriate make up, tell a different story.
Across town, this time near the canal, another young girl soliciting: this one wears a long white dress. She won't stop to talk either but she's said by older prostitutes to be 14, although she looks younger. She's also said to be two months pregnant.
The next day, the city centre, early evening. A fat boy with the beginnings of a downy moustache gets into the back of a car, all part of a pattern that's well known to those who work in the shop and the fast food outlet nearby.
Dublin has its child prostitutes all right. You see lots who'd make you wonder - mid teens? Older? Younger? But others are undoubtedly, unmistakably children. Children not just for sale, but actively selling themselves, like lambs bleating for a wolf.
Older prostitutes will stop and talk to a curious journalist, but the younger ones won't. They keep moving, quickly into a car, round the corner, down a lane. Their "fellas" - pimps or pimps' hired hands - cycle around on bicycles watching over them, making sure they're not slacking.
Some older prostitutes worry about the "young ones". One - "call me Christine" - says there's nothing new about kids on the street, there's just more of them around these days. She herself started when she was 13 and she's 40 now.
While some of the older prostitutes are concerned about the children, others are threatened and run the youngsters off their beat, They say some young ones will go with someone for a tenner, even without a condom. Down on Benburb Street, they're said to bring more suspect punters around, "pervs and weirdos". Most of the children are addicted to heroin, so their behaviour is erratic and their pimps often vicious. Sometimes they withhold sex and threaten clients with syringes. They're ruining the trade, say the older women, making it far more dangerous.
"The punters think the young ones are cleaner," says Christine, "but it's the other way round. Almost all the young ones are on drugs. They're more likely to be carrying something than we are".
What almost all the older women agree on is that there are more young girls on the streets. But gardai say they'd have no evidence of this.
"They're not turning up in our figures," says Sergeant Mary Delmar, of the Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Investigation Unit. "We have squad cars going around, the prostitutes are known to the lads in the stations, they would know if this was happening and we have no reason to believe that it is."
Most of the agencies who work with children would disagree. Derek Shorthall, who sets up community projects for children in disadvantaged areas, says: "As far as I can see the whole system has broken down. There is a pretence that we are looking after our children; whole government departments pretending things are under control when they quite patently are not.
"I have been out on the streets with colleagues, not just once, but on several occasions, and have seen numerous girls in the 14, 15, 16 age bracket working the streets. There's one girl I know of personally who has been working not in town but in Clondalkin since she was 12. She's 14 now."
AND it's not just girls, Shorthall says. The prostitution of boys is more secretive but there are a number of known pick up points in the city. The issue for boys is complicated by the taboos around homosexuality says Mick Quinlan, of the Eastern Health Board's Baggot Street Clinic, who is conducting research into men who engage in sex for payment. Quinlan does not see underage prostitution as a widespread problem in the gay world but there are a number of straight teenage boys who engage in sex with men for payment, he says.
Madeline Clarke is a social worker with Barnardos, Dublin, and member of the Children's Rights Alliance, a group which wants to see the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. "The Convention is very clear about the need to protect children from prostitution," she says. "Anyone under 18 years is a child by their definition, which is also the legal definition here. Ireland ratified this convention in 1992. That places an obligation on us to take whatever measures are necessary to protect children from sexual exploitation." An obligation we are not fulfilling, Clarke says.
Evidence from other countries indicates that what we see on the streets is only the most visible form of exploitation. A Barnardos project in Bradford this year found that children as young as 12 were being kept prisoner and tortured and forced info prostitution.
"By the law of averages we would be very naive to think that what is happening elsewhere cannot happen here," says Madeline Clark.
"We hear of kids being taken off the streets to work in clubs, or set up in apartments," says Sara Burke, youth outreach worker with Focus Point. "Once they're not on the streets, that's it, we won't know anything about them and neither will anybody else."
Even more shadowy is the world of organised paedophilia. Social worker Paul Flynn has spoken publicly of how young boys cared for at the Catholic church funded Crosscare centre for homeless boys on Eccles Street confided that they had been abused by men who had picked them up off the street. Their confidences included reports of being plied with drugs and taken to isolated locations for group abuse. Weekend sessions with eight or 10 children and three or four adults per child were reported. On at least one occasion, the rape and abuse was videotaped. On another occasion, a 14 year old whose "payment" was drugs nearly died from overdose.
PAUL Flynn has no doubt that these reports are accurate - they have been confirmed over the years by a number of the boys. "There is nothing new in this," he says. "Over the years we have gone to the gardai with names and addresses of the people who are responsible. The Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Unit recently took details from us again but we're told that unless the child makes a statement, nothing can be done."
It's deeply frustrating, Paul Flynn says, to come across a number of people whom you know to be dangerous to children but to be powerless to do anything about it. "These children are placing their trust in us, saying this has happened to me, sort it out'. When we don't, they move on. They're lost then, back out on the streets in a worse situation than when they started."
Sean Flynn, of the cross Border organisation Focus on Children, confirms that Ireland has its organised paedophiles just like other countries. His organisation has tapped into these Irish men's activities on the Internet, he says, activities which include organising prostitution rings.
So child prostitution is not just an isolated incident here and there. It is organised and it is increasing. The Bradford project reported men openly asking for 11 and 12 year olds, and older prostitutes dressing to look younger. This is now happening in Dublin too, street prostitutes say, with some of them rejecting the traditional stockings and suspenders of the trade or white socks, mini skirts and sneakers, "because that's what the fellas seem to want these days".
There is much speculation among experts about why this might be. Is it because of a perception that young prostitutes are less likely to carry disease or have AIDS? Is it that some men are in retreat from women demanding equal treatment in sexual relationships? Another theory is that it's a bizarre kind of "coming out" of those who in a twisted way feel legitimised by all the focus on sex abuse of children lately.
The underground world of sex with children and the marginalised world of sex with prostitutes have much in common. British expert on sex offenders Ray Wyre has identified qualities that separate those who sexually abuse children from those who don't. According to Wyre, there are many paedophiles about (those who are attracted to pre pubescent children) and many, many who want adolescents. Crucially, however, in both cases they may or may not act on that sexual attraction.
Those who do overcome the strong legal, social and moral taboos against sex with children are driven, he believes, by other emotions along with sex drive - a wish for control and power, sadism, a low self esteem which makes sex with an equal adult seem threatening or the craving for a specific sexual act which a child might be more easily - manipulated into providing.
Many people who are quite complacent about prostitution per se are horrified by the idea of children soliciting. But once you accept sex can be sold as a commodity, and a social system whereby prostitutes are vilified while their clients are protected, you're already on the slippery slope.
We don't treat child prostitution as child abuse. Our laws say these children are offenders, and that is how pimps, clients and the young people themselves see it. They are at high risk of violence, rape, buggery and sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS, and the system makes it unlikely that they'll come forward for help.
Sara Burke is not surprised that the police seem unaware of the extent of the problem. "These kids see the police as people who harass them people to the gardai are not always as supportive they should be and have not always should.
To be fair, one reason why the gardai are not perceived to be on top of this whole area of child abuse may be that society has only recently begun to acknowledge its existence. Child abuse, rape, pornography, paedophilia - all flourished for hundreds of years under a system which silenced the victims and protected the perpetrators. We're only beginning to turn that round.
Prostituting for these children means that in place of poverty they get money. Instead of feeling worthless, they get older, often wealthy men paying for them. Society told them they were nothing but these guys can't get enough of them.
