BlaineDaraine Luton, Staff Reporter
PARENTS, do you know what your children are doing? Are you taking the necessary steps to ensure that the communication lines between you and your children are crystal clear?
If not, try and make amends soon. There seems to be a budding, nasty child prostitution market out there, being aided by new technology. If you are not careful, your children may be used.
Child prostitution is the visual or audio depiction of a child for the sexual gratification of the user, and involves the production, distribution and/or use of such material. Pornography is illegal under Jamaican laws but no specific section of Jamaican statute speaks to child pornography, a practice which seems to be growing.
Checks by The Sunday Gleaner in the Corporate Area revealed a great demand for locally-produced pornographic movies with young girls. One male vendor in downtown Kingston commented that "people buy dem as dem come."
IN GREAT DEMAND
A Corporate Area store confirmed that locally-produced pornographic movies are in great demand. The Sunday Gleaner, posing as if interested in purchasing pornography that involved youngsters, was told that they were available in the store.
"We have all kinds of DVDs. We have with young girls too...but I am not sure if we have any local ones left," a female told The Sunday Gleaner via the telephone.
Convenor of civil group Hear the Children Cry, Betty-Ann Blaine, said she would not be surprised if she heard that adults were cashing in on child prostitution.
"However, I don't have any hard evidence that would say it is happening except that I have heard stories about it," she said.
"There is no doubt that there is a lot of sex taking place among young children and teenagers and that adults are now going to look to make money off it," she said.
Reports surfaced two years ago about a St. Ann man who used a hotel property to film schoolgirls.
As recent as March, reports of child pornography surfaced after the staging of the national Boys' and Girls' High School Athletics Championships.
Then, some vendors of illegal DVDs and CDs in the Corporate Area earned their keep off explicit sexual acts involving children. Branded as the 'Chocolate Surprise' by the vendors, one film depicted a schoolgirl performing oral sex on a schoolboy at the National Stadium. A Star report said that it cost between $350 and $500 to purchase the DVD with the action that had been captured with a cellular phone.
And there was the case of Bluetooth Express, which involved a third-form girl performing oral sex on a 16-year-old boy. This act was also captured via cellular phone. It is said that business-minded men made money off this one by transferring the action to other cellular phones with Bluetooth connection for $30.
Investigators are refusing to say whether or not the recent case of the 13-year-old girl being videotaped in the presence of a deacon is a part of the child pornography market.
FEW REPORTS
Police are also unable to indicate the extent to which young children are filmed during sexual activities for either commercial or personal purposes. Inspector Duetress Foster-Gardener of the Centre for Investigation of Sexual Offences and Child abuse, said the reporting of cases involving child pornography to her office is low.
"We have had just two cases and this one with the deacon is the most publicised to date," she told The Sunday Gleaner.
"Like sexual abuse, we believe that there are a lot more cases out there but people are not coming forward to report them."
In 1998, police in the Dominican Republic arrested two foreign men accused of using street children to make pornographic videos, which the police believe was contributing to a growing child sex tourism industry there. One of the children was just three years old and the oldest, aged 17, had lived with the accused men since he was seven.
Cellie sexA 17-year-old boy says sometimes he uses his cellular phone camera to capture pieces of sexual activities - especially girls performing oral sex on him. He says he sometimes shares the picture with his friends through Bluetooth technology.
Mr. Carlton Samuels, chief information officer and director of information Technology at the University of the West Indies, Mona, has warned sexually-charged people to be weary of the powers of technology.
"Greater availability of technology gives people the opportunity to capture and distribute images and people are exploiting it more and more every day," Mr. Samuels said.
"These technologies come in a variety of forms, making it easy to conceal them ... There are even pens with camera," he said.
Mr. Samuels said that once captured, people can easily upload images to either the Internet or a secondary medium.
Images of the 13-year-old being sexually molested in the presence of a church deacon were initially captured via cellular phone. Likewise, 'Chocolate Surprise' and 'Bluetooth Express' were video recorded with the use of camera cellular phones.
