THROWAWAY CHILDREN
Tony Samstag views
the horrors of a film on child pornography
Oslo THE European ministers of justice attend- ing their biennial meeting in Lisbon this week have been subjected to a short, sharp shock. In a suitably hushed and darkened room they have been shown excerpts from an extraordinary 60-minute documentary film on the sexual exploitation of children. The film, which is to be shown for the first time in its entirety on television here next October, was commissioned by the Norwegian government in 1986 as part of a campaign to draw attention to what it believes is an enormous international trade in child pornography and prostitution. Throwaway Children, as it is called, is surely one of the most explicit films ever made for broadcast on television. It con- tains a number of brief but all too vivid scenes in which the products — that is to say, the victims, or parts of the victims of the child abuse trade dominate the screen. But perhaps even more dreadful is the soundtrack. It records, in half a dozen countries, children, police, parents, child- care specialists, and paedophiles telling their stories — in the case of the paedophiles, usually to hidden police cameras or tape recorders.
The film opens with a most appalling recording: an Italian telephoning (from overseas) what he does not realise is an American undercover police unit in order to book a ten-year-old-girl — younger if possible — whom, he says, he wants to rape and murder. Even the policemen are momentarily stunned, but recover suffi- ciently to tell him that his adventure will be rather more expensive, because they will have to get rid of the body. This man was duly arrested as he landed in New York for his appointment, and is to be sentenced in August.
Among other memorable incidents is the account by a Dutch couple (both, as it happens, GPs) of one day last year when an organised gang swooped on their small town, kidnapped scores of ordinary chil- dren off the streets, drugged them, tor- tured and sexually -abused them, apparent- ly in order to make a pornographic video, dumped them back on the streets and vanished, all within a few hours. Else- where, there are prostitutes galore — 12 or 13-year-old girls in Rio and in Chicago, rather younger boys and girls in the Philip- pines, a burnt-out case aged 15 in New York. There are stomach-churning photo- graphs of what connoisseurs would prob- ably dismiss as relatively 'straight'.
Throwaway Children is short on statistics — deliberately, its producers say, partly because its subject is so universally taboo that figures are bound to be unreliable. A 100-page background report, as yet unpub- lished, says: 'In some cases, the authorities of several countries have tried to sum up the extent of sexual abuse of children. These numbers have one thing in common. They are very much lower than those which some private organisations have found out on their own.' The American agency, Defence for Children Internation- al, believes that official estimates as to the number of child prostitutes in any given city seem to bear no relationship to the actual numbers of children involved but rather to the seriousness with which the politicians view the problem. But the global traffic in child pornography and prostitution does appear, to be vast, prob- ably worth billions in any unit of currency. Denmark and Sweden are among the European centres through which the chil- dren, or the pornographic material in which they feature, are funnelled en route to north America, Japan, Australia and some of the Arab countries. West Ger- many and the Netherlands have also been implicated in the traffic, and linkS with organised crime have inevitably been mooted.
Many children in developing countries are involved: as the prey of 'sexual tourists' from the industrial world, as pornographic subjects, or as prostitutes within the local economy. There appears to be a strong connection between commercial child abuse. and incest, several cases of which feature in the film. Sexual abuse at home seems to be one of the most common reasons for very young children to run away — or to be thrown out. Once on the streets, they will seek affection (or cash) in the ways to which they have become habituated, or they will simply become easy meat because they are so helpless. There is a particularly shocking suggestion that in some countries — specifically, in this film, Brazil — incest may be virtually built in to the culture.
I must declare an interest in this film: I was asked to translate and narrate an English-language commentary for interna- tional distribution. I was paid a fee, of course. But like everyone else involved I agreed to waive any of the customary financial spin-offs from such a project: repeat fees, royalties and the like. Instead, profits from the film will be part of a charitable fund, perhaps for direct help to some of the victims.
Another question is why this country, Norway, should launch an international campaign on child abuse. The minister of justice, Mrs Helen Boesterud, developed an interest in the subject while working on sections of the criminal code concerning pornography as a member of the par- liamentary justice committee, before her ministerial appointment by the new minor- ity labour govt in 1986. The Norwegian government — which has been celebrated for employing the world's highest propor- tion of women at all levels — clearly thought it appropriate to campaign inter- nationally on a subject of such obvious concern to women. And the Prime Minis- ter herself, Mrs Gro Harlem Brundtland, is chairman of the United Nations World Commission on Environment and De- velopment, with its commitment to ending the rich nations' exploitation of the poor. The hope is that some form of internation- al treaty might emerge, co-ordinating and perhaps assigning higher priority to the ad hoc policing efforts of individual countries. A select committee on child abuse, established within the council of Europe in response to an initiative from Norway, started deliberations earlier this year.
The penultimate speaker in the film is Father Shea Cullen, an Irish priest who runs a child rehabilitation centre in the Philippines city of Olongapo, hard by the American military base of Subic Bay, and a garbage dump known ironically to its numerous inhabitants as Hope City. Father Cullen mourns the death of a young girl, Rosario, after a vicious attack by a middle- aged German sex tourist who, unusually, was arrested. (Even as he awaited trial, however, he managed to have a 10-year- old boy smuggled into his jail cell.) Father Cullen's words are both printable and eloquent. Of Rosario he says: 'She was buried alone and none of her family were at the graveside. She was one of these throwaway children, abandoned and un- wanted and rejected. She was a child who was alone and abandoned in life and alone and abandoned in death, as if her life were useless and worthless. And I think that's the way much of the world looks on these children: something to be used and thrown away, without value and without dignity.'
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