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	The Horrors of Child Prostitution in Ghana by Sophia Bogner, Paul Hertzberg Spiegel Online, agencies   More than 100,000 children in Ghana work as prostitutes. Melphia, 13, is one of them. She lives in a slum and spends her nights in hotel rooms with businessmen, police officers and, increasingly, tourists.   Every evening, Melphia leaves a place locals refer to as "hell on earth" and goes somewhere even worse. To a hotel room where the curtains are always drawn. Melphia is 13 years old. She lives in a slum in Kumasi, the second-largest city in Ghana. And for the past three years, she has worked as a child prostitute.   Melphia has sex with up to five men per night: workers, businessmen, police officers -- and increasingly, tourists. She doesn''t even know the names of most of her clients. What she does know is that "obronis," white men, pay more than Ghanaians. "Without the foreigners, child prostitution wouldn''t be nearly as lucrative," says Martin Opoku Sekyere, who works as a volunteer to combat child prostitution in Kumasi.   For the past two years, the economy in the West African country has been growing more quickly again and things in Ghana have noticeably improved. This also means more people are coming into the country, such as Chinese investors and European tourists. And along with them come those interested in hiring prostitutes.   Dr. George Oppong, head of the Ghana section for the NGO Defence for Children International''s (DCI), for which Sekyere also works, says that nobody really knows how many children are currently prostituting themselves, though he estimates somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000. The youngest are just 9 years old.   Melphia looks younger than 13. She''s small and thin and has elbows that stick out sharply. Like the other girls in the slum, she has a short afro that emphasizes her pretty, childish face. She has a hard time sitting still, pulling her knees in and searching her fingers for bits of her nails she hasn''t yet chewed off.   And then she begins telling her story, the sounds of the slum floating around her: drunks scream, Nigerian hip-hop blasts from old speakers and someone moans loudly during sex. It''s close to 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) and the air is so humid that the walls inside the hut are sweating.   Melphia was 10 when she climbed onto a bus in her village, located about an hour from Kumasi. Because she was so young, she didn''t need to pay anything for her ticket and it was only by chance that the bus ended up in Kumasi. She would have gone anywhere: Her only goal was to make money -- somewhere, somehow.   On her parents'' farm there was never enough food for her and her 12 siblings to eat, she says. She attended primary school in her town, with her older sister''s boyfriend financing her everyday costs. But when he went to Europe, there was no more money. Melphia could barely even read at that point, and instead of continuing to go to school, she headed to Kumasi.   Almost immediately upon arrival, she met a young man named Ali, the first person who spoke to her in Kumasi. A few hours later, he slept with her. It was her first time. Ali told her she could make money with sex, but Melphia didn''t want to. Just sleeping with him was so painful that she could barely walk. She tried selling candy, but she couldn''t get rid of the colorful Mentos she had bought with the last of her money. Then Ali told her about the Chinese. He said they would pay 25 euros ($28) to have sex with a small girl. He became her pimp.   This is her story as she tells it and it is impossible to confirm, in part because Melphia is no longer in touch with her family. This much, though, is certain: Melphia lives alone, without her family, in the Asafo Railroad slum, known to inhabitants simply as "BB."   She speaks the Ghanaian language Twi and a bit of English. She works as a child prostitute and everything she owns fits into a small, black bag: An old Nokia cell phone with a broken display, two pairs of flip-flops, two outfits, a pair of gray socks.   All of her earnings vanish instantly. Much of it goes to her pimp, while the rest is spent on showers, her single meal per day and rent for the tiny hut she shares with four other girls.   It''s really more of a shack, maybe 6 square meters (65 square feet). Melphia is able to survive, but not more.   "It is an illegal business from which too many people profit," says DCI''s Sekyere. The hotel owners, the pimps, the drug dealers and the corrupt police officers -- they all stand to gain from the fact that Melphia and the other girls are selling their bodies for a couple of euros.   Sekyere actually heads the local employment office, but in his free time he fights for the children of Kumasi. He goes into the slum every day, speaking with the girls and trying to get them off the street. If one of them falls ill, he takes her to the hospital, with DCI covering the bill if possible.   Sekyere notes the girls'' names in a notebook: "Abena, 14; Mariam, 10; Lydia, 13; Josie, 11; Melphia, 13." Melphia has neither an ID nor a birth certificate, making Sekyere''s notebook perhaps the only document where her name is recorded.   "My birthday is in May," Melphia says, adding that her ideal present would be "a bus ticket back to my mother." She misses her and says she can still remember her voice. Since leaving her village she hasn''t heard from her family at all and she doesn''t even have their phone number anymore. Her family thinks she''s selling water and Mentos in Kumasi.   If they knew the truth, they would disown her, she says, and starts to cry. She quickly grabs a towel and a piece of soap, slips through the plastic curtain that functions as the shack''s front door and joins the other girls on their way to the shower. It''s 5 p.m. and Melphia has just woken up. As always, she went to bed when the sun came up and slept all day. The sun has been beating down on the corrugated iron and plastic of her hut for hours. Inside, it''s like a sauna.   The ground in the slum is muddy and littered with plastic bags, bottles and food packaging that has been flattened by flip-fops. It is hard to tell where one shack ends and another begins because they are packed together so tightly. Laundry lines are drawn across the open sewage ditch, known as the "BB River." It smells like garbage and cooking fires, human feces and the decaying wares of the fishmongers.   A shower costs 20 cents, for which Melphia gets five minutes in a roofless cement cell. "The showers, the sale of drugs, the prostitution, the rent for the shacks -- everything is organized by the same crew," Sekyere says.   Nobody knows the name of the boss, or at least no one dares utter it, but his minions are everywhere -- slouched into plastic chairs or lying on the ground, lazy and stoned, wearing their gold chains and basketball jerseys.   The pimps come from similar circumstances as the girls. Each has one or two girls working for him, his "girlfriends," while the girls call their pimps their "boyfriend." Every once in a while, they get the girls a foreign john, because Ghanaians only pay between 5 and 7 euros, or they accompany the girls to the hotels. Otherwise, though, the "boyfriends" mostly just take their "girlfriends''" money.   During the day, Melphia wears a sleeveless T-shirt and wears a polka-dotted dress at night. She has started getting her period in the past year, but her body still looks like that of a child. And that''s what she is: a child. She doesn''t make any of her own decisions, instead being controlled by those around her. She reacts instead of acts. She doesn''t have enough experience, education or imagination to picture another life, or even to formulate goals.   When Melphia leaves the slum around 9 p.m., the sky is black and the air is full of flies. There is no electricity in BB, so Melphia lights her way with her mobile phone. The slum comes to an end after about 500 meters, turning into a maze of small alleys lined with two-story buildings housing small restaurants, cheap hotels and bars, from which colorful light and music emanate. Twelve-year-old girls, fully made up, stand at the tables smoking cigarettes. A woman changes her child''s diaper under a streetlight.   Melphia wanders past everybody, on her way to the main road where the big, red buses belonging to the company VIP are parked. During the day, the buses travel to Tamale, to Accra, to the hot north and to the seaside in the south. But at night, they block the view of what takes place behind them.   Behind the buses, the young girls stand and wait. A man of about 40 talks to Melphia, his speech slurred. She looks away, knowing that plenty of other men will come by. Violence is part of everyday life for the child prostitutes of Kumasi, which is another reason the girls prefer foreign customers: They don''t just pay more, they also tend to hit the girls less frequently.   A few months ago, a friend of Melphia''s was driven to the outskirts of the city, the john wanting to have sex with her in a thorny bush. When she refused, he lashed out at her with a machete. She survived, but now has a large scar on her cheek.   Sekyere says that girls are also killed from time to time, but nobody really learns what exactly happened to them or who they even were. Like everything else, the violence in BB remains undocumented -- hardly anyone knows anything about anyone else. That is also true of Melphia and her friends: They are more like roommates and co-workers. And, of course, rivals.   Sekyere wipes the sweat from his brow and tries to explain what bothers him most: "Nothing will change if people keep having 15 children. The parents are thankful when one of them disappears. One less mouth they need to feed."   Sometimes, Sekyere manages to get a child prostitute into a local school, but most of them disappear again.   Though Sekyere can recall a few success stories -- of girls who managed, with his help, to become hairdressers. But there''s not many of them. Most of his job consists of helping the girls in their day-to-day lives: distributing condoms, insisting that they should never have unprotected sex and explaining to them what happens with their money.   From between two buses, Melphia nervously watches what''s going on across the street. There are prostitutes there too, grown women she is afraid of. "Last week," says Melphia, "they sent over a group of thugs." For the women, the competition from the girls had become too much.   Today, things are quiet. Women sell themselves on one side of the street, children on the other. "When I''m that old," Melphia says, pointing to the 20- and 30-somethings, "I would like to be a nurse." Or a hairdresser. "Or to have a family." She really doesn''t care where she ends up. As long as it''s not the other side of the street.   http://www.spiegel.de/international/globalsocieties/child-prostitution-in-ghana-hell-on-earth-a-1262055.html http://defenceforchildren.org/ http://www.ecpat.org/news/ Visit the related web page
	UN chief highlights plight of family and friends of victims of enforced disappearances by UN News, ICRC, Reuters   Marking the 2016 International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today that the anguished women and men – parents, children, partners or friends – desperately seeking any information on their loved ones who have disappeared are also victims of enforced disappearances.   “They have a right to know the truth regarding the circumstances of these disappearances, the progress and results of any investigations, and ultimately, the fate and whereabouts of their loved ones,” Mr. Ban underlined in his message on the Day.   Referring to the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which defines a victim as ''any individual who has suffered harm as the direct result of an enforced disappearance,'' the UN chief reminded all States of their obligation to investigate, prosecute and punish enforced disappearances, as well as to provide redress to the victims.   The UN General Assembly voted in 2010 to designate 30 August as the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances to draw attention to the global problem of enforced disappearance. Once largely the product of military dictatorships, risks of enforced disappearances are high in complex situations of internal conflict, especially as a means of political repression of opponents.   In his message, Mr. Ban noted that with support from their communities, human rights defenders and non-governmental organizations, these victims seek and demand adequate responses from the authorities.   “However, they often face a lack of responsiveness or outright hostility from the authorities to which they reach out,” said Mr. Ban, drawing attention to the accounts of reprisals such as arbitrary arrests, threats and intimidation against relatives, or against those that support them, received by the Committee on Enforced Disappearances and the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, the two main UN expert mechanisms in this field.   Calling on Member States to acknowledge that family and friends of the disappeared are also victims, and to guarantee their right to full protection from any form of reprisals, the Secretary-General urged them to “sign, ratify or accede to the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which includes specific provisions against the ill-treatment or intimidation of witnesses, relatives, and persons participating in the investigation of enforced disappearances.”   “Let us all show solidarity with the victims and their relatives as they strive to realize their right for truth and justice,” he added.   http://www.un.org/en/events/disappearancesday/index.shtml http://bit.ly/2bE75DH   Day of the Disappeared: South Asia''s torturous wait for the missing, by Nita Bhalla and Gopal Sharma. (Reuters)   Shova Bhatta vividly remembers the morning 16 years ago, when five men came to her grocery shop on the outskirts of the Nepali capital and took her husband Shyam.   "They asked him to accompany them and promised that he would be back after answering some questions," said Bhatta. "My husband told me not to worry and that he would return soon because he had not done any harm to anyone." But 29-year-old Shyam never came back.   His wife insists he was kidnapped by Maoist rebels fighting to topple the feudal monarchy during the Himalayan nation''s decade-long civil war which ended in 2006.   The mother of two is left in limbo, fluctuating between the hope of seeing him alive and the agony of believing he is dead.   "I still don''t know if they killed him. I don''t know if he is still alive," she said. "If he is dead, I want his body as proof so I can carry out our traditional last rites."   Hundreds of thousands of families around the world on Tuesday marked the "International Day of the Disappeared" - aimed at drawing attention to people gone missing amid conflict, disasters, migration or state oppression.   Despite the vast numbers of missing, humanitarian workers say scant attention is given to the plight of their families who spend years seeking the truth.   "This is a tragedy affecting millions, but it remains vastly unacknowledged and underreported. Such indifference is extremely disturbing," said Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).   "Disappearances are often a sensitive social and political issue, but that is no excuse for inaction. Governments must generate the political will necessary to provide answers."   There are no accurate figures on the number of people missing but the ICRC, which works in more than 60 countries, estimates there are likely hundreds of thousands of victims.   They include combatants missing in action and children separated from their families when fleeing their homes or forced to join armed groups as well as prisoners and migrants.   The numbers of missing people is high in South Asia, which includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives and is home to one fifth of humanity, say activists.   The region is vulnerable to earthquakes and floods which force hundreds of thousands from their homes annually, and it has witnessed violent conflicts.   These include Sri Lanka''s 26-year-long war pitting ethnic Tamils against state forces, a crackdown by India forces on people in the disputed region of Kashmir and alleged state violations against people in Pakistan''s Baloch region.   There are also disappearances of political activists, human rights defenders, journalists and lawyers who criticise or voice dissent against regimes, corporations or other powerful players.   This month, rights groups accused Bangladesh of illegally detaining sons of members of two main opposition political parties. Authorities claim they do have no knowledge of the disappearances.   Bangladeshi rights group Odhikar says 287 people have disappeared after being picked up by men claiming to be law enforcement over the last seven years. Of these, 38 were found dead, 132 surfaced alive and the fate of 117 people remains unknown, it said.   In Wunigam village in Indian administered Kashmir''s Bandipore district, Hajra Begam, 70, hopes her missing son Bashir will knock at the door one day.   "When my son was taken by the army from his bakery, he had still had flour stuck to his hands," said Begam, adding she and her husband were dependent on Bashir''s earnings.   "The army told us later that he ran away from their custody, but we don''t believe them. The army did not take only our source of living, but also our Bashir."   According to activists, more than 8,000 people have gone missing in this volatile region bordering Pakistan, where security forces are battling a separatist insurgency.   Almost all young men, they include militants, former militants, civilians and Kashmiris working for security forces, activists say.   Families gather every year to mark the International Day of the Disappeared, said Parveena Ahanger, founder of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), whose son went missing in the early 1990s.   "It gives us some solace when many of us get together and listen to each other."   Experts say there is a lack of political will to address the issue, often because governments are implicated and investigations can be biased, flawed and lengthy.   In Sri Lanka, some 65,000 people are missing from its civil conflict with separatist Tamil Tigers which ended in 2009 as well as a Marxist insurrection between 1987 and 1989, according to government figures.   The government has set up an office to investigate but families accuse Colombo of not doing enough.   In Nepal, almost 1,400 people are missing, says the National Network of the Families of the Disappeared and Missing, accusing both state forces and Maoist rebels of committing abuses.   The war ended in 2006 under a United Nations-brokered peace deal in which both sides agreed to address war crimes within six months.   The government only established two panels last year to investigate disappearances. The panels have collected thousands of complaints and have until February to finish their work.   "I am in total confusion about his fate," said Ruby Shrestha whose husband went missing more than 13 years ago. "I don''t think he is alive. But there is no evidence of his death either."   Humanitarian workers say governments must step up their responses, develop legal frameworks and procedures to account for the missing and provide support to families.   "Those with influence and in a position to help should take the opportunity of the International Day of the Disappeared to recommit themselves to this issue," said Maurer.   "To remain in the dark, not knowing what has happened to someone you love," Maurer said. "Imagine the pain this must cause." http://tmsnrt.rs/2c9SNc6   Enforced disappearances: “Urgent need to reverse a frightening trend” – UN expert group   The United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances today warned that enforced disappearances are on the rise, and expressed deep concern and frustration for what it defined as “a very frightening trend.”   “We are seriously concerned that the number of enforced disappearances is increasingly rising with the false and pernicious belief that they are a useful tool to preserve national security and combat terrorism,” said the human rights experts during the presentation of its latest report to the UN Human Rights Council.   “During last year alone, we dealt with 483 urgent actions out of 766 newly reported cases of disappearance in 37 States; more than three times higher than those reflected in our previous year’s annual report,” they noted.   “This means more than one disappearance per day, and obviously it is just the tip of the iceberg when we talk about the cases the Working Group receives.”   The experts expressed concern in particular about a steep increase in the so-called ‘short-term disappearances’, the unacknowledged deprivation of liberty which puts the individual concerned outside the protection of the law for a limited amount of time.   “The fact that the victim reappears in many of these cases, does not render less worrisome this form of enforced disappearance, which is equally serious and must be eradicated,” the experts observed. “We strongly reiterate that there is no time limit, no matter how short, for an enforced disappearance to occur.”   Since its creation in 1980, the expert group has transmitted a total of 55,273 cases to 107 States. The number of cases under active consideration stands at 44,159 in a total of 91 States. During the last year, 161 cases were clarified.   The expert group also drew attention to a pattern of threats, intimidation and reprisals against victims of enforced disappearance, including family members, witnesses and human rights defenders working on such cases. http://bit.ly/2cZv9nq   International Day of the Disappeared: Why it matters. (ICRC)   Anyone can understand the grief and desolation felt when a loved one dies. But what about the crushing hurt and uncertainty when somebody just disappears? Hundreds of thousands of people are currently missing around the world from armed conflicts, violence, natural disasters, or migration.   The ICRC does what it can to help. But it is vital that governments and others step up their efforts to relieve the suffering of so many people and to address one of the most complex, challenging and under-reported humanitarian problems in the world today. The attached brief report gives an overview of the situation of the missing around the world and what ICRC is doing to help.   The ICRC works in over 60 countries to help missing people and their families.   How the ICRC made a difference in 2015:   1,000 children were reunited with their families; 3,650 families with missing loved ones were provided with psychological and psychosocial support in 21 countries; 479,000 family members were able to re-establish contact through free phone calls; 25,700 detainees were visited and monitored individually; delivered humanitarian forensic services in 53 countries around the world; 19 States were supported in the development of national laws and measures related to missing persons and their families. Visit the related web page
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