Free Republic

After finding out that her boyfriend was in debt, Jenny, 15, used the Internet to settle it. She had sex for money with three men she met in chatrooms. She suffered no guilt, no remorse; shrugging it off as a simple transaction: She needs money, she has a body to offer and someone is willing to pay. Her biggest fear was not AIDS. It was her boyfriend finding out about her sex-for-money exploit, her counsellor said. Celine Koh, a senior social worker at Fei Yue Family Service Centre in Bukit Batok, found out about her wayward view of sex while...

A year after a law change designed to get prostitutes off the street, a price war driven by teenage sex workers has flared up on the streets of South Auckland. Market forces appear to be driving street prostitution as teenagers, some as young as 12, compete alongside seasoned sex workers - with tumbling prices the result. Rather than pushing sex workers into legalised brothels, a Weekend Herald inquiry has found the new legislation has done little to discourage street prostitution. This is especially true in pockets of South Auckland, where the Manukau City Council has been forced to shelve plans...

United Nations peacekeeping troops are sexually exploiting teenage rape victims fleeing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to an investigation by the The Independent newspaper of London. Many of the girls, as young as 13, are mothers who give up their bodies to the U.N. soldiers in exchange for food to feed their hungry children. The girls, who live in the Internally Displaced People camp in Bunia, northeastern Congo, already are victims of multiple rape by militiamen. The British paper interviewed girls and aid workers who said every night girls crawl through a wire fence to an adjoining...