The UN children's fund, Unicef, called yesterday for co-ordinated global action to stamp out the commercial sexual exploitation of children. The UN body issued a report entitled Profiting from Abuse ahead of a major conference to be held in Japan next week.
"Millions of children throughout the world are being bought and sold like chattels and used as sex slaves," the Unicef director, Ms Carol Bellamy, said.
"Zero tolerance means ending the trafficking of children, their sale and barter and imprisonment and torture," she added.
Accurate statistics are hard to come by because such exploitation is a clandestine business in which "children are frequently shuttled through underground networks of traffickers", the report says. "Nevertheless, it is estimated that approximately one million children, mostly girls, enter the multi-billion-dollar commercial sex trade every year."
Trafficking continues in spite of the fact that 191 countries have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and Unicef says governments must do more to give the treaty teeth.
The second World Congress against the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children is to be held in Yokohama from December 17th to 20th.
The organisers say the conference will have three main aims: to monitor progress made since a similar meeting held in Stockholm in 1996; to list key problems contributing to the trade in children and consider how to solve them; and to agree on new measures to be taken.
In a pessimistic statement issued on November 20th, ECPAT admitted that progress since the Stockholm meeting had been meagre.
"In most cases, the policies spelled out by governments to protect children from the grasp of the sex trade have not moved beyond the desks of bureaucrats," it said.
An ECPAT report said over a million children were believed to have been drafted into the sex trade in Asia alone, with poverty being the main motor in many countries.
Even in richer countries, such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, children could be lured into the sex trade to sustain their tastes in fashionable clothes, mobile phones and watches.
In Europe, for example, Unicef reports a flourishing traffic in children from the continent's two poorest states, Moldova and Albania, to the tourist resorts of Greece and Italy.
Nigerian girls and young women were being sent to all over Europe, with one investigator finding that some victims had been bought and sold 12 times along the way.