allAfrica.com: Uganda: Family Ills Help Land Girls Into Prostitution (Page 1 of 1)

Having lost her only surviving parent at the age of 14, Prossy was picked up from her village in Luwero and taken to Kampala by a paternal aunt who promised to get her a job in the city. That job turned out to be at her Aunt's restaurant.

Prossy embarked on the job after receiving assurances that she would be paid like all the other employees, but it was only when the time came to receive her first pay check that Prossy realised she had been duped.

The long hours she had worked made the pain of not receiving the money she thought she had earned even more unbearable.

"I could wake up at 5am and start working till 11pm. But when ever I asked my aunt about the payments, she would remind me of the free accommodation and food which she was offering," Prossy told Saturday Monitor in an interview.

While she received food and accommodation from her aunt, Prossy says she was unable to cater for her other personal needs. "I couldn't afford basic needs like sanitary pads, vaseline and clothes," she said.

Eventually, she decided to run away from her aunt. But because she could not obtain any other job, desperation forced her onto the streets where she started working as a prostitute.

"Since I did not have capital to set up my own business, I decided to join this trade to earn a living," she says. Now 16, Prossy starts her rounds at 6pm on weekdays and as early as 3pm from Friday throughout the weekend at Bolivia's Bar in Bwaise, a Kampala suburb.

"When you don't come early, you may fail to get any clients. We are so many and we have to compete for the available buyers," says Prossy, who adds that she is six months old in the business.

Cases like Prossy's are becoming common in a country where up to 2 million children are currently orphaned and have to find ways to fend for themselves at an early age. In Kampala alone, according to statistics compiled by African Network for the Prevention and Protection Against Child Abuse and Neglect (ANPPCAN), there are more than 12,000 child prostitutes, majority of whom are orphans.

Mr Joshua Lubandi, the ANPPCAN Programme Officer in charge of information, says children they have withdrawn from prostitution have admitted that they were forced into the business by the adults and veteran prostitutes who brought them to urban areas in the guise of getting them petty jobs.

"Majority of child sex workers were trafficked from different parts of the country. They are normally promised so many things but unfortunately, they are later turned into sex slaves," he said. While some girls are forced into the hands of lecherous men due to lack of family to turn to for their needs, others just flee their families due to constant harassment.

Esther 17, now a single mother of a five year old girl although she is not yet an adult, says she joined prostitution after their father abandoned them and started another family. Esther says her mother was selling local brew which could not cater for all their basic needs including education. She was eventually introduced to prostitution by a friend.

Mr Lubandi said child prostitution is most rampant in Kampala, Mbarara, Mbale, Jinja, and Gulu and border towns like Busia, Malaba, Katuna, and Arua - areas in the country that are dominated by people with cash to burn on prostitutes.

For the girls however, their earnings are nothing to write home about compared to their daily occupational hazards. Prossy says that on a "good" day, she sleeps with five men and earns about Shs30,000.

On a "bad" day, Prossy says, she gets about two clients and takes home only Shs10,000.

Their charges per session are a measly Shs2,000-Shs10,000 depending on the clients - who range from boda boda cyclists, special hire drivers to video hall operators. Sometimes, the clients even ask for unprotected sex for a slightly higher fee.

Yet not all the money ends up in their purses. For young girls like Prossy who operate in bars, they have to pay a daily fee of Shs1,000 to the bar owners - including on days when they fail to get any customers.

"Most of the venues belong to the women whom we call sengas (aunts).

They operate small bars and some of them have turned part of their residential houses into lodges," explained Esther, another prostitute who admits she is yet to clock 18 years.

"Our clients usually pay for the lodges and we pay the sengas who manage the places where we normally stage ourselves". Sometimes the sengas return the favour by connecting the young girls to clients who come to their bars asking for prostitutes, as Esther explained: "If they (sengas) get male clients at their bars who have some money, they ring us to come and make money and give them a commission."

But money can never really compensate for the many troubles that these young girls face, the most deadly of which is the threat of the HIV virus. A recent study done by RHU in Kampala, for instance indicates that the HIV prevalence rate among sex workers was as high as 47.2 per cent compared to the national rate of 6.7 per cent.

For girls like Prossy and Esther however, the struggle to survive means that statistics like that - grim as they are - do not really count much in their little world of child prostitution.

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