A quarter of the workers in this industry are children - 50,000 of them in all. Children work leather in Italy, make bricks in Colombia and Peru, and mine diamonds and gold in Ivory Coast and South Africa and coal in Colombia. Here they face the possibility not only of immediate abuse but of exposure to drugs, unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases including the invariably fatal HIV infection. Until they succumb to these ills, they serve the appetites both of local men and of international sex tourists. Estimates put the number of children in the U.S. alone involved in this sordid trade at 100,000.
Children work the streets of the rapidly expanding cities in the developing world.
They sell whatever they can in the very dangerous milieu of modern urban life. Still others live totally illicit lives in crime syndicates as pickpockets, burglars, drug traffickers and prostitutes. Most street children have homes to which they return each night where they give over their meager earnings, but about one in 10 is homeless and lives permanently on the street. All of these children lack access to schooling of any kind. Local merchants often regard them as nuisances and they can be systematically murdered - as they have been in the streets of Rio de Janeiro for at least the last seven years.