Sterile at Age 12, AIDS at 14 IPS news reports appear daily in English, German, Finnish, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish. An estimated 5,000 children are currently involved in prostitution, pornography and so-called sex tourism in Mexico, according to Elena Azola, an independent expert who specialises in the issue. There is ''great demand'' for child prostitution and pornography, whose main victims are children who live and work in the streets, ''greater than the demand for adults and even more profitable,'' says a government report released this week.
Many girls get pregnant, and are forced by the circumstances to have abortions.
All suffer serious psychological consequences, the document underlines. The networks that sexually exploit minors often function as ''companies,'' says the report, which was turned over to the special UN rapporteur on trafficking in children and child prostitution. Although legislators have promised to enact laws clamping down on the phenomenon, Mexico as yet has no specific laws defining and sanctioning child prostitution and pornography as criminal activity. Existing laws only speak of ''corruption'' of minors. In 1996, after the discovery of a criminal organisation that produced and sold child pornography, the attorney-general's office set up a special group to investigate the sexual exploitation of children.