Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC) is the sexual use of boys, girls and adolescents by one or more adults in exchange for payment in cash or kind. This payment may be made directly from the sexual exploiter to the child or adolescent or from the sexual exploiter to the trafficker or pimp.
This includes the production, promotion and dissemination of pornographic material and the use of minors in public or private sex shows. The CSEC violates the rights to life, dignity and the full development of childhood and adolescence.
Who intervenes in this crime?
- Victim (girl, boy or adolescent): who’s body is “sold” directly or through pimps or traffickers as merchandise, or represented in material (videos, audio, images) with acts of sexual connotation.
- Sexual exploiter: A person who requests or pays a child, adolescent or third person in cash or kind to sexually exploit them.
- Trafficker: is a person who by any means (deceit, intimidation, abuse of power, by force or different ways of coercion, threats, abuse of dependence situation or vulnerability), captures, transports, moves, welcomes, receives or holds girls, boys or adolescents with the final purpose of sexually exploit them.
- Pimp: is the person who promotes, facilitates, contributes or obliges a boy, a girl or adolescent to submit to sexual exploitation, using him or her as merchandise or a sex object with the final purpose of gaining profit.
- Intermediary:Persons who facilitate or promote contact between children or adolescents and the sexual exploiter, the trafficker and/or pimp. Provides information about places, prices, meeting points and cellphone numbers generating earnings for themselves.
What structural factors sustain the commercial sexual exploitation?
- Unawareness of the child as a subject
- Sexist educational model
- Social exclusion or historically discriminated minority groups (people with disabilities, LGBTIQ communities, native communities)
- Bad use of technologies
- Unprotected family situations and unsatisfied socio-affective needs
- Commercial erotization of the child’s body
- Organized crime through networks who profit with this crime
- Naturalization of sexual and gender violence
- Early economic exploitation
Where is the commercial sexual exploitation committed?
Public spaces (streets, beaches, parks, wastelands, public bathrooms, buses, drug selling places, etc)
Business places (nightclubes, karaoke, bars, canteens, private rooms, massage parlors, dating houses, etc)
Communities (neighborhood stores, sport centers, “popular parties”)
Children’s shelters
Hotels, hostels, residencies and lodgings
Working and modeling agencies and beauty salons
Private houses
Schools
centers
Refugee camps