New lease of life for child sex workers

She is only 13, but the hard set of her face tells the story of a much older person, one who has been to hell and back.

Naomi* rarely smiles or laughs, and when she does look at you, the eyes are piercing and full of distrust. The innocence has long been stripped away by a string of men who sexually abused her... repeatedly, and without remorse.

Until a couple of months ago, Naomi was a child prostitute at Mlolongo, a stretch along the Mombasa road that is littered with noisy bars and brothels tucked away in dark corners. It is a popular stopover with truck drivers, making it attractive for a fast-growing number of commercial sex workers.

According to Ms Leah Ambwaya, a children’s rights activist, by the time the girl was rescued from the streets, the girl had to have urgent reconstructive surgery to repair the damage on her private parts.

“It was horrific. She was in intense pain, could not control her bladder, and was on the verge of developing obstetric fistula. She had to be operated on immediately,” Ms Ambwaya says.

Obstetric fistula is a severe medical condition where a hole develops either between the rectum and vagina or between the bladder and vagina. This leads to involuntary leaking of urine and stool. There is also the risk of a host of infections.

“Nilikuwa nalala na wanaume watatu kila siku,” (I would have sex with at least three men daily) Naomi whispers reluctantly, her eyes downcast.

She shows emotion for the first time. Her eyes cloud with tears and she bites her lower lip, trying to fight them away. At that moment, the vulnerable, tormented child that she had managed to shut away emerges. But only for a moment.

After a minute, she composes herself, and once again, the hostile look warns you to keep off.

Like almost every girl prowling Mlolongo Town and its environs, poverty forced her to run away from her home in Kitui about two years ago.

But nothing had prepared her for the harshness of street life. On her first night at Mlolongo, a gang of street boys, she does not recall how many, raped her in turns and she was unwittingly initiated into the unforgiving nightlife that visits this booming township when daylight fades.

It is these hardened boys that would sell her off to men on the prowl for illicit sex with young girls. For a paltry Sh50. Initially, she would resist their advances and try to fight them off, but her adopted “brothers”, who were always nearby, would beat her into submission.

“I just started doing what they wanted,” the class six pupil says, fiddling with her hands.

She says that for each sexual encounter the men, who rarely used condoms, would part with Sh150 which they paid directly to the street boys. They kept Sh100 and gave her the remaining Sh50 to buy food.

Ms Ambwaya, who is also the director of Terry Child Support and Youth Resource Centre, a children’s home that took Naomi in, said many of the prostitutes are barely in their teens.

“Most of these girls are from poor families around Machakos, Kitui, Mwingi and Konza,” she says.

Ms Ambwaya equates underage sex here to a cup of tea — almost every young girl is having it.

However, eager to escape a life of hardship, the young girls do not pause to consider the downside of their choice — contracting HIV/Aids and other STDs, unplanned pregnancy, physical abuse, and the psychological trauma that soon follows.

It’s a miracle that Naomi did not get HIV or other STDs.

“I expected the worst when I picked her up from the Machakos Police Station where she had been locked up for loitering, and could hardly believe it when she tested HIV negative,” Ms Ambwaya says.

We’re conducting this interview at the children’s home in Iveti Location, Kathiani District, where Naomi and six other girls rescued from the streets live. Three of these girls contracted HIV while working as prostitutes.  

Other areas teeming with child prostitutes are Chumvi Junction, all the way to Konza.

When night falls, this notorious stretch comes alive with skimpily dressed girls, many of them underage, who have sex with men old enough to be their fathers or grandfathers, for a few shillings.

Mr Walter Wafula, a counsellor and social worker, says almost all the girls they take off the streets went into prostitution unwillingly.

“Most come from poor backgrounds and, given a choice, they wouldn’t have sold their bodies for money,” Mr Wafula says.

Take 17-year-old Rose.* Dressed in a pair of black, form-fitting jeans and white T-shirt, hair combed back to reveal a shiny pair of earrings, she cuts the image of any other teenager. But there’s nothing ordinary about her life.

She was lured into prostitution by an aunt with promises of an education. The orphan had been living with her grandmother in Busia when the aunt, a cousin of her mother, offered to take her in and educate her.

What she had no way of knowing was that her aunt wanted a sex slave.

“The first time it happened, my aunt came to our single room in Mlolongo with a strange man, pointed at me and said, “ndiyo huyu,” (here she is) and then left me alone with him.”

She was 15 years old.

Her aunt took her to school as she had promised, but when Rose came home in the evening, she would force her to have sex with strange men.

“I contemplated running away several times, but I had no money and relied on her for everything, so I stayed on,” she says, shrugging her shoulders. Due to the trauma of what she was going through, she could not concentrate on her studies and failed her KCPE examinations.

A year later, she got pregnant. When her aunt found out, she beat her and told her to go to the man responsible.

“I wasn’t sure who was responsible, so I approached one of the men…a regular client and begged him to take me in.”

“Alikuwa akinitumia vibaya na kunichapa sana.” (He would do demeaning things to me, and beat me up a lot). Sometimes he would even pass her on to his friends. After a month of this unbearable abuse, she ran away to an uncle who lived in Embakasi, convinced that he would sympathise with her.

“He just raped me…” she says, choking back tears.

Rose heard about the children’s shelter she now calls home from a former neighbour in Mlolongo. Today, she is in Form Three and her child is a lively, healthy two-year-old boy.

Lynn* also lives here. She is just nine, and even though she is not a victim of sexual abuse, she was an unwilling spectator while her mother and sister “entertained” a stream of men in their single room in Mlolongo.

Lynn’s mother succumbed to HIV/Aids a few years ago, leaving her in the custody of her sister and two brothers. She shared a bed with one of her brothers, a drug user and peddler.

“If we hadn’t taken her away, it would have been a matter of time before she was initiated into prostitution,” Mr Wafula says.

Asked whether she knew what her sister does for a living, Lynn quickly shifts her gaze and turns her attention to her hands.

“Men come during the day to our house, and at night my sister goes to work.”

“There are things children her age should never be subjected to, yet the truth is, there’re numerous other cases like hers around here,” says Mr Wafula.

When the girls arrive at the home, they hide behind a don’t-care, tough attitude. But behind the façade is a bruised child longing for healing.

*Girls’ real names withheld.