Child Prostitution and Sex Tourism COSTA RICA - Consortium for ...

ancheros, many of which are without any form of sanitation. Households of five people and more are lucky t ohave one bedroom and two beds.Although Costa Rican children are formally entitled to free education up to the age of 18, there are no schools inthis barrio, and the nearest primary school is some four or five kilometers away. Mothers told us that they didnot take their children to this school because they did not have the money to buy shoes or decent clothing forthemselves or their children and were ashamed to leave the barrio.In good weather children 'hang out' on the roadside outside their homes. In the rainy season, when the rancherosare surrounded by sewage-filled mud, they crowd inside where the rainwater pours onto dirt floors through gaps inthe corrugated iron roofs.The incidence of sexual and physical abuse within the family is believed to be high in such areas and young girlsare often desperate to escape from their parents. Three of the women we interviewed in Los Cuadros said that ata young age they had run away from parental abuse with their boyfriends. They had then become pregnant andtheir boyfriends had left them so that, at the age of 13, they had found themselves single mothers.There are only three possible sources of income for girls in this situation - prostitution, domestic work whichoften also entails sexual exploitation (see below) and selling lottery tickets. Many women and girls from therancheros combine all three: selling lottery tickets for a pathetic commission to men and women like themselveswho draw comfort from the dream that fate will suddenly deliver them from poverty (this despite knowing thatthe cheap lottery is invariably being worked as a scam further up the line); working as maids for as many hoursper week as they can find at an hourly rate of between 150 and 200c, and going on the streets of Los Cuadros atnight to sell sexual access for as little as 300c.Their clients are local men and prostitutes exercise so little control within the transaction that few of them caneven insist on the use of condoms. Girls are frequently impregnated by their clients as well as exposed to the riskof AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. It is not uncommon to find women who, by the age of 18,already have three children, one or two of whom have been sired by clients.We have been describing the kind of independent prostitution which takes the form of explicit and fairlynarrowly defined contractual exchanges (i.e., x colones in return for x services or x hours of access to theperson). But sex tourists and expatriates do not always secure sexual access to Costa Rican women and childrenby entering into overt commercial transactions. They can also obtain this access by picking a 'girlfriend' fromthe ranks of teenage girls and adult women who are willing to enter into non-contractual relationships withforeign men living or holidaying in Costa Rica.Such relationships are modelled along the lines of non-commercial, romantic relationships and although the girlor woman usually hopes to secure some material benefit from the sex tourist (which could be marriage and thus away out of Costa Rica, or could be simply gifts and/or money), she will rarely explicitly negotiate or demand anysuch benefit. The man may spend a night, a week, a month, possibly longer with the woman or girl, and the'payment' he provides her is entirely at his whim.Some men lavish gifts upon their 'girlfriends', others give money, some give nothing more than a few drinks at abar.Those who are sexually exploited in this way do not typically view themselves as prostitutes, nor are theygenerally considered to be prostitutes by tourists or by their fellow Costa Ricans, who make a linguisticdistinction between putas and Zorro’s .The term putas is applied to brothel and street prostitutes, whilst zorra, which literally translates as 'fox', is usedin much the same way as the term jinitera is used in Cuba, namely to refer to girls and women who enter into lessexplicitly contractual sexual arrangements with tourists.As ever, the degree of control that a woman or girl exercises within such a relationship correlates with the degreeof her economic desperation. It seems probable that even during high season, the supply of zorras outstrips thedemand for them, and that their bargaining position is therefore always weak.Meanwhile, since many sex tourists value such arrangements precisely because they are non-contractual, it willalways be difficult for the 'girlfriend' to clearly set the terms of the transaction except through resort to