Mirador said:
I've met mothers who have sold their daughters into prostitutions to foreigners, and others celebrate an underage daughter's prostitution, and in their immediate social milieu it's not frowned upon. The issue here is social decomposition, brought about mainly by extreme poverty. My understanding is that child prostitution is more than just an issue of law and order, and the social causes should be addressed first.
Mirador
From years of meeting 16 year olds with 2 year old kids (who are trying to pass themselves off as 18 year olds) from Dominican fathers it seems there is little in the way of preventative education about sex , nor any decently accessible birth control. There seems to be an expectation that sex begins at puberty and if that is accepted as a social norm, then sex plus money is not a long leap to make.
I asked this other 16 y/o girl I met recently who of course was trying to solicit sex for money, and who was 7 months pregant why she didn't take the pill or get DepoProvera ( which I think at times is free or cheap and offers 6 months protection) and she said they are told all these methods cause cancer. And the boyfriends won't use condoms if they can get away with it.
I tell tourists who ask, any they do, and who are tempted to go with a girl who appears a bit dodgy, to make sure they have a real cedula , not a copy (and the latest crop are not all that easy to fake with the hologram etc.) and they compare the photo and the name with what they are told to avoid even inadvertent contact with underage girls. Looks alone are insufficient to tell as mentioned 27 looks 16 , 16 looks 22 etc., but getting ID and leaving that ID for review with reputable hotel management is pretty good protection and about all that is possible.
There are a couple groups that seek this sort of thng out but the underground will always exist and they are at least something to go after as it seems to me to be very deliberate actvity and they are not terribly discreet etiher.
I have never seen boys, e.g. 14, 15 y/o with women tourists, not in public anyway - lots of obvious older sankies with tourist women though. I'd think that women would be more disinclined to partake of inappropriately young partners than men would be.
The poverty excuse is interesting as the money, when you talk to these girls, seems to quite often go to clothes, hairstyles and extensions, fancy cell phones and drugs.