00.00 Its beaches are the stuff holiday brochures are made of. Tourism a major money spinner for one of the
world's poorest countries; but Kenya's tropical paradise hides a dark secret within. 

 

(Music 00.15 – 00.46)

 

We have been on a harrowing journey - from nightclubs where European men pick up 12 year old
Kenyan girls; to this orphanage where children as young as 6 have found sanctuary after sexual abuse
by foreign tourists. A journey into a world of cruelty and desperation, a world we could scarcely have imagined.

 

00.46 Eve Ngoroge   

Women's Resource Network:  "They sort of feel they can do anything they like when they come to Kenya, and get away with it. "   

 

(Music 00.54-01.59)

00.54Mombasa after midnight. And the city's clubs are filling with white male European tourists ogling and fondling teenage girls.
The teenagers wear high heels, or pay a bribe at the door to get in. The ultimate prize is a "Mzungu" or white man, who will pay for sex five times what a Kenyan labourer can earn in a day. 

 

01.24

But the price these girls are paying is a stolen childhood. Anastasia says she's 13 now, and has been prostituting herself since she slept with a British tourist at the age of 10, a crime which back in Britain would be classed as rape. Her parents couldn't even afford school shoes, so she set out for a better life amid the bright lights of Mombasa. That life is sharing a flat with a fellow prostitute, Leyla, who is 14. And both girls say the number of children involved is growing.

 

Leyla Kaluhi:  

01.59

"When I started at the age of 12, I could go into a nightclub, and maybe I can get 10 to 20 girls. At least you could count and know, 'that one and that one, they are prostitutes'. But now there are many, all over the place.  Sometimes I get stressed. I ask myself, or God, what I have done wrong ? I am still a child and I am doing this." 

 

02.25

Three years ago a study by the UN children's agency UNICEF warned that there were 1000s of girls like Leyla. But that was before Kenya was plunged into political violence and economic crisis and a drought which has left 10 million Kenyans without enough food to eat.  

The author of the Unicef study now reckons her findings are an underestimate.

02.51 
Sarah Jones
 Author, Unicef report    

 

The study pretty strongly demonstrated that there was approximately thirty percent of the population of children between the ages of twelve and eighteen who were engaged in some form of sex work.

Rugman: That's an astonishingly high figure. How many thousands of people are we talking about?

Sarah Jones: We are talking about fifteen to twenty thousand children, and maybe more now, because the population has grown in that time.

The researchers I worked with when I conducted the study all tell me now that they have a lot of visual evidence of increasing numbers of younger and younger children." 

 

03.26
Just two miles from Mombasa's beachfront hotels and you are a world away. We found local tribesmen dancing in memory of a dead friend.
Hardly anyone has a job in this village. And the local elders say they are battling to stop their children from heading to the beach
in search of a white man with a wallet full of cash.

 

03.49

Richard Chisima

Bamburi village elder  

 

"When you go to the beach you will get a European, a foreigner, who will give you money. And they will just flock there. 

 

(Music 04.01 – 04.14)

 

04.01

We had heard that resorts north of Mombasa were the centre of the underage sex trade, so we drove for about an hour to a village near the town of Malindi.  
And the scale of what we found left us profoundly shocked. Teenagers shelling maize told us it was normal for young children to sleep with African men in the low season to prepare for rich foreigners later. 
 

04.30

And the village elder was so concerned about his village's children, that he sent several families with their 12 and 13 year girls and boys to talk to us. 

 

04.39

Upsot Jonathan Rugman: "So we have a group of children here: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 of you. Can you tell me how many of you had sex with a foreigner on a beach?”

“1,2,3,4. Four of you. Four out of ten. Almost half.”

 

04.58
It was Fatuma's story which affected us the most. She's 13 now but says she was driven by hunger to sell herself to two European tourists named Andre and Thomas at the age of 11. 

 

05.13 

Fatuma

 "The first man gave me 1000 shillings . 

JR: 1000 shillings? So that's about  £10. And the second man?

Fatuma: The second man... that day I didn't get some money. He gave me 500.

JR: 500? So £5. That's all. 

Fatuma: Yes 

Fatuma: I'm very sad, because my body's the temple of God.

JR: Your body is the temple of God?

Fatuma: Yes.

 

05.42

With her mother’s permission, Fatuma showed me the beach where she sold her body to the two white men. She told me about her routine on Sundays. In the morning, she goes to church, in the afternoon her family's poverty forces her here to look for more foreigners. And her mother claims she's powerless to stop her. 

 

06.05

Philomena Kadenge (in kseswahili)
"Fatuma goes everywhere because I have no food at home and no money to support her. I don't like her going backwards. I would like the child to continue at school and the white men to be prosecuted." 

 

06.19

PTC Jonathan Rugman

 "What makes what I have seen even more shocking is that it isn't even a secret. It is widely accepted in this village that children are sold to foreign tourists for sex. And what is happening here is happening up and down the Kenyan coast, with thousands, possibly tens of thousands of children, involved.

 

06.36

There are pockets of resistance, like this girl's football team, set up by a Kenyan charity. It's motto? "My God is my strength,  not my white man". But the schoolteacher in charge admits that 16 of the 35 girls she trained last year are now back on the beaches, selling themselves. 

 

06.58

Mary Rukungi:  "They take the child of Kenya, just because we are poor. They misuse the child. Personally, it hurts me. I feel pain.

Any foreigner found sleeping with a Kenyan child should be taken back to his country, and never be allowed to come to our country again." 
 

07.18
All along the coast we'd heard that children abused by tourists are now younger then ever. But we wanted evidence.
 

So we went to Mombasa's only public clinic specialising in sexual violence. Where cameras have never been allowed to witness the terrible suffering within.

 

The sound you can hear is of a six year old boy, crying out after being sodomised by a neighbour. Stark proof that child sex abuse is not just a tourist problem. Crimes against children are committed by Kenyans as well - and this clinic is unique in confronting a scandal many would rather ignore.

 

07.59 

This is the clinic's admissions book. And it reads like an astonishing chronicle of cruelty.
 

Over a thousand children treated here in the last two years. And the academic analysing the daily rollcall says their ages are falling, with more and more sold for sex. 

 

08.21
Dr Catherine Maternowska  

University of California

 

"So the ages we have here are 9,10,8,15,10, 6 years old here. That is typical of our clinic. We have 78% under 15.

Q All raped or sodomised?

“Raped or sodomised, this is all violations against children. (And of the 78%, nearly one third of those are under 10 years old.)”

Q How many of these horrific child abuse cases have been carried out, perpetrated by, tourists from abroad?

“The national estimate, based on a report by UNICEF, is that approximately 40% to 50% - it’s a hard number to calculate - are committed by tourists from abroad."  
 

09.03

On busy days an abused child can wait 8 hours to see a doctor. This clinic is the first of its kind in Kenya, and the doctors wonder how many abuse cases never get reported at all.
 

09.16

Dr Essam Ahmed

Coast General Hospital

 

 "We don't know what the situation is outside, but we are sure that what we are seeing is just the tip of the iceberg. 

Q Do you get a sense that any of the cases you deal with of child abuse end up in court?

“Judging on our judicial system, the various loopholes we are currently having with evidence collection - we don't even have evidence collection kits - I'd say it's very rare for a perpetrator to be jailed. Very, very rare. "   

 

09.47

In June Kenyans near this beach took the law into their own hands, hacking down beach-huts after a European tourist was accused of molesting 9 year-olds inside. And a local campaigner told me that even if tourist was caught, he could bribe the police to drop the case.

 

10.08

Ours was a journey of painful contrasts - the tropical beauty of the holiday resorts jarring with the desperation of the children nearby. And as we continued our investigation, those contrasts became ever more disturbing.  

 

10.24
We found Henry, a 7 year old molested by a white man in exchange for pocket money, new clothes and a bag of flour. His father wants the police to bring charges. But the police have told the parents the tourist has fled to Europe and may never return. And in a mother's proud face, we saw a family struggling to keep its dignity. 

 

10.47

Martin Safari 

Muyeye village (in kseswahili)

 

"We have to wait until the white man comes back. But now that he has committed a crime, I do not think he will come.
I am afraid our government only listens to those who have money - and the case is not being taken seriously, because I have nothing. " 

 

11.04

The authorities know there's a problem - look at the billboards. They hope a new tourist police force will be patrolling the beaches by the end of this year. But this is a country which fears that any attack on its reputation, and innocent tourists - the vast majority   - could be driven away.

 

11.23

Najib Balala

Kenyan Minister of Tourism 
 

"We are going to take strict action on defaulters, or criminals, who are taking advantage of young children. As a parent, as well as a country, we cannot afford abuse of our children. At the same time, if it is publicised, blown out of proportion, it will destroy the same effort of eradication of poverty by destroying tourism. " 

 

11.49 

But parents and charities say the time has come for the truth to be told.

This church orphanage is sheltering a six year old girl who has told her carers about her visits to hotel rooms and being filmed for pornographic videos.
 

And the charity worker who rescued her says the abuse probably began at the age of 3. 

 

12.12

Eve Ngoroge 

Women's Resource Network

"The doctor said she had some whip-like lashes on her back. And she had a vaginal injury as well, and there was some sodomy as well.

 Q And she's just 6 years old ?.

Eve: And she's just 6 years old. 

 Q As far as we know, do we know who carried this out?

Eve: She says it was "mzungus " - white men. Laws are going to get stricter, and they can't go back home and pretend not to be paedophiles any more. They're going to wind up in jail eventually.

 

12.52

This little girl is now safe. No longer refusing to eat, no longer expecting to stay up all night. But up and down this 300 mile coastline, Kenyan children are suffering - their stories still untold.

Jonathan Rugman Channel 4 News, Mombasa.

13.22