girls going with men for money. She had worked as a child prostitute to support her own mother who had also worked as a child prostitute and both had endured pregnancies aged eleven. And now her three daughters have followed biological suit by having babies in their early teens. It’s a vicious cycle – a menstrual cycle. The question is, how to break it? Teresa’s mother receives no alimony or social security. She must work scrubbing floors all day to support her three daughters and clutch of grandchildren, even though her hands are gnarled with arthritis. She sleeps in a hammock strung across the dismal room; her daughters and their babies nestled into the small cots below.
In Brazil, paedophile tourism is rife. (In São Luís alone, 1,000 children are known to have been sexually exploited in the last year.) The young girls I met told me of specific bars and service stations where such tourists go, knowing that children will be available for proposition. One of Plan’s counsellors revealed that even though the government says they’re trying to break these paedophile rings, the girls are getting younger. ‘They use to be twelve to seventeen. It’s now eight- to nine-year-olds being offered, with younger children pimped by their parents, in their own homes. Two weeks ago,’ she added, bleakly, ‘a father and grandfather were convicted of having sex with the youngest child in the family – she is four – and of selling her to men. The little girls have to be stitched up as their vaginas have been torn and split. Sometimes they are also penetrated with objects. I see these cases every day and I never get used to it.’
In every dilapidated shack, I found young women who had become little more than a life support to their ovaries – reduced, by lack of contraception and lack of access to abortion , into breeding cows. Forced to drop out of school and unable to work, it’s as though society has handed them an eviction notice. They have become runners-up in the human race. Cintia and her sister share a hovel with their four babies and their mother, who, although also crippled with arthritis, must work as a domestic to support them – yet is paid only at the whim of her mistress. As there is high unemployment, no unions and no basic wage, Cintia’s mother has no choice but to put up with this capriciousness and take the fiscal scraps she is thrown.
At fourteen, Cintia had a baby, prematurely. ‘I wanted to be a police woman,’ she told me, with longing. Her sister, now eighteen and the mother of three children, with another on the way, wanted to be a teacher. But instead they look after their babies and try to help their mother around the house. ‘Mum was angry with us at first, but loves us and the kids.’
But how can these mothers mother, when they so desperately need to be mothered themselves?
Although their shack is neat and tidy, there is no money for a septic tank. The toilet is a pit covered by two wobbly planks through which the toddlers could easily fall. The sisters dug a hole in the backyard, but had no money to buy a tank. Ignorant about hygiene, they now throw their garbage into the pit – nappies, food scraps and waste – where it all festers in the sun. As it’s been raining, the squalid pit has filled with water, turning it into a surreal fishpond in which the soiled nappies bob about. All the babies have rashes, sores and skin complaints, which I can’t quite put my finger on – and would much rather not, come to think of it. But there’s little doubt that it’s to do with the festering bucolic pool in their microscopic yard.
My next visit was to Diana’s tumbledown hut. She is thirty with three teenage children. Here the family defecates in a bucket. The mother then wraps the family’s faeces in a plastic bag and carries them to the garbage truck once a week. This is the tropics, I hasten to add. She does this week in, week out, year after year after – well, you get the pathetic
In Brazil, paedophile tourism is rife. (In São Luís alone, 1,000 children are known to have been sexually exploited in the last year.) The young girls I met told me of specific bars and service stations where such tourists go, knowing that children will be available for proposition. One of Plan’s counsellors revealed that even though the government says they’re trying to break these paedophile rings, the girls are getting younger. ‘They use to be twelve to seventeen. It’s now eight- to nine-year-olds being offered, with younger children pimped by their parents, in their own homes. Two weeks ago,’ she added, bleakly, ‘a father and grandfather were convicted of having sex with the youngest child in the family – she is four – and of selling her to men. The little girls have to be stitched up as their vaginas have been torn and split. Sometimes they are also penetrated with objects. I see these cases every day and I never get used to it.’
In every dilapidated shack, I found young women who had become little more than a life support to their ovaries – reduced, by lack of contraception and lack of access to abortion , into breeding cows. Forced to drop out of school and unable to work, it’s as though society has handed them an eviction notice. They have become runners-up in the human race. Cintia and her sister share a hovel with their four babies and their mother, who, although also crippled with arthritis, must work as a domestic to support them – yet is paid only at the whim of her mistress. As there is high unemployment, no unions and no basic wage, Cintia’s mother has no choice but to put up with this capriciousness and take the fiscal scraps she is thrown.
At fourteen, Cintia had a baby, prematurely. ‘I wanted to be a police woman,’ she told me, with longing. Her sister, now eighteen and the mother of three children, with another on the way, wanted to be a teacher. But instead they look after their babies and try to help their mother around the house. ‘Mum was angry with us at first, but loves us and the kids.’
But how can these mothers mother, when they so desperately need to be mothered themselves?
Although their shack is neat and tidy, there is no money for a septic tank. The toilet is a pit covered by two wobbly planks through which the toddlers could easily fall. The sisters dug a hole in the backyard, but had no money to buy a tank. Ignorant about hygiene, they now throw their garbage into the pit – nappies, food scraps and waste – where it all festers in the sun. As it’s been raining, the squalid pit has filled with water, turning it into a surreal fishpond in which the soiled nappies bob about. All the babies have rashes, sores and skin complaints, which I can’t quite put my finger on – and would much rather not, come to think of it. But there’s little doubt that it’s to do with the festering bucolic pool in their microscopic yard.
My next visit was to Diana’s tumbledown hut. She is thirty with three teenage children. Here the family defecates in a bucket. The mother then wraps the family’s faeces in a plastic bag and carries them to the garbage truck once a week. This is the tropics, I hasten to add. She does this week in, week out, year after year after – well, you get the pathetic
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