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Re: India did not purchase arms from Sri Lanka - SL Army denies PTI ne
This may interest you since it will prove that I don't have a sick mind, and instead you Sri Lankanese have it by the bushels!
Sex tourists prey on Sri Lanka's children: Beach resorts are hunting-grounds for European child abusers and pornographic video makers. Tim McGirk reports from Colombo
SOME German men were in a hotel room with three Sri Lankan village boys, aged seven, 11 and 14, having sex and filming it. They would sell the pornographic video back in Europe. The men had rented the room for a month. Downstairs, pacing around helplessly, was Maureen Seneviratne, a child rights' advocate.
First she pleaded with the manager of the guest-house, a clean and proper-looking establishment shaded in the coconut groves behind Negombo beach. It was known through paedophile circles in Britain, Sweden and Germany, and while other hotels in this popular resort suffered many vacancies, this guest-house was always full. 'I'm not God to know what goes on inside my rooms,' the manager replied with a shrug. 'But I tell you, I won't bring my own children here - not around these foreigners.'
This was the last day of the Germans' filming. They were turning the three boys loose after having subjected them to a month of degradation and sexual abuse. In Europe, such behaviour would have brought them stiff prison sentences if caught. But in Sri Lanka, foreigners are never jailed for sex offences against children. The pay-off for each boy was a carrier bag with a box of cereal, milk powder, chocolates, a T-shirt and dollars 25. The Germans gave one boy a bicycle. 'He kept riding the bicycle round and round the garden, but the look in the boy's eyes was like something out of the Omen - intense and angry. Demonic,' Ms Seneviratne said. 'He was proud to own the bicycle but so, so ashamed at how he got it.'
An ebullient woman, with grandchildren, Ms Seneviratne confronted the German video cameraman as he came out of the room. 'How can you do this?' she sputtered angrily. The German rubbed his fingers together. 'Money, money, money,' he replied. One United States study estimated that more than 250 million copies of videos on child pornography are circulating world-wide, and most were filmed in the Philippines, Thailand and Sri Lanka. One raid, on a home in a Stockholm suburb in July 1992, yielded stacks of letters between paedophiles sharing descriptions of children's bodies and sex organs. Found in the haul were 300 hours of child pornography videos, mostly filmed in Sri Lanka with titles such as Boy Love in Negombo and Hikkaduwa - the Child Sex Paradise.
Sri Lanka is becoming notorious as a destination for paedophiles. The scale of child prostitution is probably larger in the Philippines and in Thailand, but in Sri Lanka the problem is growing fastest. And, in Sri Lanka, nearly all the victims are boys, aged between six and 14. Guesses of how many children have sex with tourists vary wildly between the government figure of 1,000 and some social activists' claim of 30,000. It appears that Western sex tourists visiting Asia are demanding child prostitutes in the mistaken belief that they are more likely to be free of Aids.
Sri Lankan boys are easy prey. Studies show that a paedophile is likely to be a middle-aged male professional, such as a doctor, a banker, a teacher or even a clergyman. Sometimes he is married, and often he suffered abuse as a child himself. He seduces with little gifts and by playing games. The number of children he seduces often runs into the hundreds. The excuse he gives is that the children enjoy it. Sri Lankan children are susceptible because they are naturally friendly and desperately poor.
A boy can earn as much fellating a tourist - 200 rupees (pounds 2.25) - as carrying bricks for 12 hours. Relations between boys and girls are discouraged until marriage, and until then many Sri Lankans take a discreet and casual attitude towards homosexuality. Some boys are lured into organised gangs who often run secluded villas co-financed by foreign paedophiles, while others have casual trysts on the beach with foreigners. Motor-rickshaw drivers outside the hotels frequently act as pimps.
At Mt Lavinia, a beach resort near Colombo, a middle-aged European was observed walking in the surf. He approached a young boy, whirled slowly on the ball of his foot. Then, with his toe, he wrote a number in the sand. The boy agreed and the two walked off holding hands. When a social worker mentioned seeing this awkward ballet movement, she was told by a colleague from Thailand that it was a code used by paedophiles for picking up boys.
Even more shocking is that some Sri Lankan parents condone it and rent out rooms in their shacks where their children satisfy the paedophile. 'One father told me: 'what did it matter, my son won't get pregnant',' recalled Ms Seneviratne. The foreigner's cash is offset by the child contracting such diseases as Aids and lasting sexual trauma. No Aids study has yet been made on the 'beach boys'.
Following the lead of Thailand and the Philippines, Sri Lanka is swiftly moving to pass tough laws to make abusing children punishable by up to 10 years in jail. Sweden, Norway and Germany are considering legislation that would make paedophilia a crime even if committed by one of their nationals in a faraway country.
So far, though, no foreigner has been jailed for child abuse in Sri Lanka and only a few have been discreetly deported. Yet the trade continues. A cyclist in the southern resort of Hikkaduwa was stopped by a woman demanding 'bon-bons for babies'. Having gained his attention, the woman offered the sexual favours of the small boy accompanying her.
(Photograph omitted)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-tim-mcgirk-reports-from-colombo-1407820.html
*******************************
This report is of Aug 13, 2013 and today is 14 Aug 2013 (just one day old!)
Sri Lanka Struggles to Contain a Growing Epidemic of Child Abuse
Aug. 13, 2013
War-scarred Sri Lanka is experiencing an alarming scourge of child abuse, and the apparatus for dealing with the problem, UNICEF says, is "grossly inadequate."
Every day, three to five children are raped in the island nation. Police statistics show the total number of child rapes in 2011 as 1,463; the figure jumped to 1,759 cases in 2012, according to a parliamentary report. Police records also give a total of just over 2,000 sexual offenses against children, besides rape, in 2011; child-molestation cases in 2012 soared to over 5,000, according to parliamentary figures. The total number of all crimes against children — which besides sex crimes include crimes of violence, abduction, trafficking and other offenses — increased by a dramatic 64% between 2011 and 2012.
(MORE: Amid Abuse and Fear, Tamils Continue to Flee Sri Lanka)
Some of the increases can be explained by growing awareness of child rights leading to increased reporting of incidents, but Sri Lanka remains a country where "the family unit is extremely tight-knit and the honor of the individual reflects on the entire family," says Alia Whitney-Johnson, the founder of an NGO working with survivors of sexual abuse in Sri Lanka, who was interviewed by TIME via e-mail. "It is extremely difficult to report abuse, particularly incest."
That means it's unlikely that greater reporting is behind any but a small proportion of the growing figures. Instead, "the incidence of statutory rape and child abuse in Sri Lanka is a growing problem," UNICEF says.
The traumas suffered during Sri Lanka's 26-year civil war, which ended in 2009, may have a role to play. "When the dust settles, that's when it hits them. That's when you see severe violent reactions to small things that under normal circumstances would not have happened," explains Reza Hossaini, UNICEF's Sri Lanka representative. "It's a combination of a culture of silence and culture of impunity," he says, that breeds the "continuation of violence and abuse."
(MORE: Three Years After War's End, Sri Lanka Is Only Just Beginning to Make Peace)
But a more important factor may be the growing number of Sri Lankan women who seek to alleviate poverty at home by taking jobs overseas as domestic helpers. The children they leave behind are often defenseless against abusive fathers and predatory male relatives. (Even so, a comparison with the Philippines — another country where large numbers of women have been obliged to find work overseas — is disconcerting. Based on available official statistics, there are roughly 17 cases of child abuse for every 100,000 people in Sri Lanka; in the Philippines, there are just six cases per 100,000 head of population.)
Typical of the case files that cross the desk of Esther Gnanakan, a child psychologist at a Colombo NGO, is that of a 10-year-old girl sexually abused by her father over a year ago. Sudden movements and sounds still frighten the girl, she suffers from nightmares and cannot control her bladder. With a mother working as a domestic helper in the Middle East and relatives unwilling to take her in, she now lives in a juvenile shelter in the Sri Lankan capital. "The child has no other place to go," Gnanakan says. "We're just hoping the mother will come back."
When Whitney-Johnson first arrived and met young girls who had survived sexual abuse, she says it opened her eyes "to the reality that many children face in Sri Lanka." The girls she worked with were "survivors of incest, and many of them had mothers who were working abroad, leaving them in the care of alcoholic fathers or stepfathers." As they matured, some had the courage to take legal action, but "as a result, they faced years of court cases," Whitney-Johnson says.
(MORE: Sri Lankan Maids Become Victims in Saudi Arabia)
While statutory protection for abused children exists, "procedures for investigation and prosecution of child abuse, witness protection and support for the victim" are all deficient, UNICEF says. Tellingly, a third of cases pending in Sri Lanka's high courts are those involving children, who wait a harrowing five to eight years to get justice, if at all. "The corridors of justice for children are very long and very dark," is how Hossaini puts it. As court dates are awaited, the perpetrators often roam free while their victims must live in foster homes or shelters.
The authorities are showing greater willingness to face up to the problem. There are now 36 protection bureaus for women and children in police stations across the country. Special courts to fast-track child-abuse cases have also been set up — there is one in suburban Colombo and another in the northern city of Jaffna. However, the dimensions of the crisis remain enormous: over 10,000 child-abuse cases are currently pending across all courts, and more are being added all the time.
Sri Lanka Struggles to Contain a Growing Epidemic of Child Abuse | TIME.com
***************************
Child Rape On The Rise In Sri Lanka
By Feizal Samath -
A spate of child rape cases in Sri Lanka has angered child rights activists and moved the government to consider tightening the relevant laws and making the offence punishable with the death sentence.
A government statement released in parliament in May said that of the 1,450 female rape cases reported in 2011, child rape accounted for 1,169, alerting authorities and activists to a rising trend.
Earlier this month, police said in a statement that over 700 complaints of rape or abuse of children were filed in the first half of the year, and that, on average, at least four cases were being reported daily.
But, according to the National Child Protection Authority (NCPA), the situation is far worse than what is being reported to the police and the authority estimates that over 20,000 cases of child abuse may occurred in the first half of this year.
Among the reasons for such abuse, as reported in the NCPA statement, are insecurity of children, popularity of mobile phones with internet facilities among the youth, access to pornography, increasing substance abuse and lack of sex education.
An October 2011 study of child abuse in Sri Lanka's north-central region – where unsettled conditions prevail following the end of three decades of armed separatist militancy in 2009 – showed that 30 percent of the cases were of female minors (below 15 years) having consensual sex with a male partner.
The balance 70 percent of cases were attributed to the "strength, power and dominance of perpetrators who could be relatives, teachers or religious dignitaries," a senior prosecutor at the attorney general's office told IPS asking not to be named. "While we do our part, society also needs to take a serious look at this issue," he said.
The trend of powerful people preying on minor girls is not confined to the north and east of the island country. Recently, a 13-year-old girl identified four men, including a local politician belonging to the ruling United People's Freedom Alliance (UPFA), of gang raping her.
Another UPFA politician, the head of the local council in the southern town of Akuressa, is presently in custody for the alleged abuse of a 14-year-old girl.
The Women and Media Collective (WMC), a campaign group, has denounced these alleged crimes, saying Sri Lanka has become a society where "perpetrators of heinous crimes against women and children can live with little fear of the law."
Responding to such allegations, Tissa Karaliyadda, child development and women's affairs minister, told reporters earlier this month that he has drawn up plans to tighten the laws that deal with child abuse, including making it punishable with the death sentence.
Authorities are also trying to sharply reduce the time taken – six years on average – to complete a prosecution, and thereby reduce impunity to offenders who often get easy bail.
Dr. Hemamal Jayawardena, child protection specialist from UNICEF, Colombo, said the number of cases appear to have risen due to an increase in reporting centres, particularly in the former war-torn northern region. People are also more sensitive to this issue and coming forward with information, he said.
"But I think there are many runaways (under-age couples eloping) cases and sex with consent which appear in the first complaint (to the police) as suspected rape and provide somewhat misleading data," he told IPS.
Under Sri Lankan laws, those under 16 years are defined as minors and sex with a minor is considered rape, with or without consent.
A maximum jail term of 10 years is imposed on offenders while the authorities are examining proposals to enforce the death penalty and make it a non-bailable offence.
Under a project assisted by the United Nations Children's Fund UNICEF, law enforcement authorities are experimenting with a rapid three-month process involving selected courts across the island to reduce the time taken to dispose cases of child abuse or rape.
Menaca Calyaneratne, director of advocacy at Save the Children's Colombo office, warns about a new breed of abusers called the 'professional perpetrator' who are "professionals in their own fields but carefully choose an area to work that gives them unhindered access to children in order to abuse them.
Fields such as education, sports, childcare organisations and children's institutions harbor predators such as principals, teachers and sports coaches are known to abuse their positions, she said adding that about 90 percent of child abuse is perpetrated by someone known to the victim.
"We used to tell children to be careful of strangers, but that does not seem to be valid anymore," Calyaneratne told IPS.
Lack of awareness of sexual and reproductive health among teenagers in villages is a serious problem. At a village, some 75 km north of Colombo, a social worker said there have been at least five cases reported this month of 13-15 year-old girls striking up affairs with 22-year-olds, mostly soldiers, and eloping.
"When there is a problem, the girls come back and the parents file a complaint, it becomes a case suspected rape," the worker said asking not to be identified for fear of repercussions.
Sri Lanka which had about 120,000 soldiers in 2008 more than tripled its troop strength in order to defeat separatist militancy and also ensure that there is no resurgence.
Police blame parents for lack of supervision of their children while also citing women working abroad as domestics and leaving the children under the care of a relative as some of the reasons that lead to child abuse.
Sumithra Fernando, director at Women in Need, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that works with battered women, says parents are often indifferent. "They are busy with their jobs and often unaware of what their children are up to," she told IPS.
Women's groups say it is important for fathers to take an interest in the welfare of their daughters.
"It's a social obligation for the father to share responsibilities," argues Sepali Kottegoda, director at the Women and Media Collective. "When a girl is abused it is the mother who is blamed – rarely the father," she said.
"Sri Lankan society has also become very violent and the situation is such that women and children have become very vulnerable," Kottegoda told IPS.
Prof. Siripala Hettige from Colombo University, an eminant sociologist, has a different perspective and links child abuse to young people steadily migrating from the villages to Colombo and other urban centres.
"The vast majority of school-leavers don't have proper jobs. They come to the city but can't hold down stable employment. And with the average age of marriage steadily going up from 22 to 28, there are a lot of very frustrated people around," Hettige told IPS.
This group of young people keeps moving around, looking for sexual opportunities, Hettige explained.
http://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/child-rape-on-the-rise-in-sri-lanka/
****************************
Enjoy, Mr Ostrich!
This may interest you since it will prove that I don't have a sick mind, and instead you Sri Lankanese have it by the bushels!
Sex tourists prey on Sri Lanka's children: Beach resorts are hunting-grounds for European child abusers and pornographic video makers. Tim McGirk reports from Colombo
SOME German men were in a hotel room with three Sri Lankan village boys, aged seven, 11 and 14, having sex and filming it. They would sell the pornographic video back in Europe. The men had rented the room for a month. Downstairs, pacing around helplessly, was Maureen Seneviratne, a child rights' advocate.
First she pleaded with the manager of the guest-house, a clean and proper-looking establishment shaded in the coconut groves behind Negombo beach. It was known through paedophile circles in Britain, Sweden and Germany, and while other hotels in this popular resort suffered many vacancies, this guest-house was always full. 'I'm not God to know what goes on inside my rooms,' the manager replied with a shrug. 'But I tell you, I won't bring my own children here - not around these foreigners.'
This was the last day of the Germans' filming. They were turning the three boys loose after having subjected them to a month of degradation and sexual abuse. In Europe, such behaviour would have brought them stiff prison sentences if caught. But in Sri Lanka, foreigners are never jailed for sex offences against children. The pay-off for each boy was a carrier bag with a box of cereal, milk powder, chocolates, a T-shirt and dollars 25. The Germans gave one boy a bicycle. 'He kept riding the bicycle round and round the garden, but the look in the boy's eyes was like something out of the Omen - intense and angry. Demonic,' Ms Seneviratne said. 'He was proud to own the bicycle but so, so ashamed at how he got it.'
An ebullient woman, with grandchildren, Ms Seneviratne confronted the German video cameraman as he came out of the room. 'How can you do this?' she sputtered angrily. The German rubbed his fingers together. 'Money, money, money,' he replied. One United States study estimated that more than 250 million copies of videos on child pornography are circulating world-wide, and most were filmed in the Philippines, Thailand and Sri Lanka. One raid, on a home in a Stockholm suburb in July 1992, yielded stacks of letters between paedophiles sharing descriptions of children's bodies and sex organs. Found in the haul were 300 hours of child pornography videos, mostly filmed in Sri Lanka with titles such as Boy Love in Negombo and Hikkaduwa - the Child Sex Paradise.
Sri Lanka is becoming notorious as a destination for paedophiles. The scale of child prostitution is probably larger in the Philippines and in Thailand, but in Sri Lanka the problem is growing fastest. And, in Sri Lanka, nearly all the victims are boys, aged between six and 14. Guesses of how many children have sex with tourists vary wildly between the government figure of 1,000 and some social activists' claim of 30,000. It appears that Western sex tourists visiting Asia are demanding child prostitutes in the mistaken belief that they are more likely to be free of Aids.
Sri Lankan boys are easy prey. Studies show that a paedophile is likely to be a middle-aged male professional, such as a doctor, a banker, a teacher or even a clergyman. Sometimes he is married, and often he suffered abuse as a child himself. He seduces with little gifts and by playing games. The number of children he seduces often runs into the hundreds. The excuse he gives is that the children enjoy it. Sri Lankan children are susceptible because they are naturally friendly and desperately poor.
A boy can earn as much fellating a tourist - 200 rupees (pounds 2.25) - as carrying bricks for 12 hours. Relations between boys and girls are discouraged until marriage, and until then many Sri Lankans take a discreet and casual attitude towards homosexuality. Some boys are lured into organised gangs who often run secluded villas co-financed by foreign paedophiles, while others have casual trysts on the beach with foreigners. Motor-rickshaw drivers outside the hotels frequently act as pimps.
At Mt Lavinia, a beach resort near Colombo, a middle-aged European was observed walking in the surf. He approached a young boy, whirled slowly on the ball of his foot. Then, with his toe, he wrote a number in the sand. The boy agreed and the two walked off holding hands. When a social worker mentioned seeing this awkward ballet movement, she was told by a colleague from Thailand that it was a code used by paedophiles for picking up boys.
Even more shocking is that some Sri Lankan parents condone it and rent out rooms in their shacks where their children satisfy the paedophile. 'One father told me: 'what did it matter, my son won't get pregnant',' recalled Ms Seneviratne. The foreigner's cash is offset by the child contracting such diseases as Aids and lasting sexual trauma. No Aids study has yet been made on the 'beach boys'.
Following the lead of Thailand and the Philippines, Sri Lanka is swiftly moving to pass tough laws to make abusing children punishable by up to 10 years in jail. Sweden, Norway and Germany are considering legislation that would make paedophilia a crime even if committed by one of their nationals in a faraway country.
So far, though, no foreigner has been jailed for child abuse in Sri Lanka and only a few have been discreetly deported. Yet the trade continues. A cyclist in the southern resort of Hikkaduwa was stopped by a woman demanding 'bon-bons for babies'. Having gained his attention, the woman offered the sexual favours of the small boy accompanying her.
(Photograph omitted)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-tim-mcgirk-reports-from-colombo-1407820.html
*******************************
This report is of Aug 13, 2013 and today is 14 Aug 2013 (just one day old!)
Sri Lanka Struggles to Contain a Growing Epidemic of Child Abuse
Aug. 13, 2013
War-scarred Sri Lanka is experiencing an alarming scourge of child abuse, and the apparatus for dealing with the problem, UNICEF says, is "grossly inadequate."
Every day, three to five children are raped in the island nation. Police statistics show the total number of child rapes in 2011 as 1,463; the figure jumped to 1,759 cases in 2012, according to a parliamentary report. Police records also give a total of just over 2,000 sexual offenses against children, besides rape, in 2011; child-molestation cases in 2012 soared to over 5,000, according to parliamentary figures. The total number of all crimes against children — which besides sex crimes include crimes of violence, abduction, trafficking and other offenses — increased by a dramatic 64% between 2011 and 2012.
(MORE: Amid Abuse and Fear, Tamils Continue to Flee Sri Lanka)
Some of the increases can be explained by growing awareness of child rights leading to increased reporting of incidents, but Sri Lanka remains a country where "the family unit is extremely tight-knit and the honor of the individual reflects on the entire family," says Alia Whitney-Johnson, the founder of an NGO working with survivors of sexual abuse in Sri Lanka, who was interviewed by TIME via e-mail. "It is extremely difficult to report abuse, particularly incest."
That means it's unlikely that greater reporting is behind any but a small proportion of the growing figures. Instead, "the incidence of statutory rape and child abuse in Sri Lanka is a growing problem," UNICEF says.
The traumas suffered during Sri Lanka's 26-year civil war, which ended in 2009, may have a role to play. "When the dust settles, that's when it hits them. That's when you see severe violent reactions to small things that under normal circumstances would not have happened," explains Reza Hossaini, UNICEF's Sri Lanka representative. "It's a combination of a culture of silence and culture of impunity," he says, that breeds the "continuation of violence and abuse."
(MORE: Three Years After War's End, Sri Lanka Is Only Just Beginning to Make Peace)
But a more important factor may be the growing number of Sri Lankan women who seek to alleviate poverty at home by taking jobs overseas as domestic helpers. The children they leave behind are often defenseless against abusive fathers and predatory male relatives. (Even so, a comparison with the Philippines — another country where large numbers of women have been obliged to find work overseas — is disconcerting. Based on available official statistics, there are roughly 17 cases of child abuse for every 100,000 people in Sri Lanka; in the Philippines, there are just six cases per 100,000 head of population.)
Typical of the case files that cross the desk of Esther Gnanakan, a child psychologist at a Colombo NGO, is that of a 10-year-old girl sexually abused by her father over a year ago. Sudden movements and sounds still frighten the girl, she suffers from nightmares and cannot control her bladder. With a mother working as a domestic helper in the Middle East and relatives unwilling to take her in, she now lives in a juvenile shelter in the Sri Lankan capital. "The child has no other place to go," Gnanakan says. "We're just hoping the mother will come back."
When Whitney-Johnson first arrived and met young girls who had survived sexual abuse, she says it opened her eyes "to the reality that many children face in Sri Lanka." The girls she worked with were "survivors of incest, and many of them had mothers who were working abroad, leaving them in the care of alcoholic fathers or stepfathers." As they matured, some had the courage to take legal action, but "as a result, they faced years of court cases," Whitney-Johnson says.
(MORE: Sri Lankan Maids Become Victims in Saudi Arabia)
While statutory protection for abused children exists, "procedures for investigation and prosecution of child abuse, witness protection and support for the victim" are all deficient, UNICEF says. Tellingly, a third of cases pending in Sri Lanka's high courts are those involving children, who wait a harrowing five to eight years to get justice, if at all. "The corridors of justice for children are very long and very dark," is how Hossaini puts it. As court dates are awaited, the perpetrators often roam free while their victims must live in foster homes or shelters.
The authorities are showing greater willingness to face up to the problem. There are now 36 protection bureaus for women and children in police stations across the country. Special courts to fast-track child-abuse cases have also been set up — there is one in suburban Colombo and another in the northern city of Jaffna. However, the dimensions of the crisis remain enormous: over 10,000 child-abuse cases are currently pending across all courts, and more are being added all the time.
Sri Lanka Struggles to Contain a Growing Epidemic of Child Abuse | TIME.com
***************************
Child Rape On The Rise In Sri Lanka
By Feizal Samath -
A spate of child rape cases in Sri Lanka has angered child rights activists and moved the government to consider tightening the relevant laws and making the offence punishable with the death sentence.
A government statement released in parliament in May said that of the 1,450 female rape cases reported in 2011, child rape accounted for 1,169, alerting authorities and activists to a rising trend.
Earlier this month, police said in a statement that over 700 complaints of rape or abuse of children were filed in the first half of the year, and that, on average, at least four cases were being reported daily.
But, according to the National Child Protection Authority (NCPA), the situation is far worse than what is being reported to the police and the authority estimates that over 20,000 cases of child abuse may occurred in the first half of this year.
Among the reasons for such abuse, as reported in the NCPA statement, are insecurity of children, popularity of mobile phones with internet facilities among the youth, access to pornography, increasing substance abuse and lack of sex education.
An October 2011 study of child abuse in Sri Lanka's north-central region – where unsettled conditions prevail following the end of three decades of armed separatist militancy in 2009 – showed that 30 percent of the cases were of female minors (below 15 years) having consensual sex with a male partner.
The balance 70 percent of cases were attributed to the "strength, power and dominance of perpetrators who could be relatives, teachers or religious dignitaries," a senior prosecutor at the attorney general's office told IPS asking not to be named. "While we do our part, society also needs to take a serious look at this issue," he said.
The trend of powerful people preying on minor girls is not confined to the north and east of the island country. Recently, a 13-year-old girl identified four men, including a local politician belonging to the ruling United People's Freedom Alliance (UPFA), of gang raping her.
Another UPFA politician, the head of the local council in the southern town of Akuressa, is presently in custody for the alleged abuse of a 14-year-old girl.
The Women and Media Collective (WMC), a campaign group, has denounced these alleged crimes, saying Sri Lanka has become a society where "perpetrators of heinous crimes against women and children can live with little fear of the law."
Responding to such allegations, Tissa Karaliyadda, child development and women's affairs minister, told reporters earlier this month that he has drawn up plans to tighten the laws that deal with child abuse, including making it punishable with the death sentence.
Authorities are also trying to sharply reduce the time taken – six years on average – to complete a prosecution, and thereby reduce impunity to offenders who often get easy bail.
Dr. Hemamal Jayawardena, child protection specialist from UNICEF, Colombo, said the number of cases appear to have risen due to an increase in reporting centres, particularly in the former war-torn northern region. People are also more sensitive to this issue and coming forward with information, he said.
"But I think there are many runaways (under-age couples eloping) cases and sex with consent which appear in the first complaint (to the police) as suspected rape and provide somewhat misleading data," he told IPS.
Under Sri Lankan laws, those under 16 years are defined as minors and sex with a minor is considered rape, with or without consent.
A maximum jail term of 10 years is imposed on offenders while the authorities are examining proposals to enforce the death penalty and make it a non-bailable offence.
Under a project assisted by the United Nations Children's Fund UNICEF, law enforcement authorities are experimenting with a rapid three-month process involving selected courts across the island to reduce the time taken to dispose cases of child abuse or rape.
Menaca Calyaneratne, director of advocacy at Save the Children's Colombo office, warns about a new breed of abusers called the 'professional perpetrator' who are "professionals in their own fields but carefully choose an area to work that gives them unhindered access to children in order to abuse them.
Fields such as education, sports, childcare organisations and children's institutions harbor predators such as principals, teachers and sports coaches are known to abuse their positions, she said adding that about 90 percent of child abuse is perpetrated by someone known to the victim.
"We used to tell children to be careful of strangers, but that does not seem to be valid anymore," Calyaneratne told IPS.
Lack of awareness of sexual and reproductive health among teenagers in villages is a serious problem. At a village, some 75 km north of Colombo, a social worker said there have been at least five cases reported this month of 13-15 year-old girls striking up affairs with 22-year-olds, mostly soldiers, and eloping.
"When there is a problem, the girls come back and the parents file a complaint, it becomes a case suspected rape," the worker said asking not to be identified for fear of repercussions.
Sri Lanka which had about 120,000 soldiers in 2008 more than tripled its troop strength in order to defeat separatist militancy and also ensure that there is no resurgence.
Police blame parents for lack of supervision of their children while also citing women working abroad as domestics and leaving the children under the care of a relative as some of the reasons that lead to child abuse.
Sumithra Fernando, director at Women in Need, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that works with battered women, says parents are often indifferent. "They are busy with their jobs and often unaware of what their children are up to," she told IPS.
Women's groups say it is important for fathers to take an interest in the welfare of their daughters.
"It's a social obligation for the father to share responsibilities," argues Sepali Kottegoda, director at the Women and Media Collective. "When a girl is abused it is the mother who is blamed – rarely the father," she said.
"Sri Lankan society has also become very violent and the situation is such that women and children have become very vulnerable," Kottegoda told IPS.
Prof. Siripala Hettige from Colombo University, an eminant sociologist, has a different perspective and links child abuse to young people steadily migrating from the villages to Colombo and other urban centres.
"The vast majority of school-leavers don't have proper jobs. They come to the city but can't hold down stable employment. And with the average age of marriage steadily going up from 22 to 28, there are a lot of very frustrated people around," Hettige told IPS.
This group of young people keeps moving around, looking for sexual opportunities, Hettige explained.
http://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/child-rape-on-the-rise-in-sri-lanka/
****************************
Enjoy, Mr Ostrich!
Last edited:
