Protect started working in the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica in mid-2008 by following and investigating suspected child sex offenders. A team of investigators watches and follows suspected offenders in order to put together evidence of abuse. They also gather information on the identity and history of those under investigation, as well as interviewing possible victims.
The Dominican Republic is a mid-income developing country. Its 9 million inhabitants depend for the most part on agriculture, commerce and the service industry. Tourism is particularly important, bringing in over a billion dollars to the domestic economy per year.
The annual growth rate is over 5%, although this growth has not improved the standard of living of most Dominicans.
73% of the Dominican population have mixed heritage, descending form Europeans and Africans. The most significant minority are the Haitians, who make up 14% of the population.
Commercial sexual exploitation of minors has traditionally existed, both in rural and urban areas, since the times of colonialism and slavery. During the 1970s, the increase in tourism led to an increase in cases of commercial exploitation of children by foreigners. Nowadays, children who are exploited by the sex trade have moved from behind the closed doors of businesses to the streets, parks and tourist areas.
In different parts of the Dominican Republic there have been reports of the sex trade, prostitution, pornography, sex trafficking and sex tourism. In tourist zones, most of the abusers are men aged between 30 and 50 years old.
Some of the foreigners who are accused of sexually exploiting children are arrested and deported, or are "invited" to leave the country, but this is not enforced.
Many of the sexually abused minors are street children who beg to survive. Rural migrants, orphans, those who have been thrown out of or who have left their homes and children as young as ten include those who live on the streets and are vulnerable to sexual exploitation.
Sometimes they are girls of 13 or 14 years, poor and with no education, who under the orders of a pimp, ply their services in urban areas and shopping streets.
On the beaches and streets, in nightclubs and hotels, children of both sexes fall victim to sexual exploitation by tourists in return for money or gifts. There are even cases of “concubinage” between children and foreign residents in the country who approach poor families and pay them to maintain an apparently matrimonial relationship.
According to UNICEF, more than 25,000 minors are prostituted in the Dominican Republic.
The National Childhood Council (CONANI) is the government institution that defines policies on childhood and adolescence. In November 2007, it passed “Guidelines for Public Policy to help children and teenagers living in the streets". Other government institutions associated with the prevention of the commercial sexual exploitation of minors are the offices of the Secretary of State for Women, the Director of Mental Health of the Secretary of State of Public Health and the Secretary of State for Tourism (SET).
Although the Dominican Republic has no clear and specific legislation on commercial child sex exploitation, there is abundant regulation on the subject in the judicial system.
One example is law 136-03, the Statute addressing the System for Protecting the Fundamental Rights of Children and Teenagers. This code, which carries a penalty of 30 years in prison, prohibits the use of children and teenagers in the sex trade, prostitution and pornography. It also establishes the right for abuse against them to be reported and image rights. The law also sets out the penalties for crimes such as the holding and illegal trafficking of children, using a child or teenager or distributing images of them in productions of a pornographic or sexualnature, and the commercial sexual exploitation of a child or teenager, the latter carrying a term of 3 to 10 years in prison.
Law 24-97 of the Penal Code addresses crimes such as the prostitution of minors (both the act and the intention) and the punishment for illegally taking a child overseas for profit. However, this law does not cover the crime of commercial sexual exploitation of children. On an international level, the Dominican Republic has accessed to the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and the use of children in pornography, passed by the United Nations in 2002. It did ratify and sign the Convention on the Rights of the child in 1989, and Convention 182 of the International Labor Organization (ILO) on the worst forms of child labor and the immediate action to be taken for its elimination.
In 2003, the country introduced a National Action Plan against Child Abuse and Exploitation, which includes legal, preventative, and repressive strategies, as well as strategies for caring for the victims.
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