In the Dominican Republic, Caminante Walks with Children Who Tread a Difficult Path

February 13, 2007

Hunger and poverty force many children to look for work. In the desperate search for survival, many fall prey to the sex industry. In 1997, the United Nations International Children's Educational Fund estimated that more than a million children, overwhelmingly female, are forced into prostitution every year.

Many of these children find livelihoods as sex workers in the shadows of tourism, the world's largest industry with revenues of almost $500 billion a year. The Dominican Republic received over two million visitors in 2000. Some 30,000 children and adolescents under 18 there are involved in the sex industry, two-third of them girls. In 2004 the U.S. had direct investments of 1 billion in the Caribbean country, much of it in the tourism industry. In 2005 the Dominican Republic signed the CAFTA-DR free trade agreement with the U.S.

In the Dominican Republican beachside resort of Boca Chica, Church World Service’s Regional Program on Vulnerable Children and Youth supports the work of Caminante (“One who walks the path”). The project provides a safe space where hundreds of youth and their families receive counseling and participate in recreational and formation programs. Caminante also coordinates with local government and non-governmental agencies to provide services to victims of sexual abuse and exploitation.

To increase awareness of the plight of children, CWS advocates support for the Convention on the Rights of the Child at the United Nations. Somalia and the U.S. have not signed the Convention, a human rights treaty adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1989 to ensure children’s health and safety.

Children will be the focus of Ecumenical Advocacy Days this year. The annual gathering attracts people of faith from all over the U.S. Church World Service sponsors and helps shape the conference. Read about other ways CWS advocates for vulnerable children and works with partners to meet their needs.

With Elizabeth Carrasquillo of the Disciples' and United Church of Christ's Global Ministries translating, Caminante's Executive Director Denisse Pichardo spoke about the organization during a recent visit to the US.

Church World Service: What are Caminante's latest accomplishments?

Denisse Pichardo: Our biggest success is to be able to take children from the streets and return them to their homes. We’ve placed five children in foster care and we’re working with the families to take them back home. We’ve successfully built a network of support, which has been beneficial to the holistic health of the children. Collaborating with the different community organizations, government institutions, health and education offices and children’s services has been one of our most recent accomplishments. Our thrust now is to integrate the communities with the programs, to help the communities collaborate with us in working with these children. Along with other organizations, we are doing advocacy work. This has allowed us to speak about abuse by police or representatives of government agencies who rough up the children. We’ve begun to expand our program beyond Boca Chica. Other people are learning about Caminante. This has increased our credibility.

CWS: During a recent visit to the Dominican Republic, CWS Executive Director and Rev. John L. McCullough met with "multipliers," a group of high school students who steer their peers away from exploitation of commercial sex work. Please describe what the "multipliers" do.

Pichardo: Multipliers provide leadership in our peer counseling program. They themselves have been in the program for some time and know the 300 or so children in the program. They have seen them on the streets. They go visit them. Two of them in our education program go into the streets to help our adult staff become involved in these children’s lives. We bring the “multipliers” in every Saturday morning so that they can be trained on issues that they themselves identify. For example we’ve trained them on HIV/AIDS so they can speak about how the children can protect themselves, and about birth control. We’ve trained them to be able to detect where child abuse is happening. They have the responsibility in schools to speak to the children on these themes and on the causes and effects of sexual exploitation and how to protect themselves from being abused. They are selected very carefully. They become agents of their communities. When something is happening in their community, the children go to the multiplier.It has encouraged children to study and as a result more are coming into the program.

CWS: Does Caminante help young people find safe jobs in the tourism industry?

Pichardo: We train young people in interviewing and job search skills. With street children it’s more difficult because they have abandoned school and they are illiterate, or mixed up with drugs so we have to wait for a period of time. But when they’re trained and literate and able to handle a craft, we tell them how to look for a job. We send them to airports, hotels and shipping companies where many of the cruise lines come in. Eight of our youth are working in the Boca Chica hotel industry. But there’s a shortage of work opportunities. The Dominican Republic has 34 percent unemployment. Hotels often prefer unskilled people so they can pay them less. So our children have to look outside Boca Chica, either in the capital or in the north. Many leave the country, going to Miami or Puerto Rico.

CWS: Caminante is a member of the national commission on the Code for the Protection of Children and Adolescents (Law136-03), which the Dominican Republic adopted in 2004. What impact has the law had?

Pichardo: We have this wonderful law but it is rarely carried out. Of all the people we have complained about only three have been followed up on. Part of the reason is that there is another law that hinders the child protection law: to be prosecuted you have to be caught in the act. We don’t have the investigative capacity to follow up on this. We’ve been working with the International Labor Organization over the past two years, and through them, we were recently able to have a tourist deported. One person is in jail in the DR. But you can buy your way out of anything even though the authorities say they are strict. It’s very difficult to prosecute someone, but we don’t give up.

We also refer expatriate offenders to ECPAT ( End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes). They help get the perpetrator out of the country and prosecute him or her under the laws of the country of origin. But many offenders work as business people. They have relationships with the DR that cover their actions. Our biggest industry is tourism and there is no interest in doing anything that’s going to reduce tourism revenues.

CWS: In 1997 CWS published Caution: Children at Work, a Facts Have Faces resource which told of Joan Rosario Castro, a 17-year-old who shined shoes in Boca Chica. Where is Joan now?

Pichardo: He’s living in Miami with a relative. He communicates with us and keeps in contact with some of the leaders of sports programs in Caminante, supplying them with equipment they need.