A brutalised childhood

Last Tuesday the day had been hot, and the coolness of the evening invited one to stay outside. I sat on the door steps, and after a few minutes Peter, 16 or 17 years old, sat next to me. He was silent for quite a time, then he started talking, stammering and struggling with the words, as if every word was like a heavy stone he had to spit out.

Peter is among a group of former street children living in a house with a person taking care of them. The house is comfortable, and there is a positive climate. Sometimes, the laughter and the happy voices make one forget the past these young lives have had to face. Yet the tension, the fears, the horror of a life spent in the street can surface and explode with the suddenness and rage of a thunderstorm. Peter – he tells me – has a burden on his soul: for years he has sold, for a pittance, his young body to tourists along the coast. Now he needs to tell his story, he cannot keep it inside any longer. In the shaft of light coming from the open door, with the background of the other children chatting inside, I see the expression of his face going from the mask of indifference he had put on at the beginning, to a grimace of disgust. He tells of furtive encounters, of the loathing for the people and the false smile and happiness, of times when he has suffered beatings and times when, in agreement with his friends, they had beaten and robbed the ‘customer’.

Statistically speaking, Peter’s story is just a number. For him it is everything. He can see the world and the people only from its perspective. All adults are perverts, all other children support you only if it is in their interest. There is nothing else in life. To help him to change and to grow as a normal person will be a daunting task.

A respectful tourism

These days people like to speak of Eco-tourism, that is to say an ecological tourism which is respectful of the environment. This new tourism according to its proponents, has little or no negative impact on natural habitat, wildlife, or water quality. it does not require massive investments in transport, infrastructure or personnel. Eco-tourism is a welcome improvement on the tourism policy that has transformed some of the most beautiful places in the world, like Mombasa town and its beaches, into a succession of pretentious and standardised hotels.

Very good. But how about a tourism respectful of human beings?

There is a myth that tourism is an encounter between people and cultures. Unfortunately, too often tourists carry with their luggage all their prejudices against the people they visit. In this case, tourism does not help to overcome ecological problems, let alone local degradation, desperation, and misery. It even deepens the people’s feeling of alienation and exploitation. The cost a tourist pays for two weeks in Kenya is a small fortune for the hotel waiter or the beach attendant, and this economic reality is made more divisive by the cynical attitudes of the tourists who not only are not ready to treat the locals as fellow human beings but want to exploit their misery to obtain cheap services and sexual indulgence. Then tourism becomes a way that desecrates human beings and therefore insults God. Women and children are among those most vulnerable to exploitation.

This is not Eco-tourism, but Ego-tourism, tourism at the service of the most egotistical human tendencies, and although tourism usually does not cause prostitution, it accelerates it.

Why now, in particular, such an explosion of child abuse? Are these cases really on the increase, or are people simply less afraid to speak about them? It is difficult to prove any of the two possibilities, since such offences are surrounded by feelings of shame and fear. In many cases, as with Peter, the truth comes to the surface several years after the offence has been committed.

Children are exploited as cheap labour, as sex workers, sent to the streets to beg, used as decoys in robberies. Robbed of the normal life they should have, instead of playing with toys, they become themselves toys in the hands of unscrupulous adults, sometimes of their father or mother.

However, children are not our property, they are not the property of their parents. Normal good sense sees in them the hope of our future, Christian faith teaches that they are first of all God’s children, destined to inherit the Kingdom of their Father. Those who humiliate, degrade, defile them are killing tomorrow’s soul.