By Andrew Gumbel
Published: 07 December 2007
Mothers prostitute themselves in full view of their children. Predatory relatives sexually molest children with the parents doing nothing to stop them. Husbands beat wives in front of children, who are themselves treated like slaves and also beaten. Every sort of child abuse is to be found in the one-room bamboo shacks of La Isla Trinitaria which are built directly over the filthy mangrove swamps at the mouth of the River Guayas. It is the worst urban slum in Ecuador.
After her first four years of trying to help the street children from this area in Ecuador's main port, Guayaquil, it became clear to Sylvia Reyes that for all their material deprivations their biggest problem was not poverty. It was the cycles of neglect and abuse that had plagued their families for generations – cycles that made it impossible to achieve progress simply by sending the children to school, or making sure they ate properly, or tending to their medical needs.
From that epiphany came a whole new approach to helping some of the world's most desperate children: Reyes and the Ecuadorean family workers in her organisation, Juconi – which is funded by the International Children's Trust, one of the three charities being supported in this year's Independent Christmas Appeal – decided there was no point tending to the children unless they also tended to the parents and the broader family.
What they found in the most benighted neighbourhood in Guayaquil was household after household where the parents had, essentially, come to expect their offspring to parent them rather than the other way around. "Typically, we'd find the mother in a hammock, knocked out from drugs or drinking or just tired," said Ms Reyes. "The kids would go out and make money and bring home food. And they'd be expected to tend to the mother's emotional needs, too – console her if she was sad, give her hugs. What we were looking at was distorted parenting."
It is the terrible abuse this fosters that prompts children as young as eight to try their luck on the streets by themselves. Even if they don't run away, they learn the hard way how to fend for themselves – selling sweets on the streets, dancing or singing on buses, acting as informal car park attendants, or selling roses and cigarettes in nightclubs.
In other words, they are routinely deprived of any meaningful kind of childhood. Juconi's experience is that the parents, more often than not, suffered the same deprivation – and thus have no idea what healthy parenting even looks like. "Both parents and children have real attachment problems," said Ms Reyes. "It's not reasonable to ask these parents to start looking after their children because they have no idea what looking after a child means."
In Ecuador, Juconi (short for "juntos con los ninos" – together with the children) restricts its focus to children still living at home, because that affords the best opportunity to improve the lives of the whole family unit. Typically, its "educators", as they are known, will meet working children on the street, initiate contact and then get the child to secure an invitation to the family home.
Rather than lecture the parents, the approach is one of acknowledging how hard family life is and offering help. "We ask: 'What is it you need?' We do things for them. We show we are reliable, doing what we say and turning up on time. That's where we begin," explained Ms Reyes. "Slowly, we start to do things alongside them, as one might with a child, and then encourage them to do things for themselves."
Often, these families are clueless as to how to take advantage of the health and social services provided by the Ecuadorean government, so Juconi helps the parents get identity cards and goes with them to clinics and soup kitchens to make sure they receive what they are entitled to.
Once the parents have learned to trust the educators, the parents are encouraged to talk about their own childhoods, which invariably turn out to be as precarious as the ones they are inflicting on their own children.
"At some point they will have the insight that what they are doing to their children is what was done to them," said Ms Reyes. "We don't tell them – they have to realise that for themselves. That's when we can start talking about how to repair the damage... we encourage them to develop a personal mission, so that their own suffering is not for nothing. That's when things start to really move."
Slowly, the parents rethink everything, from the way they spend the little money they have to the ways in which they can support their children, rather than the other way around. They use less of their spare cash to buy alcohol, cigarettes or drugs, and more to buy food and school supplies for their children.
After a while, they will go out and get jobs – usually informal, low-paid work. Some can qualify for micro-loans to set up their own modest businesses.
This, though, is a process that can take years. "It starts with emotional competence," said Ms Reyes . "Other competences get built on top of that."
As with the parents, so with the children. The most successful graduates of Juconi Ecuador's programme have not only finished school but have gone on to university. Ms Reyes hopes, over the next few years, to demonstrate that the therapeutic technique she has pioneered has a lasting effect. It's still too soon to tell – the oldest graduates are in their early twenties and have only just started to produce babies.
Juconi's work has been a mixture of practical experience and theoretical input from some of the world's leading child psychologists – Gianna Williams, of the Tavistock Clinic in London; Janine Roberts, of the University of Massachusetts; Sandra Bloom, an American psychiatrist, and others.
Ms Reyes is herself an educational psychologist, trained in Britain, who came to Ecuador in 1994 to work with Juconi's founders, Gabriel Benitez and Sarah Thomas. Mr Benitez died very suddenly of a mystery virus in 1996 and Ms Thomas, fearing for the lives of the couple's two young children, decided to return to Mexico where they had established the charity a few years earlier. That left Ms Reyes in charge in Guayaquil, where, with the help of colleagues in Ecuador and Mexico, she has slowly grown the operation and treated about 1,000 children in all.
Clearly, the Juconi approach has applications in all parts of the world, not just poverty-stricken slums. Ms Reyes was highly critical of the approach used by many social service agencies in Britain and the US, which tend to focus on punitive measures against inadequate parents and breaking up family units.
"The first instinct we want to do is blame these parents, but we have to stop ourselves," she said. "It is possible to take child protection measures without marginalising the parents to such an extent that you can't work with them." The work of Juconi Ecuador is living proof of that.
After her first four years of trying to help the street children from this area in Ecuador's main port, Guayaquil, it became clear to Sylvia Reyes that for all their material deprivations their biggest problem was not poverty. It was the cycles of neglect and abuse that had plagued their families for generations – cycles that made it impossible to achieve progress simply by sending the children to school, or making sure they ate properly, or tending to their medical needs.
From that epiphany came a whole new approach to helping some of the world's most desperate children: Reyes and the Ecuadorean family workers in her organisation, Juconi – which is funded by the International Children's Trust, one of the three charities being supported in this year's Independent Christmas Appeal – decided there was no point tending to the children unless they also tended to the parents and the broader family.
What they found in the most benighted neighbourhood in Guayaquil was household after household where the parents had, essentially, come to expect their offspring to parent them rather than the other way around. "Typically, we'd find the mother in a hammock, knocked out from drugs or drinking or just tired," said Ms Reyes. "The kids would go out and make money and bring home food. And they'd be expected to tend to the mother's emotional needs, too – console her if she was sad, give her hugs. What we were looking at was distorted parenting."
It is the terrible abuse this fosters that prompts children as young as eight to try their luck on the streets by themselves. Even if they don't run away, they learn the hard way how to fend for themselves – selling sweets on the streets, dancing or singing on buses, acting as informal car park attendants, or selling roses and cigarettes in nightclubs.
In other words, they are routinely deprived of any meaningful kind of childhood. Juconi's experience is that the parents, more often than not, suffered the same deprivation – and thus have no idea what healthy parenting even looks like. "Both parents and children have real attachment problems," said Ms Reyes. "It's not reasonable to ask these parents to start looking after their children because they have no idea what looking after a child means."
In Ecuador, Juconi (short for "juntos con los ninos" – together with the children) restricts its focus to children still living at home, because that affords the best opportunity to improve the lives of the whole family unit. Typically, its "educators", as they are known, will meet working children on the street, initiate contact and then get the child to secure an invitation to the family home.
Rather than lecture the parents, the approach is one of acknowledging how hard family life is and offering help. "We ask: 'What is it you need?' We do things for them. We show we are reliable, doing what we say and turning up on time. That's where we begin," explained Ms Reyes. "Slowly, we start to do things alongside them, as one might with a child, and then encourage them to do things for themselves."
Often, these families are clueless as to how to take advantage of the health and social services provided by the Ecuadorean government, so Juconi helps the parents get identity cards and goes with them to clinics and soup kitchens to make sure they receive what they are entitled to.
Once the parents have learned to trust the educators, the parents are encouraged to talk about their own childhoods, which invariably turn out to be as precarious as the ones they are inflicting on their own children.
"At some point they will have the insight that what they are doing to their children is what was done to them," said Ms Reyes. "We don't tell them – they have to realise that for themselves. That's when we can start talking about how to repair the damage... we encourage them to develop a personal mission, so that their own suffering is not for nothing. That's when things start to really move."
Slowly, the parents rethink everything, from the way they spend the little money they have to the ways in which they can support their children, rather than the other way around. They use less of their spare cash to buy alcohol, cigarettes or drugs, and more to buy food and school supplies for their children.
After a while, they will go out and get jobs – usually informal, low-paid work. Some can qualify for micro-loans to set up their own modest businesses.
This, though, is a process that can take years. "It starts with emotional competence," said Ms Reyes . "Other competences get built on top of that."
As with the parents, so with the children. The most successful graduates of Juconi Ecuador's programme have not only finished school but have gone on to university. Ms Reyes hopes, over the next few years, to demonstrate that the therapeutic technique she has pioneered has a lasting effect. It's still too soon to tell – the oldest graduates are in their early twenties and have only just started to produce babies.
Juconi's work has been a mixture of practical experience and theoretical input from some of the world's leading child psychologists – Gianna Williams, of the Tavistock Clinic in London; Janine Roberts, of the University of Massachusetts; Sandra Bloom, an American psychiatrist, and others.
Ms Reyes is herself an educational psychologist, trained in Britain, who came to Ecuador in 1994 to work with Juconi's founders, Gabriel Benitez and Sarah Thomas. Mr Benitez died very suddenly of a mystery virus in 1996 and Ms Thomas, fearing for the lives of the couple's two young children, decided to return to Mexico where they had established the charity a few years earlier. That left Ms Reyes in charge in Guayaquil, where, with the help of colleagues in Ecuador and Mexico, she has slowly grown the operation and treated about 1,000 children in all.
Clearly, the Juconi approach has applications in all parts of the world, not just poverty-stricken slums. Ms Reyes was highly critical of the approach used by many social service agencies in Britain and the US, which tend to focus on punitive measures against inadequate parents and breaking up family units.
"The first instinct we want to do is blame these parents, but we have to stop ourselves," she said. "It is possible to take child protection measures without marginalising the parents to such an extent that you can't work with them." The work of Juconi Ecuador is living proof of that.
By Julia Rooke
Reporter, Crossing Continents
Sold into prostitution aged nine, condemned by an Iranian judge to hang at 18, Leila was saved by a group of human rights activists.
"I was nine years old when my mother started selling me. I did not understand what was happening."
Today Leila is a young woman of 22. For the past two years she has been cared for by a private home for destitute young women in Tehran, Omid E Mehr, which means Hope.
"My mother would say: 'Let's go out to buy things, like chocolates'. She would actually trick me. I was a tiny girl. She just took me to places."
Leila still finds it difficult to talk about the past. But we know that the "places" she speaks of are where she was sold for sex and raped.
Leila became the main source of income for a family of five.
The lawyer who eventually saved Leila's life, Shadi Sadr, is a controversial figure in Iran. Although she was imprisoned earlier this year for taking part in human rights demonstrations, she is widely respected and frequently quoted in the press.
A girl is considered one of the first commodities or properties that can be traded or sold in the eyes of a parent who is poor in Iran
Shadi Sadr
Lawyer
Ms Sadr says Leila's story is not unique.
"A girl is considered one of the first commodities or properties that can be traded or sold in the eyes of a parent who is poor in Iran," she says.
Ms Sadr says that, in practice in Iran, under the Islamic penal code a father has enormous power over his own children.
"If a father decides to kill his own child he will not be sentenced to death, he will only be sent to prison for a couple of years."
Temporary wife
Leila lived in Arak, a small town four hours drive south of Tehran - notorious for criminal behaviour and illegal drugs. Most of Leila's earnings went on illegal narcotics for her family.
According to the United Nations three quarters of the world's opium seizures take place in Iran and the authorities acknowledge addiction is a serious problem.
But there are no such statistics on prostitution. The Director of the Omid E Mehr centre in Tehran says it is a growing problem.
"I have entered many homes in the south of Tehran where young girls had to go out and sell their bodies to provide for their father's drug habits," says Eshrat Gholipour.
I have also seen several cases of families chaining their own daughter to the homes to stop them from running away."
I am going to tell you something but please do not be upset. You are going to be hanged
Prison warder
Leila's husband began selling her for sex to as many as 15 men each night. Two months into the marriage, police raided the house and arrested everyone.
The husband was sentenced to five years in jail for providing a house for illegal sex.
During the course of the criminal investigation, Leila's brothers had confessed to raping her. They were flogged. For this Leila was accused of incest. A crime punishable by death.
Leila was in a women's prison when she heard about her own sentence from the warder: "I am going to tell you something but please do not be upset. You are going to be hanged."
Ms Sadr says the judicial system is deeply conservative and unfair.
"These male judges have not had any training about sexual charges. They all have a chauvinistic point of view and they see the woman as guilty," she says.
Leila's brothers later retracted their confessions. Ms Sadr took Leila's case to appeal and won.
Death sentence
Earlier this year Ms Sadr defended and won the case of 19-year-old Nazanine, sentenced to death for killing a man who tried to rape her. Today she too is a free woman.
There will be so many protests... from the human rights activists that the judges are under pressure not to issue a death sentence"
Shadi Sadr
Lawyer
According to Amnesty International, 177 people were executed in Iran last year, of these four were women - this year the number is up to five. The real figures could be higher as executions are not always reported.
But Ms Sadr and other Iranian lawyers say that constant human-rights campaigning and publicity is making Iran's judges more sensitive to public opinion. "There will be so many protests or so much complaints from the human rights activists that the judges are under pressure not to issue a death sentence," she says.
Tender hope
Today Leila lives in a small flat with a full-time carer paid for by Ms Sadr and the Omid E Mehr day centre.
When Leila arrived she was illiterate and needed to be taught the basics of life.
"She did not know anything," says Marjaneh Halati, the founder of Omid E Mehr, "to the point that she did not know that you wear a pad when you get a period."
Today Leila is learning to read and earning money as a seamstress.
But Ms Halati also knows that by helping girls like Leila - by boosting their self-esteem and encouraging independence - the centre is treading a fine line.
"We live in Iran and there are certain rules we have to abide by, but it does not mean we cannot tell the girls that they are no different to men. They are individuals," she says.
Today Leila is free and attitudes may slowly be changing. Iran passed its first child protection laws five years ago.
This spring a new bill drafted by human rights lawyers, is expected to go before Parliament to make prosecutions in child abuse cases easier.
Crossing Continents on BBC Radio 4 tells Leila's story on Thursday, November 29 at 1100 GMT, her story will also be told on the World Service programme Assignment on Wednesday, December 5 at 0900 GMT.
Leila's interview was recorded by the Iranian filmmaker, Hamid Rahmanian for a forthcoming film about the Omid e Mehr.
"I was nine years old when my mother started selling me. I did not understand what was happening."
Today Leila is a young woman of 22. For the past two years she has been cared for by a private home for destitute young women in Tehran, Omid E Mehr, which means Hope.
"My mother would say: 'Let's go out to buy things, like chocolates'. She would actually trick me. I was a tiny girl. She just took me to places."
Leila still finds it difficult to talk about the past. But we know that the "places" she speaks of are where she was sold for sex and raped.
Leila became the main source of income for a family of five.
The lawyer who eventually saved Leila's life, Shadi Sadr, is a controversial figure in Iran. Although she was imprisoned earlier this year for taking part in human rights demonstrations, she is widely respected and frequently quoted in the press.
A girl is considered one of the first commodities or properties that can be traded or sold in the eyes of a parent who is poor in Iran
Shadi Sadr
Lawyer
Ms Sadr says Leila's story is not unique.
"A girl is considered one of the first commodities or properties that can be traded or sold in the eyes of a parent who is poor in Iran," she says.
Ms Sadr says that, in practice in Iran, under the Islamic penal code a father has enormous power over his own children.
"If a father decides to kill his own child he will not be sentenced to death, he will only be sent to prison for a couple of years."
Temporary wife
Leila lived in Arak, a small town four hours drive south of Tehran - notorious for criminal behaviour and illegal drugs. Most of Leila's earnings went on illegal narcotics for her family.
According to the United Nations three quarters of the world's opium seizures take place in Iran and the authorities acknowledge addiction is a serious problem.
But there are no such statistics on prostitution. The Director of the Omid E Mehr centre in Tehran says it is a growing problem.
"I have entered many homes in the south of Tehran where young girls had to go out and sell their bodies to provide for their father's drug habits," says Eshrat Gholipour.
I have also seen several cases of families chaining their own daughter to the homes to stop them from running away."
I am going to tell you something but please do not be upset. You are going to be hanged
Prison warder
Leila's husband began selling her for sex to as many as 15 men each night. Two months into the marriage, police raided the house and arrested everyone.
The husband was sentenced to five years in jail for providing a house for illegal sex.
During the course of the criminal investigation, Leila's brothers had confessed to raping her. They were flogged. For this Leila was accused of incest. A crime punishable by death.
Leila was in a women's prison when she heard about her own sentence from the warder: "I am going to tell you something but please do not be upset. You are going to be hanged."
Ms Sadr says the judicial system is deeply conservative and unfair.
"These male judges have not had any training about sexual charges. They all have a chauvinistic point of view and they see the woman as guilty," she says.
Leila's brothers later retracted their confessions. Ms Sadr took Leila's case to appeal and won.
Death sentence
Earlier this year Ms Sadr defended and won the case of 19-year-old Nazanine, sentenced to death for killing a man who tried to rape her. Today she too is a free woman.
There will be so many protests... from the human rights activists that the judges are under pressure not to issue a death sentence"
Shadi Sadr
Lawyer
According to Amnesty International, 177 people were executed in Iran last year, of these four were women - this year the number is up to five. The real figures could be higher as executions are not always reported.
But Ms Sadr and other Iranian lawyers say that constant human-rights campaigning and publicity is making Iran's judges more sensitive to public opinion. "There will be so many protests or so much complaints from the human rights activists that the judges are under pressure not to issue a death sentence," she says.
Tender hope
Today Leila lives in a small flat with a full-time carer paid for by Ms Sadr and the Omid E Mehr day centre.
When Leila arrived she was illiterate and needed to be taught the basics of life.
"She did not know anything," says Marjaneh Halati, the founder of Omid E Mehr, "to the point that she did not know that you wear a pad when you get a period."
Today Leila is learning to read and earning money as a seamstress.
But Ms Halati also knows that by helping girls like Leila - by boosting their self-esteem and encouraging independence - the centre is treading a fine line.
"We live in Iran and there are certain rules we have to abide by, but it does not mean we cannot tell the girls that they are no different to men. They are individuals," she says.
Today Leila is free and attitudes may slowly be changing. Iran passed its first child protection laws five years ago.
This spring a new bill drafted by human rights lawyers, is expected to go before Parliament to make prosecutions in child abuse cases easier.
Crossing Continents on BBC Radio 4 tells Leila's story on Thursday, November 29 at 1100 GMT, her story will also be told on the World Service programme Assignment on Wednesday, December 5 at 0900 GMT.
Leila's interview was recorded by the Iranian filmmaker, Hamid Rahmanian for a forthcoming film about the Omid e Mehr.
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