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LATIN AMERICA |
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Boom in
Social-Networking Sites Behind Missing
Children in Peru
LIMA – The boom in social networks on the
Internet has contributed to increasing
disappearances of children in Lima, many of
whom fall into the hands of people
trafficking gangs, the Peru.21 newspaper
reported.
So far this year, the disappearances of more
than 600 teenagers have been reported in
Lima alone, and an average of four people
vanish each day, the newspaper said.
The complaints about disappearances may be
as many as eight per day, on average,
National Police missing persons unit chief
Jose Luis Langle told the newspaper.
Since the beginning of 2009, police have
counted a total of 1,278 missing persons
cases, of whom 619 are teenagers between the
ages of 12 and 17.
Why the rising trend? The police say that
gangs involved in people trafficking are
behind the disappearances.
The massive use of online social networking
has become a “double-edged sword” among
teenagers, Langle said.
Access to the Internet facilitates the work
of gangs that seek to abduct children to put
them to work as beggars, do other manual or
sexual work and even supply body organs for
the organ trafficking trade, the police
chief said.
“Starting with fake job offers, they begin
to seduce the children who, sometimes, end
up being kidnapped or in the hands of
organized crime groups,” Langle said.
The cases are very frequent among teenagers
who intensively use Internet social
networking sites, Maria Teresa Mosquea, the
coordinator of the non-governmental
organization Accion por los Niños, said.
The youngsters who are abducted by organized
crime groups mostly come from the country’s
jungle cities like Pucallpa and Huanuco, or
the Andean city of Ayacucho, Mosquera said.
“Most of them, the girls and, now, the boys
are forced to enter into sexual exploitation
and (the traffickers) take others to work on
plots of land, for example, in the south,”
Mosquera said. |
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