Ray Dube | A local children’s rights lobby NGO, Zimbabwe National Council for the Welfare of Children, (ZNCWC) has revealed that girls were starting to sell sex as early 12 years of age.

ZNCWC carried out a research last year in which they visited the country’s 10 provinces, targeting HIV and AIDS hot spots, with the aim of establishing the number underage girls who were into commercial sex work.

The results of the research which sampled close to 300 young sex work girls were published in Harare recently.

According to the country’s constitution the age of majority is 18 years, and anyone under that age is deemed a child.

“ While the general global consensus is that many girls across the world start selling sex at the age of 12 the modal age range of entry into selling sex for children involved in commercial sexual exploitation that we interviewed was 16 and 18, 35.1% followed by 13 to 16 years at 23,7% ,” reads part of the research findings.

“More than two thirds (64.6%) of the young women reported starting selling sex below the age of 18 with the highest concentration was the ages of 16 and 18 at 35% . 5.8% became sex workers before the age of 12 and 14 years,” the report noted.

ZNCWC, said although the respondents indicated that they were aware of HIV and AIDS and how to practice safe sex, there was a high number of Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) cases among the interviewed young sex workers.

“While respondents in this study indicated that 41.4% had experienced some illness related to their work the distribution of respondents by nature of their illness show s that the most commonly reported were STIs 81.5% followed by injury from gender based violence 18.5%,” the investigation further established.