A grim choice: sell sex or starve
War robs Chad’s ‘ghost girls’ of their innocence and childhoods
DANAMAJA, Chad: Wearing a pastel-coloured dress embroidered with a tatty trim and speaking almost in a whisper, 17-year-old Chancelle looks like she should be in school. But since the age of 15 she has been going into isolated huts or to the fields to sell sex. “Each week, I would meet three or four men,” the teen, who declined to give her real name, said.
She fled north to Chad in 2014 after her father was killed by armed militants in her native Central African Republic (CAR), where Muslim Seleka rebels and Christian and animist “anti-Baleka” militias have been fighting since 2013.
A spike in violence in the country over the last year has forced a fresh wave of refugees into Chad, the world’s third least-developed country, also weighed down by drought, floods and conflict with the militant Boko Haram.
The teenager imagined life would be easier in the country where her parents were born. However, she has gone from trading goods at a market in CAR to selling her body in Chad for as little as 250 CFA francs (R6.30).
She does not even insist on condoms. “I don’t want to risk it, in case he goes to another girl,” she says.
Chancelle is one of thousands of returnees living in Danamaja, a muddy site in southern Chad that hosts displaced people who claim to have family roots in the country but lack papers to prove it.
When the war erupted in CAR, widespread violence and ethnic killings made life there impossible for many.
Chad responded by sending planes in 2013 to rescue fleeing Muslim returnees from CAR.
About 70 000 officially recognised refugees from CAR live in 20-plus villages and six camps across southern Chad, often complaining of shortages of food and medicines. There are a similar number of returnees, the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs says.
Most do not have any papers. This means they are not entitled to the same basic assistance as refugees who fled the same war, sometimes even the same town.
Chancelle, who has never been to school, said even her food ration card was washed away by the rains months ago, and getting a replacement has proven impossible.
The young mother has no one to support her or her 2-year-old child, whose father left Danamaja, a remote strip of land 600km south of the Chadian capital, without a trace.
“I stay because I don’t have a choice,” she said.
She faces joining the ranks of an estimated 10 million stateless people worldwide, “legal ghosts” with no nationality who are deprived of their basic rights.
Elise Mbainar, a social worker with a charity, Initiative Humanitaire pour le Developpement Local, estimates about 200 girls in Danamaja sell their bodies for sex.
“It’s the conditions here that push them to do this. It’s a life the girls don’t want – no one wants.” – Thomson Reuters Foundation