luciana-4-ever

maybe 3 or 4 days ago, i was walking along the Avenida Atlantico in Copacabana. I was heading home after drinking at another hostel with some friends I had met when I was staying there. Just after I had passed the tourist-trap 'Help!' nightclub, with all the prostitutes hanging around outside, I realised I was catching up with a 50something year old portly gentlemen and a barely-clad petite brasilian girl who looked about 15. undoubtedly she was pretty but if she wasn't jailbait, she certainly looked it.

everyone who looked at them walking hand in hand had the same thought as me. how much are you paying her, sir?

I wouldn't have written about this, but last night I was walking in the opposite direction on the Avenida N.S. Copacabana (one block inland) and I saw the same girl again. With 2 30something year old guys. On the doorstep of a cheap-looking hotel.

I found myself thinking of a scandinavian film i saw recently on dvd - lilja-4-ever. It's powerful, depressing and harrowing. And really good. Fortunately I am not one of the misguided who thinks that a film has to have a happy ending. I won't spoil it by saying any more about the film or why I thought of it. Suffice to say that the film is prefixed by a UNICEF appeal to help stamp out child exploitation and prostitution.

Was the young brasilian girl being exploited by a pimp? it didn't look like it. By the westerners who slept with her? undoubtedly. By a world that produces great chasms between the very weathly few and the very many poor? damningly.