Teens sell sex for pocket money

Twenty teenage girls in Shanghai, China - mostly students under 18 years old and two under 14 - have been caught by police offering sex to earn pocket money.

Three of the suspects, believed to be starters of the "teenage girl prostitution ring," face charges of offering sex services and inducing classmates and friends to enter the business, Zhabei District prosecutors said.

"Many of them offered the prostitution services only to earn some pocket money and they were not ashamed of the trade," said Han Konglin, a prosecutor.

Man had sex with runaway teens

A MAN has been jailed for two years for plying three teenage Sunshine Coast schoolgirl runaways with drugs and alcohol then having sex with two of them at a Brisbane inner-city apartment.

The Brisbane Supreme Court was told Darren Jeffrey Benton and his mate, Aleksander Piotr Grabowski, supplied the high school students - aged 13 to 14 - with marijuana and spirits alcohol at a Kangaroo Point unit on May 19, 2009.

Girl lures teens into sex attack

A teenage girl lured two 16-year-olds into a sex attack by three men in the United Kingdom.

Stephanie Knight, (pic) then 17, agreed to find girls for three of her male friends, who she called  "my boys".

Agencies reported Knight invited them for a night out clubbing.

Instead, they were then taken to a dark and empty house with no electricity, where one of the attackers once lived.

Knight threatened one girl, ordering her to perform a sex act on one man before holding her back.

The other girl screamed for help, as her friend was raped.

Knight warned the girl that her friend would suffer even more if she did not comply and said ‘she is chilling with my boys’.

The trio took turns to rape her throughout the night.

Both girls were then raped once more as one of the men, whose partner was due to give birth at the time, drove them home.

He threatened them with a knife.

The three men, brothers Amjad Hussain, 34, and Shahid Hussain, 37, and their cousin father-of-four Tanveer Butt, 39, were all convicted of rape.

The victims had only known Knight for a week.

Knight had a sexual relationship with Amjad Hussain and also performed sex acts on his brother and cousin.

Four teens held for sodomizing, murdering Madurai boy

MADURAI - Police have found that the eight-year-old ,whose body was found in a wooden box at a school near here a few days ago, was sodomized and strangled to death by five teenagers.

Four school students , aged between 14 and 17, and an 18-year-old daily wage labourer were arrested for the crime on Thursday.

"All the five hail from Kilavaneri, the victim's village. They used to gather behind the school to drink liquor or smoke beedi . On July 16, they spotted P Jayasurya (8),(pic) who was playing hide-and-seek with friends, entering the school around 4.30pm.

They grabbed Jayasurya , took him to the school bathroom and sodomized him. The boy fell unconscious. Fearing that Jayasurya would expose them, they strangled him and dumped the body in a wooden box," said a police officer.

Mexican teens turn to kidnapping in drug war city

CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO - School dropout Toby was just 15 when he and his friends started kidnapping businessmen, truck drivers and lawyers for ransom in Mexico's most violent city, Ciudad Juarez.

Now serving an eight-year sentence at a juvenile detention center, Toby looks anything but a gangster, with his slim build and neat hair. He has no tattoos or scars.

But as a worsening drug war hits the economy of this forlorn desert city, even teenagers from law-abiding families are being drawn into crime by the lure of cash and cool clothes.

"I started with armed robberies and the money was good. As my parents didn't have any work I thought, 'this is cool,' and I started kidnapping," said Toby, a Mexican-American born across the border in El Paso, Texas.

He says he made up to $45,000 a time with the abductions, and shared the loot with his friends.

His mother refused to take any of the money, so Toby, who moved to Ciudad Juarez with his parents when he was nine, frittered it away on clothes and cars. "I got through the money so fast so I just kept on doing it," he said.

Toby's father made a decent living for years in bars in Ciudad Juarez when Americans used to come over the border in droves for cheap tequila and a night on the town.

But a turf war between Mexico's most-wanted trafficker, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman and the powerful Juarez cartel has frightened off tourists, sparking a mindless spiral of killings that has laid waste to the manufacturing city and destroyed job prospects for the city's youth.

Some 230,000 people have fled Ciudad Juarez over the past two years.

Rubble lines the streets of the old center, just over the Rio Grande with the glass towers of El Paso in the distance. Day in, day out, authorities demolish the bars, hotels and brothels they say breed the drug crime terrorizing the city. But the violence continues.

"There's no way out and nothing to do, there aren't even parks to go to," said one teenager who declined to give his name in one of Ciudad Juarez's desolate 'barrios', crisscrossed with unpaved streets and sagging electricity cables.

No official data is available on minors staging kidnappings in Ciudad Juarez, but Eustacio Gutierrez, a judge dealing with local juvenile delinquents, said he hears cases daily.

Youngsters typically get hold of guns on the city's black market, start tracking wealthy residents and kidnap them.

"I've handed down sentences as long as 12 years," he said.

According to the girlfriend of a kidnapper who reported Toby and his friends to the police, the teens kept the victims locked up in a room in the house where one of them lived.

"They would choose victims themselves and pull people out of cars at gunpoint," the girl said, declining to be named.

While the 9,300 drug war dead in Ciudad Juarez since early 2008 has scared away U.S. teens from getting involved in smuggling drugs across the border, a lust for money and status is trumping fear for Mexican youngsters.

"All the businesses are shutting down, so what opportunities do young people have?" said Marc Marquez, deputy chief of juvenile services for El Paso County. "It is a vicious cycle. By the time they are 15, they are so desensitized."

EPHEMERAL WEALTH

Ciudad Juarez was once a kind of Las Vegas that boomed in the U.S. Prohibition era of the 1920s and early 1930s, luring American film stars and singers to its bars.

Named after Benito Juarez, a 19th-century reformist president, the city is scattered with monuments that recall the fighting during the Mexican Revolution between 1910 and 1920.

After the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, it was supposed to spearhead Mexico's march toward prosperity, attracting hundreds of thousands of workers from across the country and billions of dollars in foreign investment.

Foreign-owned plants remain busy and the Ciudad Juarez-El Paso region handled $71 billion in trade in 2010, but little of that wealth stays in Juarez. Factory jobs pay poorly, forcing parents to neglect their children as they toil just to get by.

President Felipe Calderon, who launched a crackdown on the drug cartels in late 2006, has pledged to build schools and parks to revive the city and end the violence. But locals say he is moving too slowly to deal with decades of neglect.

Poverty alone does not explain the teenage slide into crime, social workers say, noting that wealthier youngsters have also been caught kidnapping, tempted by easy money.

Juvenile detention centers once full of street gang members who barely got through primary school now deal with teenagers who went to private secondary schools, some of them girls.

"Something is very wrong," said Elizabeth Ochoa, a psychologist at one local detention center. "They want clothes and expensive cell phones, and all the police and all the prisons in the world are not going to stop them."

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