Paradise Lost [15/07/2001] PRODUCER: LAURIE CLARKE REPORTER: KAREN PICKERSGILL Karen intro: Terrible allegations about murdered Red Cross director John Scott and his kiwi partner Greg Scrivener, have this week cast a dark cloud over families and friends still in mourning. Fijian police have talked of the couple's possible involvement in drugs and pornography. And they say the man they've arrested for the violent double killing claims to have been sexually exploited by the couple. Now these are just allegations, unproven at this stage, and relatives have rejected them outright. But we reveal tonight where some of these accusations have come from, and we show you a side of Fiji you will not have seen, a sordid, ugly side of desperate poverty and child prostitution. KAREN (V/O): On any given night in downtown Suva, you don't have to look too hard for evidence of the city's sex trade. Young women, young men, school-age girls and boys trawling the streets for business. MERE: There's plenty kids on the street. KAREN: How young are some of them? MERE: Nine, eight. KAREN: Having sex, with this man. KAREN (V/O): It's some of these boys, who this week following the violent deaths of John Scott and Greg Scrivener, claim to have been sexually involved with the couple. Boys we'll meet later in our programme who say they were at the couple's home and not for the first time, the night before the murders. This has only emerged in the days after the killings, after the accused murderer told police he had been sexually exploited by John Scott going back to his schooldays. Whether there is any truth to any of this we will have to wait and see. But what we do know, what 20/20 was in fact investigating in Fiji long before the double killing, is that there is a ready market, demand and supply, for child sex in the island paradise. Several foreigners have already been charged with offences against Fijian children, including a New Zealander. In February, this Dunedin man went on trial before a judge in Nadi, on eight counts of indecently assaulting two little girls. (I/V): Would you say that there is a child sex trade operating in Fiji? DEVU VODO: It’s rampant Karen. It’s been happening for a long time. It’s only come to our attention very recently. People need to be aware in this country and in the South Pacific that our children are in danger. KAREN (V/O): Social worker Devu Vodo is a guardian angel to Suva's street kids. Many of the youngsters are abandoned or runaways. Devu is one of few people they trust, a bond forged over six years she's worked on the streets of the capital. She's watched helpless as children like this teenage boy and younger, have ended up in the flesh trade making what little money they can in the face of widespread economic misery. In the post-coup years, squatter camps have sprung up around Suva, in the city and on the banks of rivers and tidal mudflats. People have moved here from farms and outlying villages looking for work, families living in huts and shacks built from other people's rubbish, living in quiet desperation. Scavenging even at the city dump, they sneak in after hours, mum, dad and the kids. DEVU: They were looking for anything they could use to survive with, like for example food that has been overdued, due date has gone. They're looking for that to eat back at home because there's no food at home. KAREN: Even if its rotten stock? DEVU: To them, what is in the dump and has been disposed of today is food for them. KAREN (V/O): This is Fiji's dark side, a view of the South Seas paradise you won't find on a postcard, revealed for the first time late last year in a United Nations report. It was a damning account of Fijian children being used for sex, child abuse by locals and tourists, teenagers forced on to the streets in order to survive, families living in poverty and despair easily exploited by others. DEVU: Money is the key here. They are even willing to sacrifice their own daughters and sons in exchange for money and gifts from people who can afford to pay. KAREN (V/O): Such men are not rapists. They're much more likely to entice or coerce. "Sugar-daddies", older men who seek out young girls and boys for sex with tempting offers of cash, meals, clothes, luxuries, money for school fees even. That's exactly the case against the New Zealander currently on trial. He befriended this couple, the poor parents of this 13-year old Nadi schoolgirl. Six times over four days in December she says, she went to his hotel room, on at least one occasion with an 11-year old friend. Appallingly, many children are lured into sex with the knowledge and sometimes even connivance of their mothers and fathers, especially in Fiji's poorer Indian communities. The street kids live off their wits and where they can. We found one group, mostly teenagers living rough in a culvert under a busy road. The kids call this 'the cave.' It's a precarious walk to a concrete den where they bed down. Many have lived here months. Others come and go if they can't find anywhere else for the night. DEVU: You can see the water, that's what they use for everything, sanitation, cooking, bathing, washing. They cook right here. They had stoves and a little kerosene fireburners where they cook their food in it, but this is where they're living. KAREN (V/O): Two days earlier, floodwaters had washed away their makeshift kitchen. The day we visited, none had eaten. We returned with lunch - bread, tinned meat, and fish. It's here we first met Mere, a runaway from home and school when her parents split up. She agreed to meet us later with two of her friends. MERE: As long as I am staying on the street, I look for money to survive my needs and wants, so I do job people for money, and sometimes I go out with clients. KAREN: For sex? MERE: Yes. KAREN: You get paid for sex? MERE: Yes. KAREN: You sell your body? MERE: Yes, I do. KAREN (V/O): 15-year old Angeline started working the streets a year ago. (I/V): Why do you work the streets? Is it the money? (V/O): Una, a wary 16-year old, has also been on the streets a year. But Mere is an old hand. MERE: Five years back. I'm 16 now. KAREN: You were eleven. MERE: Eleven years maybe. KAREN: That's young. MERE: Yeah. KAREN (V/O): She sleeps with local men but prefers foreigners ... they pay better. MERE: Mostly Europeans, I charge them, if they want to go with me for whole night, I can charge them 250. KAREN: Two hundred and fifty? MERE: Two hundred and fifty for whole nights, and fifty dollars for a short time. KAREN: And what's a short time? MERE: That's like one hour. KAREN: It's the kind of money they could only dream of earning elsewhere. These girls can make more in one hour than a factory worker takes home in a week. That night, we watched as all three worked a Suva street corner, notorious for pickups. The girls don't consider themselves prostitutes, but there's no mistaking what they were up to. DEVU: Survival is the word. They have to buy food. They have to live on a day to day basis. They have to buy clothes because they are young girls and they would like to have the most fashionable outfit ever. That’s how they see themselves. And they don't consider themselves prostitutes. But they are doing it, in their own way. KAREN (V/O): Boys sell their bodies too. Young men like Peter, 16, others as young as nine and ten. He's a shoeshine boy. You see them everywhere in downtown Suva on their knees for a dollar a shine. Cruising the streets, it's an easy way to meet people, an ideal front. Intensely shy, Peter would not admit to being involved in the sex trade himself, only that some of his friends are. (I/V): What kind of money do they make? PETER: I don't know anything about their money they make. I just know they're selling their body like that. KAREN: To local men or foreign men? PETER: Foreign men. KAREN: Have you ever sold your body? PETER: No. Some of my friends are a little bit gay. KAREN: And so they do that kind of thing? PETER: Yeah. KAREN: Do you do this sometimes? (V/O): Robert, another 16 year old, also denied it. But Devu tells a different story. She says both boys have been treated for sexually transmitted diseases on several occasions, infections caught from encounters with men. Robert is the son of a prostitute who still works the streets of Suva, begging mostly these days. The money he makes helps support his mother and little sister. Sometimes it's not much, sometimes it's not money at all. DEVU: For a quickie perhaps, they are given other things, maybe a burger, maybe a McDonald. KAREN: A hamburger? DEVU: Yeah, something like that. KAREN (V/O): The street kids all talk of a man they call 'Belo', Fijian for ‘the stalking heron’. He's a well-to-do expat businessman who regularly cruises the streets selecting young boys. DEVU: He's very smart. During the day you'll see him walking the streets, walking down passing the street children, obviously identifying where they are. Towards evening, he'll pick from certain spots, like Village 6 cinemas, Downtown Boulevard, Sukuna Park. ROBERT: Yeah he takes them to the Village 6 and watch movie. KAREN: And then? ROBERT: They went together and they started doing it with Belo. KAREN: Having sex with this man? ROBERT: Yeah. KAREN: And how many children? ROBERT: Five. KAREN: At one time? (V/O): Robert and Peter are among street kids who've come forward in recent days claiming they were involved in ‘sexual goings-on’ at John Scott and Greg Scrivener's home. They've told Devu and the police that they were among six boys at Scott's house the night before the murders. DEVU: Mr Scott had picked them up, the six children, took them to the Village 6 cinema, bought food for them and took them to his house. KAREN (V/O): There, the boys say Scott gave them food and cash in exchange for... DEVU: Sex. Drugs were there. At times the boys were taken into the room so the other boys were not aware of what was going on in there, but they are street boys you know. They've been through it and they knew exactly what was going on in the other room. KAREN (V/O): The boys told Devu it was not the first time there had been such get-togethers. DEVU: Every week they are normally taken by him to meet some of his colleagues at his house, and that particular Friday was when they went in and he said they left early and John gave them 15 dollars per person for six children. That was the story we got from the kids. But some of them stayed overnight, decided to stay overnight and they left the house at 6 o'clock in the morning. KAREN (V/O): It was the night of the annual Red Cross Charity Ball, the last time John Scott was seen in public. According to the boys, they were at his house before and after the event. One said Scott was usually accompanied by a man they now know to be Greg Scrivener. DEVU: He said it was consistent thing because they always had someone else there with John, whenever he comes around and picks the children, and they are like linked together in terms of utilising the children in what their fantasies were. KAREN (V/O): Devu says it's distressed her to hear such stories. She'd worked with the Red Cross chief and looked on him as a friend. But she says the boys have no reason to lie. Their claims of sexual liaisons are being investigated by the police. Over the past year, a number of confirmed cases have come to light. In November an Australian accountant living in Suva was sent to jail for 17 years after he was convicted of paedophilia and peddling child pornography. Mark Mutch had four girls, aged 4 to 14 living with him at the time of his arrest. The case shocked the nation. DEVU: That was when the people of Fiji then became worried our children are in danger, only through that. But what happened before Mutch, nobody knew. KAREN (V/O): This much is clear. Paedophiles cannot operate without some local knowledge or a helping hand. Which is where Suva's taxi-drivers enter the picture. Unlicensed and unaccountable, some drivers are known to play a key role in the sex trade, doing the pickups, finding the girls and the boys. DEVU: They are used by tourists to pick up children, they are used by business people to drop off children at motels and hotels. KAREN (V/O): They are seedy establishments with rooms available to rent by the hour. MERE: We go to motels, before you enter your room with your boyfriend to the motel, you have to pay $10 for one hour, and if you pass that one hour, you have to pay another extra $10 for another one hour. KAREN (V/O): At one of the most notorious, Motel Capital, we watched some twenty taxis come and go in the space of ten minutes. DEVU: The motels and hotels are doing this. KAREN: So they'll turn a blind eye to a man coming in with a boy, with a girl. DEVU: They themselves are involved because they bring in the young children, the motels I was talking about, they get the young children and they get them to be there, available for who will pay a higher price for these young children. INSPECTOR ROMANU TIKOTIKOCA: It is a concern to us because of the fact that we don't usually have this in the past. KAREN (V/O): Suva Police Inspector Romanu Tikotikoca. INSPECTOR TIKOTIKOCA: The people of this country, we are quite friendly to our visitors. We get so close to them. And at times in that intimate relationship, people are so close and so tempted. And we wish to warn especially our own people to be more conscious and aware of this. KAREN (V/O): In Fiji, as anywhere else, child sexual abuse is highly under-reported. The Pacific Island nation is still bound by the ways of the church and by tradition. Sex is rarely talked about. Sex abuse even less so. INSPECTOR TIKOTIKOCA: You know when things happen, people do not come up with it because it is something sacred, it's like taboo. And for them to expose themselves to the open stating that this man molested me, or have done wrong to me, they usually keep quiet about it. KAREN: You see this as one of the worst crimes? DEVU: It is a very bad crime. It is the worst I can ever imagine because young children who are growing up, who have a life ahead of them or have a future to look forward to, it’s been shattered, just by a simple lust of a man who's old enough to be their father, grandfather or uncle, someone they look up to. KAREN (V/O): The way she sees it, these men are stealing from Fiji's youngsters what's most precious; their innocence, their childhood, any chance they might have had of a future. (I/V): If you didn't work on the streets, if you didn't have to, what would you like to do? MERE: I would love to be a teacher. KAREN: You'd love to be a teacher? MERE: That's my goal since when I was small. PETER: I would like to be a soldier, playing rugby. That’s what I want. KAREN: Do you have a dream? What is it? ANGELINA: A nurse. DEVU: They shouldn't be on the streets at all. But what can I do? What can the government do? What can Fiji do to stop this. It's a big thing but it has to begin from somewhere.