Prostitution adolescente et économie domestique dans le contexte portuaire de Pucallpa (Amazonie péruvienne)

Abstract

The sexual exploitation of adolescents is a phenomenon that has grown with the expansion of extractive industries (timber, oil, minerals and gas) in the Peruvian Amazon. The article presents results of a long fieldwork in the city of Pucallpa and the route north of the Ucayali River. It emphasizes the mechanisms of exploitation performing local sexual trade of adolescents in restau­rants, bars and sawmills around the river port. The practice of this kind of prosti­tution is attached to the trade of food and alcoholic beverages in spaces with impor­tant male presence. This phenomenon is not due to an organized criminal logical, but to a strategy of domestic return linked to family network and running on from an economy of care in situation of precariousness.

Keywords

• gender
• prostitution
• family
• adolescence
• sexual exploitation