These orphans need parents! Contact us on. The Ukrainian Institute of Social Studies said that of those teenage girls engaged in prostitution, those practising unprotected sexual contacts had decreased from 62 percent in to 40 percent in MYKOLAYIV, Ukraine β Sasha, 17, hides her face under the brim of her baseball cap as she recounts how a lack of food and clothing in her boarding school three years ago forced her to turn to prostitution.
She is one of many young women from the former shipbuilding hub and now depressed southern Ukrainian city of Mykolayiv who at a young age felt forced to provide sex for money or services. She left and never came back," said Sasha, who declined to give her surname.
Her grandmother was left to take care of her and her stepsister, but she could not handle the pressure. So the social services took the girl first to an orphanage, and then when she was six years old she went to a boarding school. Sasha says that starting at the age of 14 she periodically ran away from the boarding school, a tough "internat" that houses orphans and problem children.
She and her friends would then be brought back by the police. The sense of utter destitution made her work on the streets. We wanted clothes, food, and we were often malnourished. Others had nice clothes but we had nothing to buy," said Sasha. The risks of such work are clear: the Mykolayiv region has one of the highest levels in Ukraine of HIV-related fatalities in the age group of 15 to 24 years.
Olena Sakovych, the adolescent development specialist at the UNICEF Office in Ukraine, said that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and practising unsafe sexual behaviour are more at risk of contracting diseases, including HIV. Sasha recalled how a volunteer from the UNICEF-backed Unitus centre came to the boarding school to tell the young sex workers about the chances of another life. It brought her to the centre.
