11-year-old Leidiane. Source: Supplied
HER name is Leidiane.
She is a skinny 11-year-old whose parents send her out each night to the highway in a skimpy sun dress to sell her body to truck drivers so her family can eat.
Soon, she will be selling herself amid the dust and the diesel fumes of the highway for $A12 a time to meet her own addictive needs.
Often, when they've finished with her, the truckies just push her out the door of the long drop down from the cabs of their car-carriers or semi-trailers.
Then it's back to the Rio-Bahia, nicknamed "highway of death" for the truckies due to its many hijackings and accidents.
The 4300km truck stop which has brought misery for Leidiane and thousands of girls aged as young as nine is now being called "the highway to hell".
The “highway to hell”, Brazil’s 4300km truck stop of underage prostitution. Picture: Matt Roper. Source: Supplied
Federal highway BR116 is an industrial artery which stretches from Fortaleza on Brazil's north-eastern coast south to Jaguarão, where Uruguay borders with South America's largest country.
Brazil's major highway, it brings everything from food, electronics, cigarettes, and pharmaceuticals to Brazil's wealthiest cities including Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.
It also passes through scores of poverty stricken villages and towns, to which it brings misery, drug addiction and an epidemic of child prostitution.
"These girls are completely broken by having started to sell themselves so young," Matt Roper, an advocate for Brazil's child prostitutes told news.com.au.
"They don't believe they are worth anything.
"When they come here and see themselves in the mirror, they run out because their self image is so shattered."
Mara, now 16, a former street girl from the town of Serrinha, almost halfway along Brazil’s sex highway. Picture: Matt Roper. Source: Supplied
UNICEF says the BR-116 is the world's most active highway in terms of sexual exploitation of children.
On the BR-116, young girls are regularly kidnapped and taken to brothels where they are enslaved into an existence of beatings and sex with hundreds of adult men.
The story has gone largely unreported, but Matt Roper, also a journalist and author, is campaigning to rescue the girls and end the trade which is supported and covered up by police officers, businessmen and government officials as high as deputy governors in regional states across Brazil.
Some of them share the profits with gangs and sex traffickers who supply human trade to paedophile rings.
Roper embarked on a trip up the highway where he met girls in circumstances which made him weep.
Rebeca, 15, and Milena, 12, child prostitutes rescued from the town of Salgueiro. Picture: Matt Roper. Source: Supplied
From Leidiane on the motorway near the industrial hub of Governador Valadares, Roper journeyed north.
In town after town, young girls who came from the poorest of squalid tin shacks emerged to stand amid rows of seedy motels along a constantly rumbling stream of traffic, waiting for a paid encounter which they euphemistically called a "program".
Six hours north in the town of Medina, the children's councillor told Roper about the hundreds of girls whose families had forced them into a life of humiliation and abuse.
"Mothers swapped their own daughters for ... cigarettes, or crack," he said.
"Sending their daughter off for her first program is as normal as her playing with her first Barbie doll.
"There are girls aged twelve or thirteen who were dying of AIDS."
Trade and misery: Brazil’s BR-116 highway. Picture: Matt Roper. Source: Supplied
Mariana was a 13-year-old who loved Justin Bieber and writing poetry.
Her mother and grandmother had been roadside prostitutes and beat her if she didn't come back from the motorway with money.
Soon after Roper met her, Mariana disappeared from Medina.
She was found 80 kilometres away in a brothel.
Police found her and a 12-year-old girl in bed with an adult male.
"Weeks later, we found out she was pregnant," Roper said.
Mariana was returned to the brothel which was operated by a drug gang.
Her grandmother had told the gang she didn't want Mariana set free because she was too valuable a commodity to the family income.
Further up the highway, in a town called Candido Sales, Roper was taken to the poorest area, which his guide, Fabio, called "o fim do mundo" - "the end of the world".
The “end of the world”: the town of Candido Sales, where child brothels stand between the squalid houses. Picture: Matt Roper. Source: Supplied
Among a row of shacks on red dirt roads, where children played barefoot in litter among rotting animal carcasses, was house No. 46.
Inside, Fabio said, police had found dozens of sliced-open drink cans used for smoking crack, rooms littered with used condoms and girls' underwear, dozens of men and three girls, the youngest aged 12.
In another town further north, Roper said "of the 60,000 inhabitants, around 6000 men were involved in town's child prostitution trade".
"We were told that by the children's councillor," he said, "who'd want to be born a girl in a place like this?"
When the summer months come and it's festival time, the prettiest girls from the poorest of towns are rounded up and brought in to work.
Some never come home.
Child prostitute, Lilian, rescued by the Pink House charity. Picture: Matt Roper. Source: Supplied
"Any big event in Brazil, girls 13, 15 or 16 are seen as legitimate to work as prostitutes," he said.
Roper said Brazil had more than 250,000 child prostitutes, perhaps as many as half a million.
After writing two books about girls lost to prostitution, "Street Girls' and "Remember Me, Rescue Me", Roper set about establishing a charity and safe house for Brazil's female child prostitutes.
He set up Meninadanca at the Pink House in Medina, where young girls go for counselling, education, dance classes and respite from the road.
"When they dance, you see them transform. They relax and forget the realities of their life," he said.
The Pink House is working on finding young girls opportunities for education and work so they can leave their lives as street prostitutes.
Roper has now written a follow-up to his earlier books, entitled, "Highway to Hell", which tell the tragic stories of some of the young girls he met and succeeded - or failed - to rescue.
Roper remembers one girl in the town he now lives in Belo Horizonte, northwest of Rio de Janeiro.
Dirt poor: young girls are taken from the streets of impoverished towns like Salgueiro and taken to the big cities for prostitution. Picture; Matt Roper. Source: Supplied
Children's counsellors had high hopes of rescuing Jacqueline, an 11-year-old who, when Roper saw her on the street before he left for a sojourn in Rio, had been sniffing glue.
"By the time I got back, crack had flooded the streets," he said.
"Every time I saw Jacqueline, she got thinner and thinner.
"With girls, they become a lot more addicted to crack than boys because the addiction is emotional as well as physical.
"There are so many things pulling at them."
One day he saw Jacqueline lying on her back in the middle of the street.
One day he saw Jacqueline lying on her back in the middle of the street.
Girls take part in therapy called the “conversation circle” at the Pink House. Not all the girls in this photograph were former prostitutes. Picture: Matt Roper. Source: Supplied
He picked her up and took her to get medical help, but she was a cause lost to the streets.
"There were drug dealers who wanted to kill her because she owed them money," Roper said.
And what of Leidiane, the 11-year-old on the highway back in Governador Valadares?
When Roper eventually returned, it took some time to find Leidiane and when he did the girl, now 12 years old, was a crack addict.
The air of sweet innocence she had projected during their highway meeting was gone.
When he refused her request for money, arguing she would only spend it on more crack, Leidiane became sullen and angry.
"We were too late," he said.
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