November 10, Claudia Colimoro still remembers the day she met Rosa, a year-old girl sent to the shelter she runs after being sold into sex slavery twice and getting pregnant for the second time. Rosa—not her real name—is one of hundreds of thousands of teens and pre-teens who get pregnant each year in Mexico, a worsening problem caused by minors having unprotected sex at an early age, but also by horrific violence against women and girls.
Colimoro runs a shelter called Casa Mercedes in Mexico City that takes in pregnant girls with nowhere else to go, pays for their education and helps them raise their babies if they decide to keep them. Rosa was not yet a teenager when she arrived at Casa Mercedes, but she had already been sold into prostitution twice by her own mother.
Her family comes from Puebla, in central Mexico, a state with a picturesque colonial capital that belies a much darker side: it is also home to networks of human traffickers who force women and girls into prostitution.
She ran away, went home to her mom asking for help, and her mom sold her again. As Colimoro does for all the girls who pass through her privately run shelter, she educated her about her options—adoption, abortion or motherhood. Colimoro addressed the issue of teen pregnancy this week at Women's Forum Mexico, a gathering of leaders and activists meant to generate creative ideas on gender issues in a country where inequality is rife and violence against women is soaring. The statistic doesn't even capture the youngest girls affected.
Most girls who get pregnant before the age of 15 are victims of "some kind of physical violence," he said. And the problem is getting worse. The teen pregnancy rate rose by nearly 10 percent from to Early sexual activity has played a part in the increase, said Maria del Carmen Juarez of the National Women's Institute. But the problem goes deeper.
