ONLINE DOCUMENT: YOUTH-SEX TRADE FLOURISHES IN POST-COMMUNIST EASTERN EUROPE

Some sleep in the sewers, some in their sugar daddies' beds. Some travel thousands of miles to make a living selling their bodies.

They're the child and teen-aged prostitutes of Eastern Europe, where the youth-sex trade is flourishing in the turmoil of the post-Communist era.Some of the most harrowing stories told at a global conference on commercial child sex here come from Romania, where girls as young as nine have been found working as street or train-station prostitutes.

"For them, prostitution is very normal," Gabriela Alexandrescu of Romania's Save the Children agency said in an interview. "They shock you sometimes with the way they speak."

But everywhere in the region the market for young prostitutes is thriving. At checkpoints along Germany's eastern border, teenaged girls from Poland, Russia and Ukraine hop into cabs with long-distance truckers. Hard-core pornography, some depicting children, is circulated widely from the Baltic republics to Bulgaria.

In most countries, police and governments, taking their cue from citizens, are too preoccupied with other violent crimes and economic problems to fight the trend.

"Resources are concentrated on those crimes which really worry the public," said Wolfgang Rau, a criminologist at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France, which advises European governments on policy.

Students of the child-sex trade in Eastern Europe date its growth to the collapse of communism half a decade ago. Not only have sexual taboos been smashed, but so have welfare systems that gave inadequate but dependable support to families and supported institutions that gave shelter, if little else, to orphans and children from broken homes.

"Large groups of children, besides suffering from poverty, are to a much greater degree left without adult guidance and care," says a report on the child-sex trade in Eastern Europe by two Swedish researchers, Helena Karlen and Christina Hagner.

Romania has been hit harder than many of its neighbors because it had more unwanted children in the first place, Alexandrescu said. Under dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, abortion was illegal, contraceptives unavailable and sex education non-existent.

Working with homeless children in Bucharest for the past five years, Alexandrescu's group has found bands of youngsters roaming the streets or living in the Bucharest north train station, a notorious pickup point for men seeking underage sex.