Allen’s fine to fund refuge for child prostitutes

MONEY paid by Ballymaloe chef Tim Allen when he pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography is being used to buy a rescue house to assist children caught up in prostitution in India.

Preparations are underway to establish a home for 30 children, who will receive counselling and education until the age of 18, when they will be assisted in making independent lives for themselves.

The work is being carried out by the Edith Wilkins Calcutta Street Children Foundation, which already helps exploited children in Calcutta and is now trying to identify and save rural youngsters before they are taken to the cities.

The rescue house will serve the joint towns of Siligiuri and New Jailpaiguri, which are strategically invaluable to the child-trafficking industry because of their proximity to the neighbouring countries of Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, where many of the trafficked children are bought.

At least five major trafficking gangs work the region, buying children as young as 10 ostensibly as domestic servants for as little as €20 a head.

They first put them to work locally, before passing them along well-established trafficking routes to Bombay and Calcutta. Most end up working in city brothels, while others are exported to order abroad. Many are also photographed and videotaped for the worldwide child pornography market.

Allen, the husband of celebrity chef Darina Allen, promised the controversial €40,000 payment in a Cork court last January as he awaited sentencing for possession of almost 1,000 pornographic computer images of children as young as five.

There was a public outcry in response to Judge Michael Pattwell's decision to let Allen off with a suspended sentence.

Within a week, he had resigned his directorships and relinquished his shares in the family's famed cookery school and hotel business in Co Cork.

Cork woman Edith Wilkins said the €40,000 would be used to help the worst-affected victims among the children the foundation encountered.

But with an estimated 345,000 child prostitutes in India, she added: "We are going to need 100 rescue homes."