A UN expert on Friday praised a ruling by Colombia’s Supreme Court upholding a 20-year prison sentence for a man found guilty of offering money to young children in exchange for sexual acts. The ruling officially recognises commercial sexual exploitation as part of the country’s wider system of violence against minors.

In commenting on the significance of the decision, Reem Alsalem, the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, stated:

The judgment importantly recognizes that the sexual exploitation of children must not be viewed in isolation, but as part of a wider system of violence in which demand, expressed particularly through solicitation and payment for sexual acts, is a determining factor and the first link in the chain of exploitation.

The ruling, issued on the 6th of May 2026, was monumental for multiple reasons, such as its acknowledgement that individuals who purchase sexual favours from children are not mere consumers, but direct perpetrators who are also equally responsible for this abuse. The Court declared that the payment of money does not validate the act as a ‘service’, and minors are legally incapable of consenting to sexual acts, regardless of whether they had ‘agreed’ to it or were paid. Additionally, the Court was explicit in addressing the deep-seated societal inequalities that fuel child sexual exploitation.

The ruling emphasised that the commercial trade of children’s bodies is a manifestation of the preexisting systemic violence and gender inequality, which together sustain an environment where the most vulnerable members of society are routinely objectified and commodified. The judgment also emphasised how pervasive and deeply entrenched patterns of violence against women and girls in the country have normalised this sexual exploitation. The severe psychological torture that the three young girls and a boy had suffered through confirmed that the Court had made the correct decision in upholding the sentence.

The Court, in handing down this decision, also relied on the framework in Alsalem’s 2024 report on prostitution, which argued that it is not a voluntary activity, but rather a system structured by coercive power dynamics. Specifically, the report recognises that the main reason why the prostitution of children is still flourishing to this day is due to the buyer-seller imbalance, where financial desperation forces individuals to surrender bodily autonomy to paying clients, therefore negating their having a choice. Young victims are also more susceptible to third-party exploitation, with traffickers stripping them of their agency.

The Court’s holistic judgment is in line with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Optional Protocol to the CRC on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography.