United Nations honours Mayerlin Vergara Perez for rescuing sexually exploited children

Colombian educator Mayerlin Vergara Perez has won the 2020 Nansen Refugee Award for her work over two decades rescuing sexually exploited and trafficked children, the United Nations announced Thursday.

The UN refugee agency hailed Vergara Perez, known as Maye, for going to "extraordinary lengths" to rescue child victims of sexual abuse and exploitation, and for championing harsher penalties for perpetrators.(Pic from UNHCR website)

Maye is the Caribbean regional coordinator for the Renacer Foundation, which has assisted more than 22,000 child and adolescent survivors of commercial sexual exploitation in the past three decades. Many of those helped have been refugee children, said UNHCR, whose annual Nansen prize honours extraordinary service to the forcibly displaced.

In 2009, her advocacy led to two new laws, leading to harsher penalties for enablers of child sexual exploitation. One established a mandatory minimum 14-year jail sentence for those convicted of aiding and abetting the sexual exploitation of children and adolescents. The second targeted the owners of establishments that allow the sexual exploitation of children on their premises.

"Sexual exploitation has a huge impact on children, emotionally, psychologically, physically and socially," said Maye. "Their bodies have been so maltreated, so abused, so exploited that they feel alienated from those bodies, as if they don't belong to them."(Pic from UNHCR website)