Those who have taken part in the study have said that the findings are alarming. In November , the End Child Prostitution and Trafficking group, a global network of civil society organisations working to end the sexual exploitation of children, issued a seminal report. In Armenia, and certainly in Nagorno-Karabakh, which lays beyond the reach of law and order and outside the scope of studies and research by the international community, the situation was, to say the least, grave.
That is making it harder to address the problem We would come face to face with the horrific human reality of this failure on our visit to Nagorno-Karabakh.
He wears the bored, unhappy look that many hotel employees do, uncomfortable in an ill-fitting, grey Vallex Garden uniform. Amid a mix of scruffy tourists and some dubious-looking Iranians, Khachaturian visibly brightens when he sees three Western men eating breakfast alone.
No accompanying women. Instead of the dismissive service of earlier, now we are the subject of a mini-charm offensive. Stepanakert is somewhat sleepy at night. Once the Blues Bar on Shahumyan Square closed for good, that left the warm and eccentrically decorated Bardak Pub on Tevosyan Street as the only legitimate nightspot in the town.
Alex, however, has a proposal. If we meet him in Shahumyan Square at ten, he will gladly show us where the real action is. A little doubtful, we are at the appointed spot, under a fine statue of Bolshevik revolutionary Stepan Shaumian that evening. Considering where we are about to head, it is a fitting place to begin our journey. Shaumian was compared with the devil in official British documents produced a century ago, when he was at the pinnacle of his influence in the region.
