Children have been a target of sex tourism in developing and poor countries for many years. The contradiction in the existence of this phenomenon still lives on among different countries and stakeholders involved. As an initiative to put an end to this matter, the U.S. implemented The Child Protection Compact Act 2009. This act involves -among others- initiatives against child sex tourism and therefore “seeks to protect and rescue children from trafficking by the establishment of Child Protection Compacts between the United States and select eligible countries with a significant prevalence of trafficking in children”. (http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20090715_klarevas_buckley.html)
Sex represents an important tourism attraction for many developing countries, but like all markets, sex tourism is an economic as well as a political issue. Sex tourism among children can be defined as sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age. This often involves either a form of involuntary servitude or a form of debt bondage, but with the added horrors of sexual assault and/or exploitation. Sadly, this type of tourism is an important income source for many poor countries, it is stated by the International Labor Organization that 1.8 million children are exploited by the commercial sex industry every year. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to show the impact of sex trafficking on the tourism industry and to point out the importance of stakeholder density and support in such a matter.
A high flow of pedophiles originated from the United States are entering the Asian countries for the purpose of sex tourism. One of the main reasons for this phenomenon is poverty that exists among these countries. Other factors include limited access to education, gender relations and weak law enforcement capacity. Technological advances, in particular the pervasiveness of the Internet and child abusive images, have also contributed to the current magnitude of the sexual exploitation of children. Some of the ASEAN tourism stakeholders agreed on the undesirable impact on the tourism industry during the conference on Child Sex Tourism on March 20th in Bali, nonetheless there is still limited coordination and collaboration across different government agencies and also between civil organizations, as well as limited engagement and support by the private sector in efforts to combat child sex tourism. In some countries, there is a lack of political will to tackle the problem or even acknowledge the existence. The weak law enforcement capacity is probably the most important factor in being able to prevent this type of tourism from happening. Therefore, the goal of the CPCA(Child Protection Compact Act) is to provide funding (through grants, cooperative agreements, and contracts) to foreign governments so that they can develop and implement national child protection strategies to combat the exploitation and trafficking of children. In order to strengthen this act, convicted pedophiles in the U.S. should be prohibited from obtaining a passport or from traveling outside the United States.
Looking at the stakeholder network in this issue, the Asian foreign governments and the U.S. tourism stakeholders should use the density of their network to implement these actions. All of these parties have a degree of power to influence each other and there is a high flow of information passing. (Friedman and Miles, 2006, p. 97) The U.S. and Asian forces should therefore connect their power and interests in order to come up with a compromised solution for child sex tourism. The initiative of The Child Protection Act thus is a step in the right direction towards ending this horrifying type of tourism flow, but yet is not enough I’m afraid.
Sources:
*http://www.eturbonews.com/8401/child-sex-tourism-under-siege-southeast-asia
*http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/09/30/shutting_down_child_sex_tourism/
*Friedman, A.L., Miles, S.(2006) Stakeholders, theory and practice. Oxford University Press
Hey Laura,
Eye-catching, and sadly, very realistic topic. I agree with you on the fact that the initiative of the Child Protection Act is not enough. More initiatives like that have been taken in the past, and there do not seem to be major improvements in the situation so far. I also think that the ‘lack of acknowledging the existence of some countries’ as you stated in your article, might be a lack due to the fact that child sex tourism does provide economical benefits to that specific country, and therefore they are not eager to fight it in first instance. Very sad if that would be true, but unfortunately I do think that this could be a possibility. What would your opinion be on this?
Nienke van Gemert (TDM student)
Dear Nienke,
thank you for your comment on my article. You are absolutely right, as stated in my article, sex tourism in poor countries like Thailand provide enormous financial benefits for the country, it was a 5 billion industry in the 90′s, so think of the number adding up the continuing trafficking nowadays. This is of course one of the reasons for not acknowledging this phenomenon by political agencies, when the government starts interferring, sex tourists simply move to another area. Added to that, sex tourism is of course a terrible matter, by acknowledging the existence, Thai government agencies put a stamp on the tourism business as being ‘abusive’ and ‘cruel’ to exploit their children to the horrifying industry of sex tourism. This will create a negative country identity, which will affect their tourism industry on the whole.