Sex Tourism Trade Throughout the World
Travelers Taking Trips For Illicit Purposes
Sex tourism is a very lucrative industry that spans the globe. Countries that have become prime destinations for tourists seeking sex include: Malaysia, the Phillipines, , Thailand, Mexico and Central America. It is estimated by the non-profit organization End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography, and the Trafficking of Children, (ECPAT), that more than one million children worldwide are drawn into the sex trade each year.
Poverty Influence in Sex Tourism
Many nations with with thriving sex tourism industries suffer from wide spread poverty resulting from turbulent politics and unstable economics. Children in families who are illiterate, with limited employment opportunities and bleak financial circumstances are easy targets for procurement agents in search of young children. They are lured away from broken homes by "recruiters" who promise them jobs in the city and then force the children into prostitution. Poor families have been seen to prostitute their children or sell them into the sex tourist trade to obtain needed money. In some countries, female children have fewer educational opportunities or the skills for employment and are forced into this means of earning a living.
Internet as a Marketing Tool
The Internet has provided a convenient marketing way that is accounting for the recent rise in sex tourism. Websites provide potential child sex seekers with pornographic accounts written by other sex tourists. Here can be found details of sexual exploits with children and information on sex establishments and prices in various destinations and how to specifically procure child prostitutes.
Sex tour travel agents even publish brochures and guides on the Internet. Governments in need of income from the sex tourism turn a blind eye to the sexual exploitation.
Children as Victims of Sex Tourism
According to ECPAT, international child prostitutes are known to serve between two and thirty clients a year, adding up to 100 to 1500 per clients, per child. They may be as young as ten-years-old. Many of them have physical ailments, including tuberculosis, exhaustion, infections, and physical injuries inflected upon them. Venereal diseases, drug use and suicide is common among them.
Typical Sex Tourists
Sex tourists are typically males and come from all income brackets, coming from nations in Western Europe and North America. The sex tourists are sometimes pedophiles that seek out children for sexual relationships, however many are individuals who do not consistently seek out children as sexual partners, but do occasionally engage in sexual acts with children when the opportunity presents itself. They are often drawn towards child sex while abroad because they enjoy anonymity that comes with being in a foreign land. There is a sense of being free from moral restraints that would cover such behavior in their own country.
International Response to Sex Tourism
Efforts to combat child sexual exploitation run into conflicts with foreign governments' desire to promote the international tourism industry. So far, the international community has not been able to depend on the destination countries to protect the right of child victims. In the United States (U.S.), there are proposals to increase the prosecution of its citizens who engage in sexual acts with children when abroad. As a global leader, the U.S. is committed to using its power to reform and eradicate the child sex tourism industry.
As long as tourist sex remains a lucrative industry and countries allow it to continue with impunity, millions of children will continue to be its victims.
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