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Every day, 2,000 children are forced into prostitution, a transnational enterprise that is growing in both size and scope. The International Labor Organization estimates that more than 2 million children under age 18 are involved in prostitution, half of them in Asia and 300,000 in the United States. Americans account for 80 percent of world arrests involving child sex tourism.
Sex tourism is a widely practiced phenomenon, contributing to the child sex trade. Although sex tours are usually arranged informally, there have been instances in which travel agencies plan packages including flights, meals, hotels and sex slaves.
An often-frequented Western paradise, Costa Rica, appears to be growing in child sex tourism, reportedly receiving 5,000 tourists with the specific intention of exploiting children in 1999 alone.
Anonymous travelers are less inhibited outside their own countries; it is not likely they will be caught before they leave the country. Tourism allows access to vulnerable children, allowing foreigners to abuse their social and economic advantages at the cost of desperate youngsters. It also draws the rural poor into urban centers as it delivers luxurious consumerism and replaces traditional job markets.
Victims are sold, swindled, forced or otherwise coerced into sexual servitude. In Eastern Europe men posing as employment agents visit villages, offering bids to families who are coaxed by the idea that their daughters may have a better life or find work. These sex dealers lure them to Israel, Germany, Switzerland, Japan and the United States, where they are delivered to abusive buyers. In other parts of the world, people willingly sell their children or other relatives for temporary monetary relief.
Other times, children are kidnapped and then transported abroad against their wills, where they are raped and beaten into submission. Some girls report being ordered to dance, appear happy and have sex with any customer who wants her for less than $20, according to National Geographic.
Intercontinental ties between organized crime units such as the Mafia, cartels, triads and Yakuza, assist child traffickers across borders, providing documents, transportation, hideouts and local contacts.
Their owners abuse any vulnerability they can. For instance, because the trade is starting to move away from traditional brothels to less detectable clubs, bars, restaurants, massage parlors and personal residences, children who are employed at these establishments are forced to engage in the underground sex business.
Their bosses have them arrested for not having proper documents because they have been smuggled illegally into the country, bail them out and then make them earn back unrealistic sums of money through sex. If they ever make the money back, they are sold to the next buyer, and the cycle continues. Debt slaves are kept in ignorance about regional laws and languages in the countries where they have been imported, dimming any hope of escape. Tourists often compensate child prostitutes with T-shirts, toys and petty sums of money.
Although children in countries undergoing social and economic transitions, such as those in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, are particularly at risk, it is no longer accurate to say that the slaves are being sent from developing countries to countries with emerging economies. Today, child prostitution is found in virtually every country in the world.
Profiteers skillfully monitor the trade and adjust accordingly. As security and law enforcement cracks down in one country, they move their establishments to another neighboring country, a practice reflected in the increasing shift in child prostitution from Thailand to Cambodia.
Although child prostitution is highest in Asia, it is not exclusive to other parts of the world. In downtown Los Angeles I spoke with a crack-addicted prostitute whose mother had sold her to her own pimp when she was 12. Domestic workers and women in the sex industry are trafficked into the United States with promises of jobs and education and then held as slaves.
In some Mexican border towns, 12 to 17-year-old “street boys” occasionally prostitute themselves to subsist and pay for addictions, receiving only $20 out of the $200 they earn, surrendering the rest to their middlemen.
The most obvious factor that leads children to prostitution is financial. Lack of education, unskilled labor and few viable alternatives in developing countries, especially in rural areas, combined with consumerism and economic disasters, have intensified the problem. The shift of agricultural goods to urban centers supplies a steady stream of prostitutes.
Prostitution provides children a unique option that other jobs do not — a way for one child to support the entire family. In Cambodia, 98 percent of girls in prostitution are the main providers for their families.
Even the Internet has helped facilitate international purchases of mail-order brides (sometimes as young as 13), mainly from Asia and Eastern Europe.
AIDS and war have made many children homeless, and others orphans, who carry the burden of supplying for their younger siblings.
The arrival of peacekeeping troops was associated with a rapid rise in child prostitution in six of the 12 countries studied in a U.N. report. How ironic. The U.S. Navy presence in the Philippines in the 1970s and 1980s witnessed an influx in prostitution, as did Cambodia, Mozambique and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Thailand received money from the U.S. Department of Defense for “recreation and relaxation” for American troops during the Vietnam War. In 1975, the World Bank built Thailand’s economic plan around the sex tourism industry, which subsequently became the country’s No. 1 export, according to End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism Organization, based in Thailand.
Psychological and emotional abuses hinder moral and social development of the children, who suffer from shame, guilt and low self-esteem. Someone they loved or trusted has usually betrayed them, and they often commit suicide to escape their hopelessness. Health and social services are inadequate, according to reports.
There is a naïve theory that children are less likely to be infected with sexually transmitted diseases, or that they are virgins. In fact, their immature bodies suffer lesions and bleeding during intercourse, which increases the chance of contracting AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, as well as reproductive complications later in life. Their body tissue is more easily damaged, and there is little education to spread awareness about such life-threatening matters.
Victims are often left homeless and addicted to drugs. At that point it is nearly impossible to stop selling themselves to feed their habit. Some masters in Mexico, including women, sell the babies of the girls who become pregnant from their forced sexual activity or force them to have abortions.
The only way to get victims off the street is to provide jobs and education for them. Police need better training and higher wages to counter corruption. International and state laws must be aggressively enforced. To date, only 32 countries have extraterritorial legislation to punish citizens who committed crimes abroad.
Thanks to many nonprofit organizations, such as the UNICEF, Child Prostitution and Tourism Watch Task Force, Turkey and Costa Rica are making progress, and some European airlines play in-flight informative videos about sex tourism and the laws against it.
The media also have a responsibility to inform the global community about the exploitation of children, while at the same time respecting the rights and dignity of these children.
For more information, visit http://www.ecpat.com.
Submitted October 23, 2003
MALIBU, CA
