Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
tourists were met by Thai tour operators at the airport and taken to their hotels, where Thai
girls with the job of “special services” accompanied each man to his room. Alternatively,
the men could board a bus and visit massage parlors where Thai girls were waiting to give
the same services.
Brothels returned to Cambodia when the United Nations peacekeepers arrived there to
enforce the peace agreement in 1992. During their stay of less than two years the number
of girls in brothels jumped from 6,000 to 20,000 and the average age of the girls entering
the trade dropped from eighteen to twelve. This was the first post-Cold War peacekeeping
mission where the peacekeepers faced charges of sexually abusing girls. Back then Yasushi
Akashi, the special representative of the U.N. Secretary General, refused to take the issue
seriously, saying “boys will be boys.”
In subsequent years, as U.N. peacekeepers faced increasing allegations of sexual mis-
conduct, the U.N. stepped in to forbid most abuses, including giving money or food to
young girls for sex.
Cambodia became just one of the countries where sex tourism sprang up in the 1990s
during the chaotic transformation of Communist nations to capitalist and the sudden
opening of closed borders. Rogue gangs and organized crime got footholds in many indus-
tries, including tourism and prostitution, when governments were at their weakest. The
money was eye-popping and bribes helped the trade dig deep roots. In Eastern Europe un-
derground syndicates took over prostitution in the former Czechoslovakia along the “High-
way of Shame” originally patronized by German truck drivers.
“Before the dust from the Berlin Wall had even settled, gangsters and chancers were
laying the cables of a huge network of trafficking in women,” wrote Misha Glenny in
McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld.
Estimates from individual countries suggest that these criminal syndicates earn in the
hundreds of billions every year. Sex tourism provides anywhere between 2 and 14 percent
of the gross domestic products of Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines, according to
the U.S. Department of Justice, which monitors the aspects of sex tourism that are crimin-
al behavior.
And it is a crime to traffic in women and children and to have sex with underage girls
and boys. Foreign male tourists convicted of any of these crimes can be punished with
long prison terms in the home countries.
The tourism industry publicly opposes child sex tourism. Respectable hotel chains pro-
hibit guests from bringing underage children to their rooms and forbid all solicitation on
their premises. Many hotels cooperate with the police, contribute to campaigns to stamp
out the scourge and pass out information leaflets to tourists about illegal prostitution of
minors.
However, the industry is also quick to point out that they can't stop sex tourism or be
held responsible for the brutal trafficking of women and children—that is the job of the
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