GETTING IT WRONG - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 83

local authorities. The industry may condemn tourists traveling to foreign lands to buy sex
with an underage girl or boy or a young woman who is being held against her will, but it
remains a cornerstone of its profit earnings, an extension of the idea that you can let your
hair down on vacation and indulge in fantasies.
I saw this confirmed in the middle of an earnest discussion at an exclusive conference of
tourist executives in Brazil. Brett Tollman, president of the Travel Corporation, interrup-
ted comments about responding to tourists' desire for environmentally responsible travel
by saying many young men travel just “to drink and get laid.”
The crowd of mostly men broke out into knowing chuckles. Sex tourism makes billions
of dollars from those fantasies, and that money is spread throughout the in-
dustry—agencies, operators, airlines, hotels, restaurants and, of course, brothels. The
Czech Republic is famous in the business as a magnet. Cheap flights to Prague are
routinely filled with young men looking for a sex vacation. Czech brothels are cheap and
operate in a legal gray zone. During the recent 2008 Recession, when tourism dropped,
the Czech hotel industry lobbied hard to legalize prostitution and boost business. (Tourists
account for 60 percent of the $500 million sex trade in the Czech Republic.) The govern-
ment said no, but in the economic rebound, sex tourism, along with hotel bookings, is up.
Cambodia is recognized as a hot spot for child sex tourism along with India, Thailand,
Brazil and Mexico. At least 2 million children are prostituted in sex tourism around the
world, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, and millions of lives ruined. In the
global world system there are international rules and regulations to govern the trade of
goods and services. But even though every minute of every day a child or a woman is co-
erced into sex as a prostitute, there are no rules covering sex tourism.
Marina Diotallevi of the World Tourism Organization is an expert on the sexual ex-
ploitation of children. “Sometimes a normal tourist goes to a poor country and sees this
new opportunity and says, 'Why not—I'll try this and I'll do these poor children a favor
and give them money.' That is the crime. Tourism is not the crime.”
As she points out, the battle against sex tourism has been going on for more than thirty
years, and some of the biggest victories have been won in Thailand, where much of it star-
ted. There are international campaigns to inform consumers, including an international
code of conduct, increased prosecutions of sex offenders by their home nations, more re-
porting of crimes even without prosecution and greater cooperation between the industry
and international organizations. Yet she can't say whether all this effort has reduced the
risk for poor children.
“It is such a big world,” she said. “Most of these countries don't want to admit they have
such a big problem with child sex tourism.”
There are few things more odious than walking along Phnom Penh's waterfront and
running into a white-haired old man walking to an assignation with a girl young enough
to be his granddaughter. That image of the old man is something of a misnomer. Young