Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
their dreams for the future and nothing else. I went elsewhere to find out more about sex
tourism.
Today easy sex draws nearly as many tourists as the Angkor temples. In a survey, tour
agents estimated that 21.7 percent of male tourists to Cambodia were looking for sex and
32.5 percent for culture. Another survey did a profile of these men's nationalities. In re-
cent years Asian men are the most numerous—from Korea, Japan, China, Thailand and
Malaysia. Chinese sex tourists stand out for being obsessed with buying the services of
young virgins, willing to pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars for them in the belief
this will enhance their masculinity and health. French and American men top the list of
westerners.
You can find these male tourists seeking girls and boys in brothels and on the street. At
dusk male tourists find young boys near the Royal Palace or the Central Market in Phnom
Penh. They know where to look thanks to Internet chat rooms and local motorcycle and
taxi drivers. Similar transactions take place just outside the main gate at Angkor. The most
blatant trolling for sex is in the south, on the beaches of Sihanoukville. Since neighboring
Thailand began cracking down on child sex tourism, hundreds of sex tourists have arrived
in Cambodia with its lax law enforcement and beautiful beaches.
The Ministry of Tourism has joined with several private charities to stop child sex tour-
ism, in part in response to growing pressure from Europe, the United States and the World
Tourism Organization. “Don't Turn Away, Turn Them In!” is one of the campaign slo-
gans. Cambodia has passed laws that are better than even those in Thailand, and some
Cambodian police work with foreign nonprofits to capture foreign tourists caught having
sex with minors. In 2009 three American men from California were arrested in Cambodia
for having sex with young prostitutes and extradited to the United States. Among them was
a forty-nine-year-old man charged with having sex with a ten-year-old girl and a forty-one-
year-old man charged with having sex with young boys for $5 and $10.
The International Justice Mission or IJM, a human rights group with an office in Ph-
nom Penh, played a central role in that arrest. Ron Dunne, the head of the IJM office,
took me on a “brothel crawl” through Phnom Penh to show me how difficult his job is and
how ineffective those anti-sex-tourism campaigns are.
Dunne is a retired Australian military officer whose last post was attaché at the Aus-
tralian embassy in Phnom Penh. As we drove around Phnom Penh, he explained how
sex tourism ruins lives and society. “Most of the young children are sold by families who
are deeply in debt. They're farmers, coming from the rural areas where they can't make
money. They'll wait to sell a virgin girl to the highest bidder—a foreign tourist who will
pay from eight hundred to four thousand dollars,” said Dunne.
“After she loses her virginity, the girl works in a brothel—often drugged and
beaten—and by her mid-twenties she's finished. She's lucky to make $10 a night. You
Search WWH ::
Custom Search