Pratul Sharma

New Delhi, January 2010

Hotels and airlines will no longer allow the use of the Internet on their premises by anyone searching for child pornography or sites that peddle child sex tourism.

If any of their employees is found helping tourists abuse children, these industries will ensure the workers are sacked and arrested. Besides, all employees will be trained to keep an eye on paedophiles.

These are some of the guidelines framed for the tourism industry to curb child sex tourism. The guidelines have been drawn up by Pacific Asia Travel Association’s (PATA) India chapter and the ministry of tourism. Sources said state tourism departments will start implementing them in the next two months.

The guidelines also require the tourism industry to conduct all future businesses by introducing a clause in the contracts that will discourage sexual exploitation of children.

Sources said curbing child sex tourism, now a major industry not only in coastal tourist hubs but also in the religious towns of Orissa and Tamil Nadu, cannot be done by the police and NGOs alone. “Until hotels, tour operators and even airlines play an active role in curbing child abuse, the menace cannot be contained,” a tourism ministry official said.

Several cases of child prostitution have been unearthed in India in recent years. Among them was the arrest of Albert Freddy Peats in Goa in 1991. He was charged with sexually exploiting children under the pretext of running a shelter for them. He was the first person in India to serve a life term for paedophilia.

Even the government agrees that in the pretext of drawing more tourists to the country, such cases were being brushed under the carpet.

The new guidelines will require tour operators, hoteliers and airlines to include information about the illegality of child abuse in their promotional brochures and other publicity materials.

It appears pedophiles are those who preferentially seek out children for sexual relationships; however many child sex tourists are “situational abusers” — individuals who do not consistently seek out children as sexual partners, but who do occasionally engage in sexual acts with children when the opportunity–i.e. vacationing in another country–presents itself. According to the NTV report, pedophiles and sex pests flushed out of Asia by the tsunamis have now embedded themselves in the coasts of Kenya where child sex tourism is fueled by poverty and also the internet.

Like many holiday destinations, East Africa’s pristine shorelines, game reserves, abundant nightlife and cultural attractions are the stuff holiday brochures in the west are made of. Tourism is a major money spinner for many of the world’s poorest countries, but East Africa’s tropical paradise hides a dark, sordid secret: “child sex tourism.”

The rise of this trade is shocking and the speed of its establishment staggering. It can only happen under a culture of deep rooted corruption, poverty and lack of concern for the most vulnerable in society that prevails in East African countries, especially Uganda and Kenya.

“Child sex tourism” has a long history. However, the practice has developed substantially during the last few decades. According to experts, “child sex tourism” involves tourists who deliberately travel to foreign destinations solely for the purpose of engaging in sex with juveniles.

A 65 year old expatriate teacher from the United States of America is facing jail in Ghana after being arrested for abusing several African children by exchanging sexual favours for food. Patrick Ken Larbash is currently in custody whilst officials investigate his child abuse practices. His arrest followed the seizure of video recordings with up to eight Ghanaian children performing oral sex –Felatio– on him at his house in Adjomanikope.

In 2006, Alexander Kilpatrick, a 56 year old father of two, was arrested in Milton Keynes, England, and jailed for 17 counts of sex offenses after making several trips to East Africa, masquerading as an NGO worker, when he was actually a pedophile. Kilpatrick made harrowing films of the abuses.

More recently, police in Gulu, in war-torn Northern Uganda, arrested and detained Peter Kets, a Belgian “tourist” for taking and being in possession of pictures of nude little girls from the area whom he lured to his hotel room. In his defense, he claimed he did not know he was committing any crime because the girls in the photographs were his girlfriends!

Whilst some expatriates make permanent bases in Africa as NGO workers, others make frequent visits with the sole purpose of grooming minors by using their comparative wealth to entice, exploit and ultimately abuse vulnerable Africans – often creating films of their abuse to sell and share worldwide with other pedophiles.

The problem is that, East African countries are doing nothing of note to prevent “child sex tourism..” In Kenya for instance, the practice has become part of the daily life along the shores of Mombasa. It is done with the knowledge of the police who always accept bribes –”chai” – to look the other way. African borders and immigration rules towards white foreigners are simply too lax.

In recent years, growing concerns about rising abuses of children has tested the resolve of governments to implement international agreements designed to end the exploitation of children. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is already the most widely recognized of any international agreement. Concern over child labour, child prostitution and the civil rights of children are a benchmark by which any nation’s commitment to human rights and democracy can be judged.

But this has achieved very little in places like Northern Uganda, with its army of “lost children” and survivors who continue to face sexual exploitation by those who purport to help them cope. As experiences have shown from DR Congo, Haiti, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Northern Uganda, respect for children’s rights cannot be guaranteed by goodwill alone.

The pressures of commercial development, cultural diversity and a global economy that give easy access for a rich minority to regions where people are struggling under appalling conditions of war, poverty and exploitation, vulnerable, powerless and voiceless group like children become easy victims as their governments are fixated with attracting foreign investments more than protecting their own citizens.

Tourism is the world’s leading economic sector and all countries compete to lure visitors. The problem is that in many regions of Africa, particularly countries like Kenya and Uganda, sexual exploitation, specifically the exploitation of children is an unpleasant by-product of tourism. Equally the ready acceptance of “NGOs” whose credentials go unchecked is a major contributor.

It is an issue that should involve many players – journalists and media, travel agents and tourism companies, national tourist boards, airlines and travel services, hotels and restaurants and entertainment providers.

The exploitation of human beings in any form, particularly sexual exploitation of children, must never be part of the tourism industry. Any form of child sex tourism, child sexual exploitation, should be robustly combated and perpetrators and those who abet them penalized without concession. Some countries already penalize their nationals for such crimes, even when it is committed abroad.

The author is a human rights advocate
www.observer.ug

Air France currently shows this video on their flights.

• About 2 million children worldwide are under 18 and enslaved in the sex trade. 
• Child prostitution is a crime. 
• Support businesses fighting child sex tourism.

Visit www.thecode.org to learn more.

Hotel chains like Carlson (owner of Radisson) and Accor (owner of Sofitel, Novitel, Motel 6 etc), European airlines like Air France, and travel agencies all over the world have signed on to a 6 point plan to fight child prostitution.

There are many myths: that sex tourists are helping the children earn money, that it is legal and acceptable in other countries, and that children are less likely to have HIV.

ALL are myths.

Child prostitution is illegal, prosecutable (and they are prosecuting) no matter where you commit this crime, and it is a physically and mentally torturous life for the child.

When you travel, please patronize companies who are helping to fight this sick and brutal crime.

There is a list of companies at www.thecode.org.