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.