1.1 Problem Statement

"On this trip, I've had sex with a 14 year-old girl in Mexico and a 15 year-old in Colombia. I'm helping them financially. If they don't have sex with me, they may not have enough food. If someone has a problem with me doing this, let UNICEF feed them."
(Retired United States Schoolteacher in Nair, 2005)

The above quote was said by a sex tourist in a documentary about sex tourism in Costa Rica I watched, which made a huge impression on me, also because I have visited Costa Rica myself three years ago (Twee Vandaag, 2005). This documentary made clear that there are huge amounts of money involved in the sex tourism industry.

Every week, airplanes filled with men, and in lesser extent women, who are planning to spend millions of dollars in the sex industry, fly to Thailand, the Filipinas or Costa Rica. Approximately an estimated 2 million children are victims of child sex tourism. The average age of these children is fourteen years old, depending on the country, but some of the victims are as young as five. These children are often required to commit sex acts as many as 30 times a day.

Children of sex workers are at risk of being prostituted and are at high risk of suicide, post-traumatic stress disorder and diseases. 50-90% of children rescued from brothels in parts of Southeast Asia for example are infected with HIV (Willis, & Levy, 2002). More than two million of these children all over the world are abused in the sex tourism industry.

The affordability of flying to foreign countries nowadays, the corruption of local police, and shortfalls of international legislation can explain why these children are being abused. According to ECPAT [End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography & Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes], a network of organizations and individuals working together to eliminate the commercial sexual exploitation of children, child sex tourism is:

“The commercial sexual exploitation of children by persons who travel from their own country to another usually less developed country to engage in sexual acts with children”.

Until a relatively short time ago, the authorities in Costa Rica ignored the problem of sex tourism, specifically child sex tourism. They even responded to activists with comments such as child sex tourism was being made up. Until 10 years ago everything seemed possible in Costa Rica. There were no laws at all regarding the protection of children in the sex tourism industry. In the newspaper Tico Times, August 11, 1995 you even found advertisements where children where offered, as shown in the following:

“DREAMGIRLS!...
Beautiful, sweet, loving, traditional, nice Costa Rican girls all ages, interested in meeting & corresponding with nice older guys, all ages. If you are serious about finding a Costa Rican dream girl, we can make your dream come true. We have incredible references” (O’Connell Davidson & Sanchez Taylor, 1995)

Nowadays sex tourists are becoming more often prosecuted and convicted. However, there are problems in tracing those sex tourists mainly because of the modern technology that constitutes an extra problem. The sex tourists exchange a lot of information on the internet world wide. Furthermore, since the hunt in the Far East on sex tourists, in Thailand for example, has begun with the implementation of strict regulations to prevent sex tourism, specifically child sex tourism, sex tourists are looking for new destinations.

Besides “new” child sex tourism destinations such as the Middle East and the Pacific, it turned out that Costa Rica, among other countries in Latin and South America, has become an attractive alternative. Costa Rica is relatively easy to reach and the legislation on child sex was until recently not very strict. Sex tourists call it “the land of cockaigne or the land of plenty” (VARA, 2004).

More and more initiatives are being developed on local, regional, national and international level to fight child sex tourism, although we do not hear much about this. We mainly hear about child sex tourism being a problem. The development of all these initiatives does not automatically mean that these initiatives have an effect.

In a documentary about sex tourism in Brazil (VARA, 2004) a girl reported that the police are taking children off the street and bringing them back to their parents, but the next day the children are back on the street again to sell their bodies. This is an example which shows that, despite all the efforts from the last decade to fight this dark side of tourism, child sex tourism has continued to become a growing world-wide problematic phenomenon, which makes this an important phenomenon to study.