1.2 Research Objective and Research Questions

This research aims to situate the issue of Child Sex Tourism within the context of tourism policies, regulations and interventions pursued in Costa Rica. I believe we need to move beyond stating that child sex tourism is a problem and to assess in more detail how well we are dealing with this problem. The fight against child sex tourism is not a so-called program bounded in time, which could be evaluated and from which the effectiveness could be measured afterwards. Instead the fight against child sex tourism is an ongoing process, a process which needs to be monitored.

The research objective that follows from this is formulated as follows:

To get a better insight in the fight against child sex tourism in Costa Rica by evaluating, analyzing and explaining the effects and potential positive or negative changes in a society, in this case Costa Rica, as a result of this fight against child sex tourism. In order to reach this goal I need to answer the following research questions:

1. How can Costa Rica be described with regard to its history, politics, culture and economy?
2. How (and why) is the situation in Costa Rica with regard to child sex tourism sustained?
3. How does Costa Rica succeed with its fight against child sex tourism?

It would be too large of a task in respect of time, finances and moral constraints to investigate everything that is happening in the field of fighting child sex tourism in Costa Rica and study everyone who is involved. Therefore, my research will focus on one specific project “Political Incidence” of one specific NGO named “Paniamor”, an affiliate group of ECPAT International.

Finding out the views of specific stakeholders Paniamor works with, namely other NGO’s, Governmental Institutions and the Tourism Industry will be a focus of this study. Furthermore, with this research I would like to achieve that the general public and scientists take away their focus on South-East Asia and look at other regions as well which also have to deal with the problem of child sex tourism. In doing this researchers hopefully can get a broader and more holistic view on this world-wide problem.