3.6 Research Sample Profile

To find out what is really happening in the field, if the situation really improved, it would naturally be a good idea to interview the children and families involved in sex tourism, and maybe potential sex tourists, and hear from them if something really changed and how this is affecting them. Initially this was my plan. However, research in the field of child sex tourism is difficult for several reasons. Doing research on sex tourism, and especially child sex tourism is first of all a big challenge, because most of the people that are relevant for the study, such as the child victims, survivors, the sex tourists, or the intermediaries, constitute the so-called hidden population (Tyldum & Brunovskis, 2005).

According to Tyldum and Brunovskis (2005: 18) a hidden population is “a group of individuals for whom the size and boundaries are unknown, and for whom no sampling exists”. Tyldum and Brunovski (2005: 18) continue arguing, while referring to Heckathorn (1997), that “membership in hidden populations often involves stigmatized or illegal behaviour, leading individuals to refuse to cooperate, or give unreliable answers to protect their privacy”. Because of this, it turned out to be too difficult a task to find and contact these stakeholders, especially because I was only in Costa Rica for 12 weeks. In order to get a good interview with a child and/or its family it is necessary that they feel comfortable with you and trust you. With such a sensitive topic, it takes time to find these people, as well as to find sex tourists, and build such trust and I did not have this time.

Furthermore, I valued my safety. Therefore, I, a “tourist” woman alone, still an outsider to the people I was dealing with although I was working within a Costa Rican organization, did not want to put myself in dangerous situations if not necessary. People in Costa Rica told me to be careful, because crime is growing, towards locals and especially towards tourists. The commercial sexual exploitation of children is an illegal activity that takes place in these criminal surroundings. That is why I decided to investigate the topic of child sex tourism looking at other stakeholders playing a role within this issue. With other stakeholders I mean the stakeholders who are involved in the fight, and who could give me the required information thus from another angle, although I still had to keep in mind that this is a very sensitive topic, which is a taboo to talk about for many people.

I conducted twenty semi-structured interviews with several kinds of stakeholders, ranging from some of my colleagues at Paniamor, other NGO’s and government institutions to the private tourism sector. There were many interesting stakeholders to interview, but time constraints and contact possibilities have limited the number of research participants. Most interviews were conducted in English, some in Spanish and some in Dutch. The interviews lasted an average of 1, 5 hours, the shortest being 25 minutes and the longest 3 hours. I found the research participants mainly through Paniamor, especially with regard to the government/education sector and the NGO sector. One group of stakeholders that were not very willing to cooperate in my research was the private tourism sector. It took me a lot of trouble to find research participants in this group.

In my search for research participants I chose people who could provide me with the most (interesting) information on the issue. The research participants were both female and male, young and old. It is important to point out that I did not look at gender in choosing my research participants, because this was not important at this level as I was interviewing these persons from their professional position. However, in this light it is interesting to note, looking at the characteristics of the different research participants in each sector, that there is a striking difference with regard to gender. In the NGO sector I have interviewed nine women and one man, in the government/education sector three women and one man, and in the private sector five men and one woman. All of my respondents considered themselves to be middle class citizens. All the interviews were useful, except for one from which I had to leave a big part out of my data analysis because of language problems. In Appendix VII my whole list of respondents can be found.