3.8 Limitations Of The Study

During my research I ran into several difficulties that have limited my study on the topic. First of all, I was rather reckless in thinking I would be able to conduct interviews in Spanish. My knowledge of the Spanish language turned out to be too basic to be able to conduct interviews in Spanish. Fortunately, most of my research participants were able to speak English, but nevertheless I was constrained in my interview possibilities.

It was a good decision that I decided not to focus on the families and the children as most people in Costa Rica do not speak English, although I do think it is a limitation not to have heard their opinion on the child sex tourism situation in Costa Rica and the fight against it. Also I would have needed more time to build some trust in order to conduct these kinds of interviews.

Another problem I encountered was my safety. I always was being told by everybody, especially my Costa Rican guest family I lived with and my colleagues at Paniamor, to be very careful on the streets and not to be on the streets in the dark alone. They warned me not to take my digital camera with me, not to wear jewelry, and definitely to leave my laptop in the house of my guest family. This restricted my movement possibilities, and the possibility to take pictures, especially as I was not able, as a woman alone, to go to specific places during the evening to observe the phenomenon of sex tourism with my own eyes.

It even turned out to be almost impossible make observations when I went together with the Costa Rican man and his Dutch girlfriend of my Costa Rican guest family, as his girlfriend and I were not allowed to enter a famous prostitution bar belonging to a prostitution hotel. Besides these observation problems, if I had wanted to talk to sex tourists, not only observe, it would probably have been very difficult to get these people, mainly men, to open up to me, a Western woman. However, it would have been interesting to know how they react on the stricter fight in Costa Rica.

Time constraints were also a limitation and difficulty in my study as I am interested in so many facets of this phenomenon and there were so many interesting stakeholders to interview. Time constraints were also present in the interview with the stakeholders themselves, as most of them did not have time for a long interview and some of them even put a time-limit on the interview.

I also met some other difficulties with some of the research participants. Before starting the interviews I was warned that making appointments in general is far from easy in Costa Rica as “manana, manana” (tomorrow, tomorrow) is a common expression in Costa Rica. Furthermore there was one group of stakeholders that were not very willing to cooperate in my research: the private tourism sector.

All the other stakeholders I had planned an interview with, non-governmental organizations and governmental institutions, cooperated, however I had great difficulties in finding tourism companies, especially hotels in the beach locations, who wanted to cooperate and also the Chambers (CCH, ACOT and CANATUR) I wanted to interview did not cooperate in my research.

Furthermore the NGO, Fundecooperación agreed with an interview in first instance, but later I was not able to contact her anymore and she did not react to any of my emails and calls. Nevertheless, I believe I was very fortunate to get access to such an amazing organization as Paniamor. An organization that has a fairly long history of fighting against the exploitation. Their opinions and experiences of being on the ground have provided me a fairly good insight into the whole phenomenon.