As a resident of Jersey City, my home is situated very close to where the last Super Bowl took place. While most fans will remember this Super Bowl as a day that Peyton Manning would like to forget, I'll remember it for a community meeting weeks before the big game, when a police representative warned all of us in the community with children to watch out for organized criminals who may haunt our neighborhoods in order to kidnap them so they could satisfy the need for teenage sex partners of incoming Super Bowl fans.
Of all the controversies one associates with professional sports, from steroids to concussions, this was one I wasn't familiar with.
I found a bit of irony in the fact that on the one day my town was to be an international tourist attraction, the local police felt compelled to have me protect my teenaged daughter. What about the places I write about all of the time, in Asia, Europe and the Pacific? How were parents and children adjusting to the people I was helping to send to their towns? Were their local police making them understand the dangers?
The State Department estimates that about a million children per year are driven into the global sex trade. Another unknown number of children are victimized by sex tourists in non-commercial settings. Governmental organizations and police organizations around the globe are joined in fighting against this sort of abuse and tourism organizations are increasingly willing to talk out loud about a subject that has been for too long considered too incendiary to discuss.
PATA Leads the Way
Earlier this month, the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding with The Code of Conduct for the Protection of Children from Sexual Exploitation in Travel and Tourism (The Code). Though The Code has been in existence since 1996, PATA is the first regional tourism association to partner with it.
In signing the MoU, Mario Hardy, PATA's COO said, "As taboo as it may be to talk about, the sexual exploitation of children is a problem in some of the regions we operate in. When our members join The Code they will be supported to take concrete actions to protect children while also reassuring their customers that they are socially responsible."
Under the agreement PATA will reach out to its members and other tourism related businesses in the Asia Pacific region and encourage them to cooperate in the promotion of child protection practices and to raise awareness of the crime of child sex tourism and further promote The Code. The MoU also promises that PATA will encourage members to join The Code.
Companies that join The Code agree to take six steps that turn child protection principles into concrete actions that can help keep children safe.
The steps are: 1. To establish a corporate ethical policy against commercial sexual exploitation of children; 2. To train the personnel in the country of origin and travel destinations; 3. To introduce clauses in contracts with suppliers, stating a common repudiation of sexual exploitation of children; 4. To provide information to travelers through catalogues, brochures, in-flight films, ticket-slips, websites, etc.; 5. To provide information to local "key persons" at destinations; and 6. To report annually.
Since 2008, the FBI has been partnering with both domestic and international law enforcement agencies to investigate the U.S. market for sex tourism with children under the age of 18. According to the FBI, "American perpetrators travel to a variety of locations-from less developed areas in Southeast Asia and Central and South America to more developed areas in Europe. But it makes no difference where these crimes occur-any U.S. citizen or permanent resident who engages in sexual contact with a minor overseas is subject to prosecution under various U.S. laws."
According to the World Tourism Organization research travelers who participate in sex with children abroad don't fall neatly into the category of pedophiles. A large percentage of these offenders, maybe even a majority, don't practice the crime at home. They follow a different ethic abroad that the UNWTO characterizes this way,"far away from home, the same morals do not apply." The UNWTO even suggests that many of these perpetrators feel they are helping the child by providing money for food and other necessities. This echoes the defense of sweat shops abroad. There's also the common belief that other societies don't view sexuality with children as we do in the West, an echo of the canard we used to hear during the Vietnam War that "they don't value life as we do."
In the mean time I still think back to that policeman's warning to my community. The same warning was probably given in World Cup host cities in Brazil. In Brazil, where prostitution is legal for those over 18, the government still felt compelled to work overtime to prevent the country's children from being exploited. Brazil knows they have a child sex tourism problem. In 2013, the country's child-abuse hotline received 124,000 calls, with 26 percent of them for sexual violence against children.
A large majority of the calls came from northeastern Brazil, a popular region for tourism. To combat the situation Brazil produced a code of conduct for taxi drivers and hotel receptionists. It also ran a campaign to raise public awareness, just as they did in my town when the Super Bowl came to the Meadowlands.
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