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News Archive |
LAST UPDATE
July 11, 2005
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February 16, 2005 |
Child Prostitution: Tourism as a facilitator, and a force for change |
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| Ms. Saito Keiko |
It is possible to purchase the services of a 12 year old girl in Cambodia for as little as five US dollars. Throughout the developing world, over 1,000,000 children from as young as seven and up to 18 are forced into child prostitution each year. The driving force is almost always poverty, and often parents are forced to sell their children into sexual slavery, often masked as a domestic job or other scheme to con youth into the sex trade. Sometimes the children, whether knowingly or not, enter into prostitution, simply out of the need for food and shelter and there being no alternative social support or education services to take them in. |
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| Ms. Izutsu Yoko, Japan Grace managing director, coordinating work with ECPAT |
The hard reality is that the global tourism and vacation industry is used and abused as a tool for customers of child prostitution around the world. By creating the infrastructure for people to easily travel from rich countries to poor countries, and largely turning a blind eye to the problem, the tourism industry itself has become accomplice to a humanitarian catastrophe hidden in dark alleys and taboo and the need to protect profits. A former receptionist at a high-end resort hotel in the Philippines estimated that customers engaged in child prostitution accounted for 20-30% of the hotel’s business; a formidable economic force to which hotel management knowingly turned a blind eye. |
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Ms. Saito Keiko is from ECPAT Stop Japan, an affiliate of the international NGO ECPAT (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking in Children for Sexual Purposes). ECPAT has been working since 1990 to bring together NGO’s working on child prostitution, the tourism industry and governments together to change tourism from a tool abused for child prostitution, to a way to reduce and eliminate child prostitution. Ms. Saito was invited to speak to staff and volunteers about this problem by Japan Grace, the travel company which handles the logistics of the Peace Boat voyages.
In April of 1996 ECPAT Sweden, the World Tourism Organization and a number of private tour operators in Sweden enacted the “Code of Conduct for the Protection of Children from Sexual Exploitation in Travel and Tourism.” Tour operators, travel agents, hotels, airlines and other tourism related groups which endorse the Code, commit to implementing a number of measures “aiming to prevent sexual exploitation of children at tourism destinations.” These include local public education about the issue and how to deal with it, inform travelers of the problem, and implementing contractual clauses with suppliers and customers repudiating sexual exploitation of children. While the breadth of involvement of members of the tourism industry in this problem is great, and complete implementation by any tour operator without going bankrupt is difficult, ECPAT, the WTO and endorsing groups are pressuring more and more groups to gradually implement the Code. |
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While the movement is growing in Europe and North America, it is still very weak in Japan, a country clearly recognized as the primary source of business in the South and East Asian child prostitution market. Working in consultation with Ms. Saito and ECPAT, a group of 15 staff members of Japan Grace are meeting weekly to find new ways to raise awareness of the Code and implementation of its principles. Recently, an agreement was reached with Tokyo-based fair trade company “People Tree” to supply Peace Boat voyages with dried mango from the Philippines, purchased from the Preda organization and produced by youth rescued from child prostitution. It is one step in the right direction, but many more need to be taken, until the $5 market for young girls and boys, and the customer base of sex-tour operators, locals, business travelers, backpackers and others is wiped out for good.
Japan Grace will sign and implement the Code at a ceremony at the UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) Tokyo offices on March 14 as a concrete step towards furthering awareness-raising and implementation of the Code in Japan and around the world. |
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