ABSTRACT
In May of 1995, Christian Aid published a short report on child prostitution in the economically underdeveloped world which suggested that there may be as many as 200,000 child prostitutes in Thailand, over 200,000 in India, 60,000 in the Philippines, 15,000 in Sri Lanka and an unknown further number in other South East Asian countries, Latin America and Africa (Christian Aid, 1995). The report was concerned to highlight links between child prostitution and tourism and to provide support for a Private Members’ Bill, tabled by Lord Hylton, which was designed to make it possible for British tourists accused of committing sexual crimes against children whilst abroad to be tried for their offences in British courts. Such legislation had been adopted in a number of other European and Scandinavian countries, as well as in Australia and the United States, following a rash of cases in which their nationals had been charged with sexual offences against children in Thailand, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, but had escaped to the safety of their own country before being brought to justice. Despite the fact that Britons are the second or third largest group of men deported from the Philippines and Sri Lanka for sexual offences against children (Ireland, 1993), and the fact that in June 1995 a Swedish national was successfully tried and convicted in Sweden for child sex offences committed in Thailand, the Major government refused to support Lord Hylton’s Bill, arguing, among other things, that it would be technically difficult to secure convictions for extra-territorial crimes.1 The Christian Aid report, the Bill and the government’s response to it generated fairly extensive media coverage of the phenomenon of child sexual exploitation by tourists. A spate of news articles, radio programmes and television documentaries devoted to the topic appeared, many of which implicitly assumed that the problem consisted mainly of ‘paedophiles’ travelling to poor countries in order to secure safe and easy sexual access to very young children and reinforced a set of stereotypes about child prostitution in the economically underdeveloped world.
