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TRAVELLING SEX OFFENDERS FUELLING DEMAND ABROAD
Human trafficking in far-off lands may seem removed from the lives of average Canadians. Victims like Srey Mao, however, know all too well that travelling sex offenders from numerous countries, including Canada, have contributed to the demand that has enslaved them.
Srey Mao grew up in Kampong Cham province in central Cambodia, where, as far as we can tell, she enjoyed life in a remote village. It all changed when Srey Mao’s mother sold her to a brothel owner in the bustling national capital of Phnom Penh when she was seventeen.
Once the money had changed hands, Srey Mao was taken directly to a hotel room where a foreign “child sex tourist” raped and beat her while another man, likely paid by her owner, guarded the door.
From that day, Srey Mao’s life became a chain of sexual abuse by countless men who rented her body from her mama-san. After several months, Srey Mao finally managed to escape and, in search of comfort and safety, travelled from Phnom Penh to the home of an aunt. There she encountered rejection, not just from her aunt but from the entire village, which stigmatized her as a prostitute. No one in the village allowed her to stay with them, nor would they feed her. In desperation, hoping her aunt would acknowledge that she wasn’t responsible for her fate, Srey Mao slept beneath the window of her aunt’s bedroom. Her aunt was unyielding: Srey Mao was labelled a prostitute and deserved no love or support.
It was Srey Mao’s mother who found her—and only because she was on her way to Phnom Penh to sell Sarun, Srey Mao’s younger sister, to the same mama-san who’d purchased Srey Mao. When her mother ignored Srey Mao’s pleas not to condemn Sarun to the same hell, Srey Mao offered to take her little sister’s place. Her mother agreed, and Srey Mao was sold back to the brothels to save her sister.
Srey Mao’s love for her little sister was more powerful than the evil that had ravaged her. Although she’d been shunned and treated worse than an animal, her spirit hadn’t been crushed.
Within three hours of agreeing to take her sister’s place, Srey Mao had been re-sold and was again forced to accept a steady stream of men, at least fifteen, each night. As before, she attempted to escape. This time, however, she was caught and severely beaten before being forced back into the role her “owners” had paid for her to perform.
For six months, hundreds of local men and foreign tourists raped and sexually abused her. In a courageous moment, Srey Mao attempted another escape, this one successful, and made her way through the countryside of Kampong Cham, hoping this time her family would take her in. Again she was rejected. With no one to turn to, Srey Mao returned to Phnom Penh where, hopeless in the face of people, power, and a system she couldn’t escape, she attempted suicide by ingesting a mixture of drugs and collapsed unconscious in the street.
Srey Mao awoke in a hospital bed. Someone—a modern-day Good Samaritan—had found her and brought her there. The man hadn’t left his name, but without a doubt he’d saved her life.
After hearing the story, doctors at the hospital pooled their money and gave it to Srey Mao, then helped her obtain a bed at a recovery centre for rescued victims of sex trafficking. It was a safe place, away from the mama-sans and other traffickers, landscaped with flowers and trees, and staffed by people who rejected the idea that anyone who’d been treated like Srey Mao should be stigmatized for life. She shared the centre with other girls and young women who’d been sold into sexual slavery to meet the demand from tourists, expatriates, and businessmen from Western countries, as well as local men looking for young bodies to purchase.
When I met Srey Mao at the recovery centre, she was nineteen years old and making plans for her sister to join her. As an at-risk child, Sarun would be safe at the centre and not sold into sex slavery. Srey Mao herself was learning to read and write in the traditional Khmer language of Cambodia and, for the first time in years, beginning to make her own decisions and shape her own future.
To prepare survivors to become self-supporting, the recovery centre offered the young women their choice of three training programs: sewing to make clothes, cooking to start a small restaurant, or haircutting and hairstyling to launch a salon.
Srey Mao chose sewing. She wanted to learn how to make beautiful dresses for girls and young women to wear and help them feel good about themselves.
Exporting the problem but not the fault
It’s not known what proportion of the men who bought the power to abuse Srey Mao were foreigners, and how many were from Canada. Some likely were. Foreign men who leave their own countries in fear of arrest, exposure, and punishment contribute to the demand for young women and girls as commodities.
Purchasers of sex acts with underage girls and boys know the odds: They are more likely to be identified, arrested, and prosecuted in Canada than in many countries that suffer from corruption, poverty, and an ineffective legal system.
To those who can hardly fathom a single act of child sexual abuse, encountering it on a widespread and systematic scale, as I did in Cambodia, produces something between shock and amazement that quickly morphs into disgust.
To help expose the problem, I went undercover with other members of The Future Group in 2001 at the request of a local human rights investigator. On this particular evening, our destination was a “karaoke bar” in Phnom Penh that caters mainly to expatriates or tourists whose sexual preference involves underage girls. Of course, the karaoke bar was merely a front for unspeakable crimes of child sexual abuse. The patrons of this establishment came from Australia, Japan, the United States, various European countries—and Canada. Since we were from Canada, the local investigator asked us to come with him to help him gain access more easily. That being a Canadian made entry to the facility effortless caused me to feel ashamed of my nationality for the first time in my life.
When we entered the facility, we were met with a large glass window extending from floor to ceiling. Behind it, seated on small bleachers that you might find in a hockey arena in any small town in Canada, were over a dozen young girls. Bright lights glared down on them, and they wore red or blue tags fastened to their tank tops. Their eyes looked distant, their expressions defeated. They were, I estimated, between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. I felt like I was in a pet store, looking at an aquarium, which was not inaccurate. These girls were for sale.
Individual men or small groups peered into the glass enclosure, told the mama-san the number of the girl or girls they wanted, and negotiated a price. They were then escorted to a private room to sexually abuse them. In contrast, we were busy scanning the rows of girls to count them, determine their approximate ages and nationalities, and look for any obvious signs of physical abuse. Unbeknownst to the proprietor, we were investigating the front, hopefully to help any of the girls inside who wanted to escape.
Suddenly, the proprietor sidled up to me and asked which one I wanted.
Stuttering, I replied that I didn’t know.
“Blue mean Cambodia girl, red mean Vietnam girl,” she explained.
I glanced over at the other researchers, whose expressions deliberately concealed the disgust I, too, was feeling. Then I said, “Maybe we’ll just start with a beer and sing some karaoke.”
After our group declined to select any girl, we were escorted down a dark hallway with doors on either side and led into our own room. The expressions on the girls’ faces remained fixed as we passed by. Inside we found a windowless room with an old fake-leather sofa and a “loveseat.” A lamp stood in one corner and a disco light overhead spread its random sparkles throughout the room.
For an hour, we drank Heineken and sang horrible renditions of Céline Dion songs as the mama-san began sending some of the young girls into the room. The local human rights investigator with us was fluent in Khmer. He spoke to the young girls while we continued to give performances of songs that would have earned us a swift rejection from American Idol. In hushed tones, he confirmed that underage girls were being held and exploited in this karaoke-brothel. They were glad that we were planning to get word to the police about this secret den of exploitation. Yet we were careful not to encourage false hope— better than we, they knew the odds of intervention were extremely low.
Thanks to lack of resources, widespread corruption, and broad acceptance of the sex tourism industry by many officials, the local authorities pursued few cases, even though serious criminal offences were being committed contrary to Cambodian law. In some cases, however, pressure from an international NGO like ours could help. So the next day, we used our reports from that evening to encourage the local prosecutor to launch an official investigation into the karaoke bar–brothel and rescue the underage girls caged there.
Generally, only the most egregious cases involving extremely young victims, such as those under ten, or cases involving severe physical violence would spur recalcitrant police and prosecutors to proceed with a rescue. Whatever local officials think of the practice, sex tourism brings millions of dollars in foreign currency to Cambodia, a country in dire economic straits. What would replace this money stream if the attraction vanished overnight? Compared with neighbouring countries like Thailand, Cambodia has little to attract tourists beyond Angkor Wat, the twelfth-century temple sacred to Hindus and Buddhists, which appears on the country’s flag. Cambodia is ranked as the 187th-poorest country on the planet with a per capita weekly income of U.S.$36.50. Yet the average price paid by foreign sex offenders for the virginity of an underage girl is U.S.$300–$700. With that kind of economic incentive for sex trafficking, only the most moral and courageous officials choose to demand an end to the racket, or at least prosecute the most offensive brothel keepers.
Occasionally a case actually moves forward, and we hoped our reports would lead to at least some girls being rescued and given a fresh start at one of the few recovery centres in the city.
We applied as much pressure as possible on authorities, encouraged those who continued to operate the recovery centres, helped improve programs to assist those who were rescued, and, in our own ways, prayed for the girls who remained enslaved.
That was almost ten years ago, and the image of those young girls inside that glass prison continues to disturb me.
Sexual abuse at home and abroad
Those who travel beyond Canada’s borders to pursue their sexual abuse of children and women don’t always restrict these repugnant actions to foreign locations. Donald Bakker didn’t.
Crab Park was created as an urban oasis for residents of Vancouver’s poor and crime-ridden Downtown Eastside. With old railway tracks to the south, commercial shipping ports to the east, and the sea bus terminal to the west, Crab Park may not be the most scenic and inviting public space in Vancouver, but for various reasons it has become a focal point for sexual exploitation issues. A park bench overlooking Burrard Inlet bears a plaque with the names of missing prostituted women. A local newspaper speculated that “some of the missing women may have found temporary respite here from the daily terror of their lives,” but the opposite appears to be true. For a time, an isolated forested area of the park had become a convenient and discreet place where drugs and sex were for sale, and it is now known as the place where Canada’s first overseas case of child sex tourism was discovered.
On a noon hour in late 2003, a Vancouver city worker having lunch near the waterfront heard a woman’s screams from the trees and shrubbery in Crab Park. He called the police, who were present when forty-year-old Donald Bakker emerged from the bushes followed by a visibly upset woman. Officers stopped the two and examined a bag Bakker had been carrying. With evidence that he had sexually abused the woman, the police placed Bakker under arrest and seized the bag and its contents.
Inside the bag, police found a video camera and several videotapes that revealed Bakker torturing and mistreating a series of women. With a warrant to search Bakker’s car and home, investigators found more videotapes, including one of Bakker sexually abusing Asian girls between seven and twelve years old.
The police turned to an RCMP officer with international expertise on the sexual exploitation of children in an effort to find these girls: Brian McConaghy, a dedicated officer who now operates a charity in Cambodia that helps to rehabilitate survivors of sex slavery. McConaghy noted that the children on the videotapes were speaking a combination of Vietnamese and Khmer, and that some wore a kroma, a checkered scarf common in Cambodia.
Also on the tape was a view of a 2003 Cambodian calendar that indicated the probable year of Bakker’s sex tourist visit to Cambodia. Investigators began to visit notorious Cambodian brothels in Svay Pak, a well-known brothel district for foreigners, and found a house that looked strikingly similar to the one on Bakker’s videotape. Any doubts were resolved when investigators were able to match smudge marks on the wall with those seen in Bakker’s video. This remarkable piece of evidence enabled the officers to identify the girls who had been used as child sex slaves.
A few years earlier, Bakker would have escaped prosecution for such crimes committed abroad, but in 1997, Canada joined a growing number of countries in making it a crime for its nationals to sexually exploit children anywhere in the world.
Bakker, himself a husband and father, was charged with twenty-eight counts of sexual abuse and exploitation, including twelve charges under Canada’s child sex tourism legislation. He pleaded guilty to a single count of sexual assault, two counts of sexual assault causing bodily harm, and seven counts of inviting a female under fourteen years to touch him for a sexual purpose.
The judge sentenced Bakker to ten years imprisonment, but he was required to serve only seven years after he was given “two-forone” credit for his eighteen months in pretrial custody (this pretrial credit policy had become a standard practice in the courts, one that undermined the actual sentence to be served and baffled the general public). In sentencing Bakker, the trial judge considered it an aggravating factor “that the Cambodian complainants are children enslaved into the sex trade, which only exists, or largely exists, because of Mr. Bakker and others like him.”
Despite having a thorough and well-conceived law, the enforcement record of Canada’s child sex tourism law is much less impressive. Between 1997 and 2007, following the adoption of this legislation, Bakker was the only individual convicted, and his exploits were discovered by accident. Clearly, child sex tourism offences are among the most under-enforced of the entire Criminal Code.
For the record, Section 7(4.1) of the Criminal Code prohibits Canadians from engaging with minors in the following practices on a global basis:
• sexual interference
• invitation to sexual touching
• sexual exploitation
• incest
• compelling the commission of bestiality and bestiality in the presence of, or by, a child
• parent or guardian procuring sexual activity
• householder permitting sexual activity
• indecent acts
• procuring sexual services of a person under eighteen
A contrarian view: Does Canada need a child sex tourism law?
Some argue that Canada shouldn’t even have such laws on the books. Among them is Bakker’s defence counsel, Kevin McCullough, who was widely quoted in the media arguing against the validity of the sex tourism laws. McCullough’s position was based on a claim that the law violates the sovereignty of the country where the alleged offences took place, suggesting that Canada’s law improperly seeks to govern events that occur exclusively in another country.
In a quote in the Washington Times, Alan Young, a law professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto and a key player in efforts to strike down Canadian laws against prostitution, said that Canada’s child sex tourism law is a form of “moral entrepreneurship.”
Young’s point of view has received support from predictable quarters, not least from Robin Sharpe, who challenged Canada’s child pornography laws after being charged under them. Sharpe attacked Canada’s child sex tourism law in an email to the Canadian Press in the fall of 2007, at the time of an apparent crackdown on foreign child sex offenders in Thailand. “The purpose of the law is to pander to the moral satisfaction of the righteous and they want men convicted,” declared Sharpe. In response to criticism that Canada has not actively enforced its child sex tourism laws like other developed countries, he sarcastically replied, “We are behind the Australians and Germans— shame shame shame [sic].”
With all of these claims circulating in the media, a court challenge to the law was inevitable. It originated with Kenneth Klassen, an international art dealer and pedophile from Burnaby, British Columbia. Klassen came to the attention of the police when customs officers intercepted a suspicious package at the Vancouver International Airport. Sent from the Philippines, it was addressed to Klassen and labelled “quilts.” Hidden inside the quilts were DVDs containing footage of girls between the ages of nine and eighteen being sexually abused by Klassen.
Following an international investigation of more than two and a half years, Klassen was charged with thirty-five counts of child sex crimes against seventeen victims in Cambodia, Colombia, and the Philippines, the incidents having taken place over five years. Among the charges laid were sexual interference, permitting sexual activity as a householder, and soliciting a person to have illicit sexual intercourse with another person.
Klassen’s court challenge to Canada’s child sex tourism laws failed. On December 19, 2008, the B.C. Supreme Court released its decision upholding Canada’s child sex tourism legislation under both Canadian constitutional law and international law. The decision paved the way for more rigorous enforcement of the sex tourism law, and Klassen eventually pleaded guilty to numerous charges in May 2010.
Rather than offending international law, as its detractors claim, Canada’s child sex tourism law is supported by both international treaties and the practice of other countries. Every major child sex tourism destination country in the world has joined Canada in signing the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, confirming that all children have the inherent and inalienable right to be free from sexual exploitation and sexual abuse. These countries also have agreed to protect children through appropriate national, bilateral, and multilateral measures.
All known and emerging child sex tourism destination countries (except Russia) are also parties to the Optional Protocol to the Convention. This treaty requires signatory countries to criminalize numerous child sex offences, whether their citizens and residents commit the offences domestically or in other countries. The treaty also authorizes countries to establish extraterritorial jurisdiction over child sex offences committed by or against their nationals and residents, which means that countries around the world have agreed to child sex tourism laws that ensure offenders do not escape with impunity.
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Cullen says in the Klassen decision: “In the absence of extraterritorial legislation, Canada would become a safer harbour for those who engage in the economic or sexual exploitation of children. The nationality principle reflects Canada’s clear interest in taking steps to prevent its own nationals or residents from using the advantages of Canadian nationality and residence to perpetuate the economic and/or sexual exploitation of children in other nations.” The Klassen decision relied heavily on the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in R. v. Hape, with the majority of judges stating that “[c]ooperation between states is imperative if transnational crimes are not to be committed with impunity because they fall through jurisdictional cracks along national borders.”
Critics of Canada’s child sex tourism law are either grossly misinformed about the international treaties mandating these laws or are deliberately ignoring them for their own purposes. Regardless, their arguments have failed to carry the day.
The power of the almighty dollar
Child sex tourists disproportionately drive demand for human trafficking by typically paying larger sums of money than local men, usually in much sought-after U.S. currency. In response, some venues in developing countries cater specifically to foreigners seeking such activities.
In recent years, foreigners have demanded ever-younger girls because they believe such victims are less likely to have contracted sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) such as HIV/AIDS. Traffickers have responded by employing more effective means of finding and offering these young victims, knowing they can charge a premium. The expanding exploitation is becoming a pressing concern for the international community—a concern that is well founded, although late to receive attention.
Each year foreign pedophiles target countless children in developing countries. It is difficult to assess the number of children in developing countries who are abused by foreigners due to the clandestine and criminal nature of child sexual exploitation. The U.S. Department of State estimates the figure at two million children worldwide. On a country by country basis, End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT), a leading global NGO, estimates that at any given time 22,500 to 40,000 children are being sold for sex in Thailand, 60,000 to 75,000 in the Philippines, and an estimated 30,000 in Mexico. As well, the U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report (2008) has flagged other havens for travelling sex offenders. They include the following countries:
• Latin America and the Caribbean: Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Venezuela;
• Asia: Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Laos, Mongolia, Nepal, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam;
• Africa: Benin, The Gambia, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa, Togo; and
• Europe: Russia.
Canada’s shame: Producing the world’s most-wanted pedophile
In 2007, Christopher Paul Neil, a former schoolteacher from British Columbia, became the world’s most-wanted pedophile. Neil imposed a digitally constructed swirl over his face to hide his identity in photos that allegedly depicted him sexually abusing young children. He then distributed the images on websites for pedophiles. Investigators in Germany eventually unscrambled more than two hundred digitally altered images to reveal Neil’s face.
The global policing agency Interpol took the extraordinary step of launching a worldwide public appeal to identify the man in the photos, resulting in hundreds of tips with five positive identifications of Neil. When Interpol published an international wanted persons notice, the Royal Thai Police followed up immediately, identifying victims and issuing an arrest warrant for Neil. Within a few days, he’d been arrested and placed in custody, a stunning example of global co-operation to combat child sex tourism. Tried in a Thai court for the sexual abuse of two Thai brothers ages thirteen and nine, Neil received fines and a sentence of nine years in prison.
Rosalind Prober, president of Winnipeg-based Beyond Borders and North American representative to the board of ECPAT-International, believes that Canada’s reputation as a country of overwhelmingly lawabiding citizens makes it easier for Canadian offenders to travel abroad and sexually abuse children. As a result, countless Canadian men have paid to sexually abuse women and children in poor countries around the world.
One admittedly limited measure of Canadian complicity is the number of men from this country who requested consular assistance in dealing with charges of child sexual abuse and exploitation offences filed against them while abroad. Between 1993 and 2008, the Department of Foreign Affairs provided such assistance to more than 150 Canadian men. Some of the countries where these acts allegedly occurred are predictable—Cambodia, Thailand, Costa Rica, Panama, and Cuba—and a few may surprise, including the United States, Mexico, and China.
These represent only those cases flagrant enough to attract attention and action from local law enforcement officials. NGOs and the media have reported many more cases, and even more Canadians have likely evaded detection entirely.
And let’s be open about these men. Typically they are not travellers on short trips for business or pleasure who act on impulse. A number of recent cases involve Canadian expatriates living transient lifestyles over several years. If victims file complaints about them, these sex offenders simply travel on their Canadian passports to neighbouring countries where they can continue their activities. In Southeast Asia, Canadians move easily among Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos.
“They feel almost protected being outside of Canada,” says Sabrina Sullivan, managing director of The Future Group, of these offenders. “They feel untouchable.”
Poverty, corruption, and impunity
When a Cambodian judge declared John Keeler a pedophile and sentenced the British headmaster to three years in prison, Keeler screamed “Scum!” at the judge, attempted to throw a chair at the bench, declaring, “I paid $5,400. I am supposed to go free. This isn’t justice, this is robbery!” As he was led out of the courtroom sobbing, Keeler reportedly said he was “going to die if they put me back in that hole.”
Keeler’s 2001 conviction for sexually abusing underage children was a landmark case, one of few instances in Cambodia in which a foreigner was sent to prison for such crimes. Addressing police and judicial corruption remains a challenge—so much so that some local NGOs have launched detailed court monitoring programs to identify judges who routinely dismiss charges in such cases and where bribery has been alleged.
While loathsome and incomprehensible, the action of parents selling their children into slavery must be seen against the harsh reality of three factors mentioned earlier: poverty, corruption, and impunity.
Poverty helps create a supply of vulnerable children for traffickers globally. Income from the sex industry is a major contributor to Southeast Asian economies and within the last decade has accounted for an estimated 2 to 14 percent of the gross domestic product of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. According to a United Nations report on the sale of children, child prostitution, and child pornography, “Poverty relates to the supply side of the problem. It does not explain the huge global demand, with, in many instances, customers from rich countries circumventing their national laws to exploit children in other countries.”
Additionally, travelling sex offenders choose countries with high levels of corruption and poor law enforcement. When Thailand began strict enforcement of its laws against the sexual exploitation of children, pedophiles flocked to neighbouring Cambodia, where they were much less likely to be charged, convicted, and imprisoned. This inadequate law enforcement results from two main factors: the dependency of many governments on revenue produced by child sex tourism and the prevalence of corruption.
Transparency International placed both Cambodia and the Philippines in the top quintile of corrupt countries, where more than 32 percent of citizens had paid a bribe in the last year. In 2005, the Filipino police force was found to be the most corrupt institution in the country. The police in Cambodia are also notoriously crooked, and the country’s judges are among the least-trusted government officials. Corruption of this magnitude enables foreign tourists to sexually abuse and exploit vulnerable children with impunity, despite local laws prohibiting such practices.
Inside the minds of travelling child sex offenders
Psychologists have identified two categories of child sex tourists: preferential and situational abusers. Preferential offenders are predatory, actively seeking out children for illicit sexual activity. Some abusers ruthlessly target the most vulnerable victims.
For example, after the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, the Queensland Police in Australia identified sixty convicted child sex offenders who left that region to volunteer in tsunami-affected areas. Very likely, the offenders were looking for opportunities to be near children and to use money, food, or gifts, along with flattery, compliments, and affection, to persuade them to engage in sexual activities. If necessary, the pedophiles would employ threats, blackmail, and even physical abuse.
Preferential offenders are more likely to be caught because their actions are frequent and habitual. In a sample of thirty-six offenders, the Protection Project at Johns Hopkins University found that almost half had jobs with responsibilities that placed them in daily contact with children or involved children through some other related activity. Fully two-thirds of American men convicted of committing child sexual abuse abroad have done the same at home; they are repeat offenders who target children wherever they can.
It is not surprising that habitual child sex offenders expand their abuse beyond their own borders to evade criminal prosecutions. Incentives to do so are all around them. For years, the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) has been encouraging pedophiles to visit poor developing countries as a relatively safe means of satisfying perverse sexual urges. The invitation in this excerpt from a NAMBLA newsletter is blatant and direct:
Weigh the pros and cons of becoming involved yourself in sex tourism overseas. Seek and find love from [boys in your home country] on a platonic, purely emotional level. For sexual satisfaction, travel once or twice yearly overseas. You might get arrested overseas for patronizing a boy prostitute. But the legal consequences of being caught patronizing a boy prostitute in a friendly place overseas will be less severe.
Enticements to pedophiles such as this, along with cheaper international travel, have brought child sex tourists directly to vulnerable children.
In contrast, situational abusers may choose to sexually abuse minors only when opportunities arise. They may also deceive themselves about the true ages of their victims. In most cases, these men either don’t know or don’t care about the circumstances of the people they’re abusing, or that others control the people they’ve paid for sex.
Whether preferential or situational, these abusers have an identical impact on their victims, and neither group can legitimately claim a moral high ground regardless of where or under what conditions they practise the abuse.
The victims of sexual abuse suffer severe psychological effects, including depression, low self-esteem, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicide. Trafficked children in developing countries who are victimized by Western sex offenders are deprived of their childhood. Often they cannot attend school, socialize, or engage in other normal developmental activities. Many contract HIV/AIDS and other STDs, and girls who become pregnant are at risk from inadequate (or nonexistent) medical care before, during, and after delivery. The fate of their babies represents another sad and harrowing situation.
Any sense of self-worth among child victims vanishes with the knowledge that they have no value beyond the passing pleasures they produce for untold numbers of strange men and the money they generate for their traffickers. Most will never see their traffickers or the men who pay to abuse them brought to justice.
Meanwhile, the sexual tourists return to the comfort and security of their homes in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, or, in too many cases, to British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia…