Bangkok known as center for sex industry
Dave Curtin
Denver Post
Aug. 17, 2006 12:00 AM
Bangkok is a pedophile paradise with a lucrative child-sex industry.
"Certainly it's an attractive place for a pedophile who has the money to travel, so it follows the person who murdered JonBenet Ramsey would be attracted to Thailand both as a place to fulfill sexual desires and as a place to hide," said criminal justice Professor James Alan Fox of Northeastern University in Boston.
"If you know who you're looking for, that might be a place to look."
The sex industry in Thailand generates an estimated $1.5 billion a year, according to the British Columbia Federation of Labor.
Child-sex exploitation thrives in the poverty-stricken areas of Thailand and the Far East where young females are sold to traffickers and where law enforcement is lax or corrupt, said Ann-Janette Alejano-Steele, a professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver and coordinator for the Colorado office of the international Polaris Project, which fights human trafficking.
"Female children can be expendable. You find families will sell their daughters just to survive economically, and traffickers will use children for their own means," she said.
Sex trafficking in the Far East largely results from a lack of education and abject poverty, Alejano-Steele said.
"If a trafficker offers false promises, they will believe it. An opportunity to come to Bangkok and wash dishes could actually be a cover for the sex trade," she said.
The U.S. government has been trying to get a handle on American consumption in the overseas child-sex trade. About 20 Americans accused of having engaged in illicit sexual conduct in foreign places have been prosecuted, according to the U.S. State Department.
The Thai government passed an anti-trafficking law in 1997 and in 2005 reported 352 arrests and 74 convictions from cases filed in 2003 and 2004, according to a State Department Web site. Sentences handed down averaged three years. Eighteen police officers were fired in 2003 for complicity in trafficking, the State Department said.
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