The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter Sept./Oct. and Nov./Dec., 1999, Vol. 6, Number 5 & 6. NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SEXUAL TRAFFICKING Tourism Industry Complicity Guest Speaker: Carol Smolenski Coordinator, ECPAT-USA Carol Smolenski

Y ou may know that the travel industry is the world's largest industry now. In 1996, there were 595 million trips abroad, seventy-seven percent more than ten years ago. Tourists and business travelers bring money into struggling economies that rely on tourism as their primary industry, and this is coupled with local acceptance or even promotion of sex with children.

Consequently, there is an increase in the number of tourists who come specifically in search of sexual contact, including contacts with children. The result is that thriving sex industries have evolved in many popular tourist destinations. And people whose livelihoods are linked to tourism, including bar and brothel owners, taxi and rickshaw driver guides, and even parents who readily offer children to tourists for sex.

In 1996, Business Week found 25 American sex tour companies. None of them are advertising child sex tours. This isn't done explicitly, but anybody who is interested in sex with a child knows that when they get to the destination they can have anything they want. Some of the sex tour on-line sites have disclaimers saying "we won't introduce you to child prostitutes so don't even ask about it." And yet, at least in one of these cases, on the same site there is a link to child pornography. "Click here for Asian teens" on the same site with the sex tour.

We've been trying to work very hard with the tourism industry in the United States. Unfortunately, they're not very interested in working with us on this issue. Our message is to tell Americans that it's not okay to have sex with children in other countries because many of them think it is. They think they're giving them money and that this is a great. They think it's culturally acceptable. Well, ECPAT grew out of Asia, where Asian activists said 'stop your tourists from coming here. It's not acceptable for you to be abusing our children.'

So our message is a very simple one and we've asked all the U.S. airlines to join us in this. We've written to them several times. Not just the U.S. airlines, we wrote to every airline that delivers travelers to countries where there's a sex tour industry - 43 airlines in all. Eight wrote back and said no; thirty-five didn't even respond. Many of our constituents have also written, and they also got the same message. We asked the New York City Port Authority to post signs about the laws against child sex tourism, and they said 'absolutely not.'

There is a law in the United States that makes it a crime to travel abroad to abuse a child. It wasn't passed until 1994 but there's been very few prosecutions of Americans for traveling abroad to abuse a child, and I believe that the only reason that resources were put into one case is because the man actually brought the child back to the United States with him and lived with him. A second arrest has been made of a Silicon Valley computer executive who had arranged to buy a Vietnamese 13-year old. He was arrested as he got onto the plane to go and accept his purchase.

Senator Grassley from Iowa did introduce an amendment to the FAA Reauthorization Act, which has been in negotiation. While there are lots of parts of the FAA bill that are controversial because of airline politics, we didn't think an amendment. which would require airlines and airports to do some kind of notification to travelers that it's against the law to abuse children overseas was particularly controversial. Well, the first Senator who we asked to co-sponsor it, Mary Landrieu from Louisiana, said no, and then there was lots of hands-off attitude on the part of other senators who really didn't want to talk about the matter.

And yet, the situation is not hopeless. Air France and Lufthansa both run in-flight videos that tell their customers it's against the law to have sex with children in other countries. And Australian airlines and the Austrian airline are planning similar things. Tour operators in Europe have signed on to a code of conduct, and there's a big campaign on that. There's lots of activity among the travel industry in other countries to do something, but not yet in the United States.