Paedophilia, which may have been a very rare occurrence here and there a few decades back, has now become a full-fledged industry all over the world thanks to the international tourism. It is the most heinous crime against humanity as innocence is sacrificed on tourism altar, a demonic curse of our time.
Paedophilia or, the deviant practice of sex with children, which had increased sharply in Northern Europe in the 1970s — largely boosted by Swedish purveyors of indiscriminate child pornography, suffered a set-back in the early 1980s after Sweden passed stringent laws to curb child abuse in the country. This forced the principals of the child sex trade to seek fresh and ‘less hazardous’ locations, particularly popular international tourist destinations in poorer/developing countries like Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India and other sexually tolerant tourism hot-spots in Southeast Asia.
With the boom in global tourism, moneyed sex crazy persons especially from the Western regions, travel to developing countries, including India, to satisfy their carnal desire through child sex abuse. In fact, tourism coupled with easy availability of child pornographic material due to rapid growth in information technology, besides lax laws in poorer countries, has resulted in further boost to sexual exploitation of children in the developing world, with child sex offenders travelling as tourist to places where they perceive the lowest risk for their perverted and inhuman sexual escapades.
Social activists across the globe have been demanding a better collaboration and cooperation among various countries in order to have a link together and sharing of information by creating a central hub for protocols and contracts in tourism destinations, to combat sexual exploitation of children. They pointed out that it is a pre-mediated crime, well planned and involves networks of sex offenders from different countries operating together, sharing child abuse images across borders and abusing children disguised as tourists. Activists are of the opinion that the need of the hour is to have a comprehensive system in place for rapid response and to treat this as an organized international crime. Without such an arrangement child abuse cases will continue to fail before the courts, with children never getting protection they deserve. The question, why some people become paedophiles, however, continues to remain unanswered.
Even after much agonized debate on the issue of paedophilia, especially in the aftermath of the horrific child abuse scandal in Europe, most Western experts have been forced to admit that they are still uncertain why a person becomes a paedophile. It has been suggested that one of the reasons for the proliferation of these offenders is that the consumer culture sexualizes children. They are used to promote adult products like lingerie and cosmetics. Supermodels in the West today have to perforce look like pre-pubescent children in order to be successful — anorexic, flat-chested, emaciated women who peddle highly eroticised products. This is, however, only one reason. A background of abuse in childhood is another.
The discovery that an Anglo-Indian, Freddy Peats, was running an orphanage in Goa for I7 years during the I980s-90s, and who was subsequently convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for providing defenseless children to Western paedophiles; the ‘Anchorage’ shelter case in Colaba, Mumbai, wherein two British nationals, Duncan Grant and Allan Waters, were convicted for sexually abusing street children in the late 1990s; and the recent case against another British national Jonathan Robinson, on charges of sexually abusing children at an orphanage in Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, funded by him, are clearly the tip of a huge iceberg of paedophilia menace in India. These cases are not just about abuse of street children, but the larger issue of sex tourism and the role of tourism industry in the developing world.
In the desperation for tourist dollar no thought has been given to the fact that many of the paedophiles find India so attractive because of the easy availability of children and its lax laws. In fact, India has been seeing an increasing number of these offenders in the guise of tourists with even rich elderly women preying on young needy boys. The demand for children is growing with the increase in AIDS – the child is thought to be safe, and the younger the better.
India is unfortunately in no position to be self-righteous about the depredations of depraved tourists from the West, given the fact that a thriving child prostitution industry exists here. Fifteen per cent of prostitutes in India are under the age of I5 and 24.5 per cent between the ages of 16 and 18. The political will to help these children lured to cities with promises of better life by organized gangs has been sorely lacking.
So far all efforts to curb child prostitution have been confined to highly publicised police raids on brothels, following which the children are escorted home, they are rarely accepted back into their original environment and languish in state rehabilitation homes which are definitely not equipped to deal with the enormous physical and mental problems that they suffer. Many of them contract STD or HIV and are unable to come to terms with the sufferings they have had to endure.
Moreover, despite the fact that the child enjoys all rights of an adult before the law, these rights are rarely evident when an abused child is brought to court. Although the government is a signatory to the Convention of the Rights of the Child, it has made no appropriate efforts to prevent the utterly callous manner in which a child prostitute is treated in courts.
Rehabilitation efforts are hampered not just by lack of resources but the attitudes of society which place a high premium on virginity. Therefore, a child prostitute can rarely hope to lead a normal, leave alone married, life. She is considered soiled forever. The victim already broken in spirit has then just a dark and lonely future.
A study conducted by some NGOs on hundreds of victims of child abuse found that they suffer from conflicting emotions of sadness, anger, shock, disgust, frustration, worry, fear, shame, guilt, helplessness, humiliation and confusion. The long-term effects are equally frightening, the hurt almost never goes away. Many try to commit suicide, suffer depression and are unable to ever have normal physical relations again.
(The writer is a freelance journalist)
