EDITORIAL - Canada needs to act against “sex tourists”

By Brian Seaman
Every UN member, except the United States and Somalia, has ratified the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child. Yet horrible abuse of children continues; for example, prostitution and the trafficking of children for sex.

South America is notorious for this, the demand fueled by “sex tourists” - wealthier males usually from North America and Europe.
Iguazu Falls is one of the most renowned natural tourism sites in South America, attracting hundreds of thousands every year. However because of lax policing, the area is also a smuggler’s dream. Among the trade in cheap consumer goods is an illicit trade in drugs, stolen vehicles, weapons and people. According to INTERPOL and the FBI, Paraguay, for example, owes a large part of its economy to illicit trade, some estimates placing the underground economy as worth up to five times its annual GDP.

Human trafficking in women and children
According to the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), human trafficking in the Iguazu Falls region chiefly involves women, teens and children. IOM studies have estimated that roughly 6,000 unaccompanied children and teens cross over between Brazil and Paraguay each year. These young people are at risk of being kidnapped and forced into, or otherwise falling into, the sex trade; many of them are illiterate and come from extremely poor families in rural areas. Many of these children and minors have had to flee abuse and violence within their very homes and have been obliged to move to cities in the region to look for work.
The incidence of sexual exploitation is staggeringly high. According to Sentinela, a Brazilian children’s advocacy group, of the 489 children they rescued from 2002 to 2007, 410 of them were victims of sexual exploitation. Furthermore, according to Argentinean immigration officers, out of the dozens of girls and young women rescued from 2004 to 2007, almost all of them were Paraguayan girls destined for the sex trade in Argentinean cities situated further south.
Argentina, as party to international covenants protecting children, is obligated to inhibit the trafficking of children and minors. However, Argentina continues to be the source of a lot of such traffic, largely because it lacks resources to address the problem and because many law enforcement and border control officials are reportedly complicit in the trade.
Reports from the media, UN agencies and non-governmental organizations suggest that the problem is not lack of awareness. Rather, it is the lack of investigatory and prosecutorial resources and initiatives devoted to rescuing children and minors caught up in this horrendous trade.
However, the lack of resources is not just an issue for emerging regional economic powers like Argentina and Brazil, both of which still struggle with widespread poverty. There is also the failure by wealthy countries, like Canada, to allocate adequate resources to investigate “sex tourists” and bring them to justice in their home countries.

Children continue to live unsafe lives
More than 20 years have passed since the international community brought its focus to the universal rights of children when the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child came into force, yet many of the world’s children continue to live lives that are anything but safe and in accordance with the values and requirements set out in that Convention.
A Canadian sociologist named Richard Poulin, who has studied the international sex trade, says that the trade has grown larger and more complex over the last two decades. According to Poulin, human traffickers, all of whom are connected to networks of organized criminal gangs in some way, are responsible for transporting anywhere from one to four million women and children every year, the majority of them destined for the sex trade.
Outside a minority of countries with transparent and credible legal systems, our world is a Hobbesian place where the “paper protection” for children through international covenants and treaties is far from reality. Another ugly reality is that abusers of the most vulnerable among us come from wealthy countries like Canada with rule of law. Trafficking children for sexual purposes reveals an international economic system of supply and demand at its cruelest and most amoral: those with a need that would land them jail and social shunning at home fly to places where children are sold by their own families into a shadowy world that everyone knows exists yet continues in spite of international conventions and treaties.