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| Sunday, 14 July 2002 |
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Australians feed Cambodian child sex trade -report MELBOURNE, July 13 (Reuters) - Hundreds of Australian men are flocking to Cambodia to have sex with girls and boys sold in brothels, The Age newspaper reported on Saturday, citing international aid agency officials. "There are thousands of men who are being attracted to Cambodia because of easy access to children and the belief that they won't get caught," said Bernadette McMenamin, head of the Australian branch of ECPAT, an international agency fighting child sex abuse. "It's attracting the worst of the worst and Australians are among them," the newspaper quoted her saying. From the go-go bars and massage parlours of Bangkok's infamous Patpong red light district to the Vietnamese girls forced to work in Phnom Penh brothels, sexual exploitation of children, usually girls, is a problem throughout Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Despite a crackdown last year, brothels openly thrive in Cambodia and sex with a girl aged 10 to 13 costs $30. The U.N. agency for children, UNICEF, said in May that poverty was the overriding factor explaining the prevalence of child prostitutes in the region but cultural acceptance of prostitution had hampered efforts to eradicate it. UNICEF data shows that 80,000 women and children have been trafficked to Thailand to work as prostitutes since 1990. The International Labour Organisation calculates that the Thai child trafficking trade is worth around US$12 billion a year. Cambodian women's affairs minister Mu Sochua told the Age newspaper that corruption in the legal system and government indifference aggravated the problem. "The government has made almost no impact at all in controlling the trafficking of women and children. There is no control or monitoring of brothels and what is going on inside these brothels," the minister was quoted as saying. U.N. officials and aid workers in Southeast Asia have made similar comments in the past. While Australian law provides for jail sentences for people who have sex with children overseas, Australia's ambassador to Cambodia, Louise Hand, said the embassy had found it difficult to convince local authorities to stop the abuse. The Australian government tried and failed in 1996 to prosecute a former Australian diplomat to Phnom Penh under its child sex tourism law. The Australian Federal Police recently posted an officer to Cambodia to help deal with trans-national crime issues including people trafficking and child abuse but McMenamin said illicit drug smuggling was a higher priority than the child sex trade. |
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