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Combating the Sexual Abuse of Children

Remarks by Hon. David Kilgour, MP for Edmonton Southeast

and Secretary of State (Asia-Pacific), at the 7th Annual Model United Nations Assembly,

Grant MacEwan College, City Centre Campus, 10700-104 Ave., Edmonton

March 1, 2003

*Check Against Delivery

I have been asked to speak to you about the Asian side only of a hate crime that today affects more than ten million individuals across the world including our own country and province. It is a practice that brings billions of dollars in profits to those who destroy the health, dignity and innocence of their fellow human beings. It is something Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF, has labeled “a form of terrorism, whose wanton destruction of young lives must not be tolerated for another year, another day, another hour.” This scourge, of course, is the international sex trade in children.

In 1983, I attempted without success to pass a private member’s bill that would make the production and dissemination of pornography involving children a criminal offence another one to allow the prosecution of Canadian pedophiles who commit crimes abroad. In 1997, Parliament passed Bills C-15 and C-27, which allow police to charge pedophiles in Canada who leave and commit sexual acts with children abroad. We are now one of over twenty-three countries with similar laws of extraterritorial application.

Asia Pacific Problem

The international sex trade in children concerns me also because I currently help represent the government in forty-two countries in the Asia-Pacific. The region is home to more than half of the world’s children; in 1997, UNICEF estimated that more than one million minors across South Asia alone in the sex trade. UNICEF, moreover, says that more than one-million children are lured into the trade across Asia every year.

A UNICEF worker in Nepal described how girls were there kept locked in small four-by-four foot rooms without windows. They were made to service 15-20 men daily for a pay of less than $1 a day. These girls, as young as six, were subjected to rape, torture, violence, abuse and life-threatening diseases. It is a life of slavery without hope.

Ron O’Grady, a well-known speaker on the subject notes; “the prostituted child does not enter into the relationship by choice. It is a contractual arrangement in which the child is simply the commodity available for hire. After the price is fixed and paid, the child is used by the customer to meet the customer’s own needs and then referred to the owner of the child. The child is given the respect of a rental car.”

Child Dignity

It is this lack of respect for the rights of the child by ruthless predators that is the essence of the trade. Sadly, it has infiltrated a number of Asian countries as well as many non-Asian ones. Canada’s International Development Agency (CIDA) says that up to 800,000 children could be victims of sexual exploitation in Thailand alone. According to the International Labour Organization, trafficking in children in Thailand is worth more than $11 billion yearly and is more profitable than the drug trade. One example of this phenomenon is Pa Tek, a village in northern Thailand. The “Development and Education Program for Daughters and Communities,” an NGO in the village, estimates that 70% of Pa Tek’s 800 families have sold at least one daughter into the sex trade. Prices range from $110-$900 for each child, which is equivalent to about six year’s wages for most families. This is a cruel irony for a country whose name means “land of the free.”

Similar stories exist across some other parts of the region. According to UNICEF, in parts of South East Asia, over a third of all sex workers are under the age of 18. World Vision estimates that the average age of a child exploited in the commercial sex trade is closer to 14. In India, over 500,000 sex workers are children, some as young as six years old. The BBC reported recently that there are now over 100,000 child prostitutes in the Philippines, five times the number of fifteen years ago. Why?

Nepal

Nepal is especially targeted. One foreign-based organization in Nepal estimates that each year 40,000 women and girls are abducted or falsely lured into sexual slavery. A UN report on HIV/AIDS in 2000 estimated that 72% of Nepalese prostitutes under 18 working in India had contracted the virus. Many of these Nepalese girls are sold by their fathers, brothers, or uncles for a few hundred dollars only to end up as bonded prostitutes often in Indian brothels.

UNICEF estimates that over half of the 30,000 child sex workers in Sri Lanka are boys. Hope for the Nations, a non-profit organization working in Asia goes further to say that as many as 30,000 boys are involved in Sri Lanka’s sex trade. Many are known as “beach boys” because they are often forced to work by those who own property along the coastline.

The pattern in some other parts of Asia is quite similar. The BBC recently reported that in Cambodia, a country ravaged by civil war and destitution, 98% of the girls in prostitution are the main providers for their families. The war produced a poverty that caused many families to sell their daughters into the sex trade. Brothels operate openly in Cambodia and sex with a girl as young as six costs $10-$30.

Why Asia?

Why is the child sex-trade such a curse in some corners of Asia? UNICEF says poverty is the overriding factor: some desperate parents sell their children in the same manner as chicken or cattle in order to try and stay alive themselves. Other families do so, hoping that they will find work and not have to endure grinding poverty. The truth is that many children, performing sexual acts under inhuman conditions, wind up at the same level of poverty as what they left.

Extreme poverty is often the soil in which scoundrels plant the seeds of the most unimaginable forms of child abuse. Recruiters in Asia promise children jobs in foreign cities and then mercilessly exploit them. Often their victims go willingly as they feel it is their responsibility to help their family in time of need.

Lack of skills and education, armed conflicts, family breakdown and weak law enforcement all contribute to this tragic phenomenon.

Sex tourism

Rural poverty and the movement from subsistence farming to cash economies have enabled many criminal networks to exploit families. These syndicates use modern information and technology to advance the exploitation of Asian children across the world. Sex-tourism and child trafficking for sexual slavery have become in many cases highly sophisticated operations. A cellular phone-call from a village in Pakistan can result in young girls there being removed to the sex trade in the Middle East or Europe. One email can move Vietnamese girls to Tokyo.

It is vexing that the Internet is perhaps the most vicious. The admirable organization “End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism” labels it one of the most prolific tools for sex-offenders. It exchanges information and spreads child pornography at an astonishing rate. Anecdotal evidence suggests child sex tourism is increasing and that it is the Internet it is increasing the number of offenders going to new destinations. Combined with cheaper travel arrangements and the opening of lands once closed due to war or politics, the Internet is a cruel boon to adults who prey on innocent children.

Child Pornography

Web sites based on the exploitation of Asian children provide international access. “Viva Network” estimates that more than 250 million copies of child porn videos are now circulating worldwide. Time magazine reported in 1999 that as much as 80% of the child porn available on commercial sites worldwide originates in Japan. Although Japan has thankfully since taken steps to reduce child pornography, it remains a significant problem for that important country with the second largest economy on earth.

A recent New York Times article quoted the CEO of Childnet International: “We have this image of pedophiles lurking around playgrounds, looking for victims. Now they don’t even have to leave their own homes. They can reach children playing online. From a pedophile's perception, this is a wonderful playground.” A pedophile in North America can engage his private obsession with an enslaved Cambodian or Vietnamese girl via the Internet. Can something much more vigorous be done to prevent web servers, or at least Canadian ones, from broadcasting these hate crimes against children?

Conclusion

All this paints a grim picture of the situation involving the sexual exploitation of children in Asia and elsewhere. The situation shrieks for remedies; measures are being taken. Japan recently hosted the Second World Congress Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children. This resulted in a consensus by governments on the Yokohama Global Commitment, reaffirming promises made at the first World Congress in 1996 in Sweden. More than 3000 delegates from 138 countries attended the conference in Japan, three times the number at the first conference in Sweden.

With multi-sectoral cooperation among countries around the world we can do something really effective to help exploited children. A good example is “The Future Group,” an exemplary charity based in Calgary. In cooperation with the RCMP, FBI and the Australian Federal Police, it has established a world-renowned Internet site to help track pedophiles. The website, www.youwillbecaught.com, receives reports of exploitation of children all over the world and then passes them to the relevant authorities. Efforts like this are impacting Canada’s efforts to combat the scourge of sexually abused children.

Permit me to close with an example of someone who is helping to improve the futures of many children: Father Shay Cullen. He began his life’s work in Olongapo City in the Philippines in 1969. Since then, he has been active in rescuing children enslaved in the sex trade by providing them with a recovery centre, which offers therapy. He was a member of the drafting committee for the “Convention on the Rights of the Child” in 1989 and is currently involved with The People’s Recovery Empowerment, Development, Assistance Foundation, or PREDA. www.preda.org

Cullen is an example of the need to defend those who cannot defend themselves. He says:

“When I see young victims of violence desperate for help and then responding with courage and strength I feel determined and empowered to help them all the more. I want to free them from filthy jails or sweat shops or the enslavement of brothels and sex bars and stand by them in their fight for justice.”

May that be the conviction of every person present today. I look forward to your thoughts and the discussion.

Thank you.

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When asked to indicate by a show of hands how many of the delegates from across Alberta think, Canada should attempt to have servers that host content that exploits children shut-down, virtually every hand went up.