By: Amy Fraley
The sexual exploitation of children for economic purposes is
among the worst forms of human rights abuses. In the
underworld of child sexual exploitation, sex tourists live out
deviant fantasies while claiming to be on an exploration
abroad. As a result of these actions, children are raped,
sodomized, abused, and denied their basic rights. They are
not permitted or are not able to attend school or receive basic
health care or nutrition, and they are denied the safety and
security of a decent childhood. These children are exposed to
sexually transmitted diseases, including the deadly HIV. Many
of these young people lose their lives, but they all lose their
childhood.
The goal of this Note is to analyze and critique the provisions
of the Prosecuting Remedies and Tools Against the Exploitation of
Children Today Act of 2003, (the “PROTECT Act”), which strengthened
the existing legislation by making it illegal to engage in child
sex tourism, and the United States Immigration and Customs
Enforcement’s “Operation Predator” program. A further goal will be
to compare these efforts to Australian, German, Japanese, and
Swedish child sex tourism legislation.
Part I of this Note provides an overview of the problem of child
sex tourism and its impact on the child victim. Part II
examines the evolution of United States child sex tourism
legislation, focusing on the amendments adopted as part of the
PROTECT Act, and Part III discusses the advantages of a comparative
perspective by which aspects of the United States approach of
combating child sex tourism are measured against their respective
counterparts in the Australian, German, Japanese, and Swedish
systems. Part IV of this Note analyzes the lessons learned
from the comparisons undertaken in Part III and attempts to
establish benchmarks of effective legislation. Finally, Part
V explains that legislation must be coupled with international
collaboration and support in order to apprehend and prosecute child
sex tourists. Without such unity of purpose and action among
the states, efforts to thwart the problem of child sex tourism will
be far less successful than if sure unity were to be
achieved.