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If the international headlines over the arrest of alleged Canadian pedophile Christopher Neil has put a chill on Southeast Asian sex tourism, it isn't evident on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. It takes all of 30 minutes to find a boy who earns his living having sex with foreigners.
Just go to the backpacker district, a shabby collection of bars, budget travel agencies and cheap hotels. Sit down at an outdoor table, order a beer and wave to the first street vendor who walks by. A teenaged bookseller in a baseball cap and flip-flops first offers himself, then heads off to find someone even younger.
Minutes later, Mai appears. He has full lips, died blond bangs and a diamond-shaped stud in one ear. The sleeves of his shirt are rolled up to expose his slender biceps. His nickname is the Thai word for ponytail, after the wisp of hair styled to fall down his neck. He claims he is 15, but with his hairless cheeks and unbroken voice, he looks no more than 12.
He's not shy about telling a reporter about his trade. The price to take him to your room is $6, he says, twice that if you want to take his best friend Tien along too. Mai and Tien do it all the time — with Frenchmen, Australians, Englishmen and yes, as recently as the other day, a Canadian. Mai says he met one right over there, at the corner table.
Mai says he sometimes goes home to his mother's place in another part of the city to give her a few dollars of his earnings. When he's not on the street, Tien lives with his grandmother and his mother, who was left alone when his father left her and his sister got married. He claims his mother needs money for cancer treatment, though its impossible to verify any part of the boys' stories, which they may adapt for foreigners.
No, he doesn't know Christopher Neil, he says, shaking his head at a picture of the man accused of preying on Asian children and posting their pictures on the Internet. Told of the Canadian's arrest in Thailand, he says "he got what he deserves."
But it's unlikely the arrest of Mr. Neil will make any difference to children such as Mai. Pedophiles have been thronging to Southeast Asia for decades, drawn by the warm weather, smiling people and ready supply of pretty, available young boys and girls.
One year, the hot spot is a waterfall in the Philippines, the next a beach resort in Vietnam. Thailand and Brazil were once the choice spots for child sex tourists. Now Ecuador, Indonesia and Cambodia are favoured. Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, does a roaring trade in virgins, sought by Korean, Japanese and Thai men who believe that deflowering a girl is a kind of elixir.
The child sex trade has drawn worldwide attention over the past few years, generating new laws and big publicity campaigns, conferences and conventions, and a blitz by social activists from Melbourne to Winnipeg to Bangkok. The abusers show little sign of being deterred. Asia is their happy hunting ground, a lure for pleasure seekers since American GIs came to the bars and brothels of Bangkok for R&R during the Vietnam War.
In a place such as the backpacker district, it is all too easy for pedophiles to find a street kid like Mai and slip into one of the many little hotels that line the crowded streets. The hoteliers won't make a fuss. Neither will the boys, who are eager for the quick money they get for spending an hour with a foreigner. It would take them a week to make as much selling books or shining shoes.
"It is widely recognized that only a very small proportion of offenders are ever detected," says a recent report from a child sex task force of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
"There are too many of them," said Rosalind Prober, president of Beyond Borders, a Winnipeg-based children's rights group. "There are so many places where they can think they can just get away with it — and they are probably right."
Cellphones and the Internet have made it much easier for pedophiles to share information about where to go and who to seek out for child sex. "They look for willing hostels, willing taxi drivers, willing travel agents, and what's worse, willing kids," Ms. Prober said. They even trade information on "what the kids will do and the size of their genitals. These are sick individuals."
