Underage Vietnamese prostitutes waiting for customers in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. (Source)
A scathing editorial in The Korea Times newspaper lambastes fellow countrymen following a state-funded report by the Korean Institute of Criminology that conducted a year-long onsite survey of sex tourism in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and the Philippines.
The government’s findings? Korean sex tourists are the No. 1 source of demand for sex with minors in Southeast Asia.
According to the Korea Times, Interpol officers in Cambodia sarcastically refer to Korea as the strongest sponsor of the SE Asian sex industry and that “Koreans are unrivaled when it comes to buying sex from minors.”
The Times went on to say:
If the testimony from many underage prostitutes, police officers and human rights groups is true, South Koreans are the biggest customers of the child sex industry in the region. That’s very shameful for the country.
Another article in the Korea Times claims that some attribute the problem to ignorance of the law, with one survey showing that the great majority are unaware that sex tourism is illegal:
A survey conducted by the institute on 900 Korean tourists last year showed 77.7 percent were unaware that sex tourism in Southeast Asia was illegal. About 78 percent of respondents said Korean tourists won’t be punished by the government even if they were caught buying sex
The Widening Reputation
The world has also taken notice. A report from the U.S. Department of State, entitled “Trafficking in Persons Report,” highlights South Korea as being a “significant” source of the demand for child sex tourism in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands.
Child prostitute caught on film by Al Jazeera (source)
The State Department ranked Korea as a “Tier 1″ human trafficking country as recently as 2011 and also noted the growing number of South Korean women and girls being traded within the U.S., Japan, Hong Kong and Western Europe.
As reported in a recent post on this blog, it is estimated that over 100,000 women are exported from Korea every year to work as prostitutes abroad.
Easy Access and Target Marketing
Yun Hee-jun, head of a Seoul-based group campaigning against sex trafficking, told reporters that finding minors for sex is easily accessible online and that brothels in SE Asia specifically target Korean clientele.
On online community websites, you can easily find information about prices for sex with minors and the best places to go. If you visit any brothel in Vietnam or Cambodia, you can see fliers written in Korean.
The Times editorial calls for harsher punitive measure against individuals seeking sex with minors abroad as well as a crackdown on domestic tour operators who publicly arrange sex tours to SE Asian countries.
Further Material:
creepy, creepy..
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Sparkling Koreans! (not..)
its a way to make money its harsh to take that away from them.sex does not have to be shamefull it would be nice to live in a world where people where more open about sex.
All this concern about child prostitution and child pornography is basically due to an agenda set by the USA and its European client states which which seeks to impose Judeo-Christian moral values upon the rest of the world whilst terrorising people with bogeymen which can then be used to justify censorship and world-wide social control as well as the USA’s domestic prison complex whose model it wishes to export to the rest of the world.
Commercial child prostitution exists presumably for the same reasons as its adult equivalent and therefore will not end until its root cause, poverty, is ended, but as the USA and its extension the EU are all for free markets and rampant mafia capitalism (as well as neo-colonialism/neo-imperialism which is one of the main reasons these countries have such abject poverty in the first place) and keep pushing the crypto-fascist corporatism of Friedmanite monetarism I can’t see out it will ever end (though like the war on terrorism it isn’t supposed to because it’s good for those organisations that profit from it such as Christian evangelical charities, western NGO’s, and the police state).
I personally would like to see a more rational and less emotional response to this issue alongside that of prostitution (and drugs) in general, especially where the sex is consensual and freely entered in to; too many people are being locked up and having their lives ruined by what are essentially victimless crimes, eg. child pornography and non-forced child prostitution.