Sweden Launches Website To Crack Down On Child Sex Tourists

Sweden has launched a website to crack down on child sex predators from that country who go abroad and indulge in child sex tourism. The website was unveiled on Tuesday by the Swedish police with an appeal to people to report the details of offenders if they are spotted abroad in suspicious circumstances. The website, named as Resekurage.se, means "travel courage," will now keep a tab on Swedes travelling to destinations such as Thailand, Cambodia and Sri Lanka, where cases of child sex tourism have been reported.

The online initiative follows the campaign by local authorities, child rights groups and the police against the menace. The police claimed that the website is also meant to raise awareness about the issue. In 2005, Sweden enforced a new law to prosecute tourists who had paid sex with under-18s. The offender will be slapped with a two year prison term, once they return to Sweden. The website noted that "every year, hundreds of thousands of Swedes travel abroad. During their travels, they run the risk of unwillingly seeing children sexually exploited by foreign and Swedish tourists". It said only one in ten nationals knew how to report such crimes abroad, reported Global Post.

Call To Report

The campaigners also made a call to people to exercise their civil courage and alert the police, if they come across instances of sexual exploitation of children. The organisers published an article in the in the newspaper "Aftonbladet," which also quoted UN estimates and said the number of children involved in sex tourism is about two million. "There is no doubt that there are Swedes feeding this market, perhaps in the belief that they can safely commit abuses with the protection of anonymity in a far away country," they added. It noted that individual tips go a long way in helping investigations and also ensure fair convictions. According to the Swedish news agency TT, in the last 10 years, at least seven Swedes have been convicted for paid sex with minors.

Modus Operandi

A report by The Economist magazine threw up some interesting insights into the modus operandi of child sex-tourism operators. It said, the process starts with a predator from a rich country arranging a meeting with a fixer before he travels to one of the poor countries. The fixer may be a pimp, or a relative of the child. The predator will then try to earn the good will of the family by showering them with gifts and money in exchange for private time with the victim. Eventually, the offender flies home and gets on with his normal life as if nothing had happened.

However, in recent years, with the rapid spread of the Internet in South-East Asia and elsewhere, there is a new spin to the nasty story. Today, it is more of "virtual trafficking", where predators meet children in video-chat rooms. America's FBI says there are at least 750,000 potential predators online at any given moment and most of them are active in the 40,000 odd chat-rooms.

Early this year, a series of police operations exposed such "cottage industries" which included web-streaming sex dens that were abusing children for sexual acts. Terre des Hommes, a Netherlands-based NGO, released a report last year, to show how easy it is to get information from paedophiles. The NGO tricked many predators by using a false profile of a 10-year-old girl and recorded some 20,000 advances from 71 countries in two months. The predators easily disclosed their locations and identities thinking that no one was watching them. The NGO identified 1,000 of them and promptly handed over the details to the Interpol.