The first thing that came to my mind when I heard all the news stories about lost and orphaned children in the tsunami disaster was that the paedophiles and child sex traffickers would move in immediately. It is the obvious move for them.
It is what I would do if I were a committed paedophile or somebody who made my money from buying and selling children into white slavery for sex. Southeast Asia is teeming with these horrible people. It is the holiday destination of choice for those who wish to satisfy their cravings for small boys and pre-pubescent girls with an ease that is impossible at home. Some of them even take up residence in Thailand so as to get what they want on a regular basis, free of hassle, as cheaply as possible. Paedophilia is an abnormal sex drive, and paedophiles shape their entire lives on the basis of ready access to children.
The flow of paedophiles from Europe, the USA and Australia into Thailand and Indonesia is so strong and so constant that in recent years there has been pressure brought to bear in some European countries, most notably Britain, to find the means of prosecuting at home the men who travel to these poorer parts of the world to prey sexually on vulnerable children.
This is fraught with problems. With the exception of acts which are crimes under international law, and of the American law that makes it a crime for an American citizen or company to obtain or to try to obtain business contracts through bribery in any part of the globe, it is accepted practice in the democratic world for criminal prosecution to take place in the jurisdiction where the crime was actually committed.
Thailand and Indonesia have so far seemed reluctant to clamp down hard on the thriving child sex industry, which is a niche market – and some would say even a cornerstone – of their tourism-driven economy.
Unable to deal with British subjects who have sex with children in Southeast Asia (they cannot be prevented from leaving the country and they cannot be prosecuted in Britain for paedophile acts that take place outside Britain), Britain recently began to exert diplomatic pressure on the Thai government to take this problem as seriously as it is taken in the developed world. Some months ago, when the debate was at its height, The Sunday Telegraph dispatched a journalist to the paedophile hot-spots in Thailand to find out just how easy it is to buy children for sex there.
The report he filed, which was carried with great prominence in a spread across two pages, barely contained his horror. He was appalled to discover that sex with girls and boys of any age, even toddlers, could be bought for a couple of pounds. Under cover as a child sex tourist, he won the confidence of ‘fellow paedophiles’ between the ages of 30 and 75, and heard their stories and anecdotes.
Like Italian grandmothers giving advice on the best washing-powder to buy – at least in the television advertisements – they gave him their tips on where to go for the best girls of eight or the boys of four who could perform certain tricks particularly well.
No doubt, the fundamentalist ‘fire and brimstone’ Christians who take the Bible literally are already seeing the horror of 26 December as the equivalent of God’s visitation of punishment on Sodom and Gomorrah. We can leave them to chatter and chant, for only they will know salvation, as they repeatedly remind themselves and anybody else who will listen.
They are besides the point and I trust that nobody will take them seriously outside the American Bible Belt. The point is that these Thai and Indonesian children were being marketed for sex by their own relatives and guardians. Now that all hell has broken loose in that part of the world, there is a completely new set of problems.
They come from the huge number of unclaimed and unsupervised children, who were separated from their parents in the flood, or whose parents have died, who have been exposed to the predatory interest of child traffickers and paedophiles. The overwhelming goodwill and munificence of the past week would have blinded most to the fact that some individuals will be looking at the mass tragedy with a very cynical eye: as a business opportunity, with a previously unimagined child bounty coming like manna from hell.
Seeing film footage and photographs of all those children without their parents, some of them holding up cards with their names on, hearing the reports of toddlers, babies and young children found alive in the mud or stuck in a tree, it was the only thing I could think of. My mind continued to churn around the question of why nobody else seemed to be speaking about it, until a couple of days ago when I heard an aid worker comment on the BBC that the experience of other disasters showed that unprotected children are extremely vulnerable in this respect.
What if the ‘saved’ children had been found by a predator instead of a rescuer? How many shocked and wandering children have been plucked up and spirited away by the paedophiles who were already ‘there on the ground’ – to use the terminology of war – having their child sex holidays, long before the medics and the rescue teams got in? We will never know. It is the perfect raiding-ground for those who want to steal children to sell them for sex, or to have sex with them, because there is the ideal, unchallengeable alibi. A missing child will be listed as killed in the disaster, and no one will ever know the truth.
Is this far-fetched? Not at all. Do not let the heartening demonstration of international solidarity and individual generosity obscure your view of the nastier side of human nature. If you are a Pollyanna, always looking at the good and refusing to see the bad, then you are in denial. There is a side of Thai and Indonesian tourism that is wholly sordid.
It is based on the ready availability of children for sex, because of the rampant poverty. Paedophiles in the developed world are finding it increasingly difficult to gain access to children at home because of the heightened awareness that has made parents police their children at all times, and because of draconian punishment if they are caught.
This means that they are travelling in their thousands to poor parts of the world like Southeast Asia, to get what they want. However, they still have to pay for it, and they have to return the child to its guardians when the allotted time is up. That is enough for some. What others really want is a child they can kidnap, use as they please, and then get rid of by killing.
The chaos that reigns in Thailand and Indonesia has opened up a myriad of possibilities in this regard. Two days ago, the news agencies reported that the hunt is on for a 12-year-old Swedish-American boy who was last seen leaving the makeshift hospital, where he had been treated, with an unknown man. He has not been seen since. His father has returned to Sweden with his other two sons. His frightened grandfather has stayed on to help with the search effort. That boy escaped death by drowning to probably endure a much worse fate. It does not bear thinking about.
Men who like to buy sex with children have their other fetishes too, in the same way as do the men who like to buy sex with women. For some, the dark, Southeast Asian appearance is a particular turn-on. In earlier generations, when travelling all that distance for sex was out of the question, the paedophiles of northern Europe would come down to Sicily and southern Italy (and doubtless even Malta) to pick up street urchins.
But others want fair, European boys, who are in very short supply because of the militating factors in the countries where they live. Since the fall of communism, more and more have come onto the market through the impoverished areas of eastern and central Europe, but still there are not enough. It does not take too much imagination to see how the child sex network must have hummed into even greater life than usual as soon as the scale of the devastation in Thailand and Indonesia became evident.
What sick excitement there must have been as the news broke through of all those European children sundered from their parents. They must have been on the first flights in as everybody else was leaving, or alerting their contacts there. I may not necessarily be bothered about whether there is or is not a God, but I certainly hope against hope that there is some form of hell, and that it is as cruel and unforgiving as possible towards these creatures.
In the midst of tragedy and disaster, we have to contend with the ugliness of the twisted human psyche, too. While many are now wrestling with the notion that there may be no God, the child predators are probably the only ones who see the devastation as confirmation that there is a god after all – though where that leaves them, I certainly do not know. I suppose it is their kind of god.