Is the problem of child sex tourism in Asia on the rise?
This is hard to gauge, unfortunately. The full extent of the problem is unknown and, as with other criminal phenomena, has so far been the subject of various estimates. We normally use arrests and prosecutions as dummies to try and identify ‘trends’ within countries or regions. This, in turn, may be misleading, because a sudden increase in arrests in a given country may not necessarily stem from an increase in the underlying number of cases of exploitation, but perhaps from the police having received better training or resources, or having overcome – at least in part – issues like, for instance, corruption. To give you a more concrete example, I can say that the perception of the situation in Thailand was felt to be one of improvement around the turn of the century (new laws, sufficiently reactive police engagement, etc.) However, a few years later, with several perpetrators that had moved to neighbouring Cambodia or Vietnam, the attitude of law enforcement appeared to take a turn for
