The Child-Sex Industry: Who Said It Can’t Happen Here?

The basement of First Presbyterian Church in Anaheim is a long way from free-lance journalist Maureen Seneviratne’s home in Sri Lanka. And since much of her work in recent years has involved researching child prostitution in her small island country, she confessed to some relief at being able to put some miles between home and her current speaking tour in America.

As we talked for 45 minutes or so in the church basement, I was probably doing some distancing myself.

Distancing myself from her government’s estimates that 30,000 Sri Lankan children are engaged in prostitution. Distancing myself from her depiction of how European tourists routinely fly into her beautiful country off India’s southern tip and book themselves for days or weeks in lavish homes for the main purpose of sexually abusing children. Distancing myself from her mournful conclusion that the experiences leaves the child “a wreck. . . . I’ve seen hundreds of those children. They’re better off dead, actually. It’s very difficult to rehabilitate them. They’ve lost all power of concentration, all self-esteem. They’re the dregs of humanity. I’m not exaggerating.”

She’s talking about the Third World, I keep telling myself. Sri Lanka, Thailand, Taiwan, the Philippines--countries where the sexual exploitation of children has run rampant in recent years.

She’s not talking about Orange County .

Then, I picked up the morning paper Thursday, the day after she and I talked, and read about the Anaheim couple that allegedly directed their 13-year-old daughter to prostitution.

I thought about the Southern California couple recently arrested for allegedly molesting and taking sexually explicit photos of themselves and a 3-year-old Newport Beach child.

“We’d all rather think and wish it were true that it’s not happening here, but it certainly is,” says Jan LaRue, senior counsel on the West Coast for the National Law Center for Children and Families. Her office is in Santa Ana, and the group focuses its efforts on child pornography.

Statistics for such things are usually hard to come by and sometimes hard to confirm, but LaRue produced newspaper accounts in recent months of computerized national child pornography rings, as well as individual cases. She said a Los Angeles shelter has estimated the number of teen prostitutes there at 3,000.

The center is sponsoring AB927 for the upcoming California legislative session, a bill that would toughen laws governing sexual exploitation of minors.

Although the Third World is the current focal point for the child sex trade, LaRue said tourists from Western Europe and America help fuel the industry.

Seneviratne’s research, conducted as part of a project that also studied the child-sex industry in the Philippines, Taiwan and Thailand, also concentrated on the tourism influence.

Her research indicated that while only about 5% of the tourists entering Sri Lanka were involved in child-sex matters, they might come into contact with as many as 30 children on a single extended visit. The excursions are so highly organized that those involved likely would be met at the airport, taken by limousine to a secured home and then introduced to the children they had paid for.

Children as young as 6 are involved in the sex trade, Seneviratne said. They get lured, coaxed or forced into prostitution, with some having no idea what they’re getting into but perhaps thinking they’re taking simple domestic jobs to help their poverty-stricken families.

International experts studying the problem have said that the child-sex market is growing partly because customers consider them “safer” from sexually transmitted diseases. The experts also said that taboos against sexual exploitation of children generally have eroded over the years.

Earlier this year, the New York Times quoted a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) official as saying, “We are losing all boundaries. More and more children are being sacrificed to the sex industry. We must break down the wall of silence around this.”

From half a world apart, people like Maureen Seneviratne and Jan LaRue are linked in combat.

“I don’t think Orange County and Sri Lanka are separate,” Seneviratne said. “We can no longer say it’s a Sri Lanka problem or a California problem. Our partners in Europe and North America have found that abusers of children here are almost the same people who abuse children in Asia.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.