03. From Asia: June 2005 Archives

When I was in junior high school, I heard the story of a girl called Rosario on TV. She was one of the so-called `street children,` abandoned by her parents and by society, a drug-addict spending the nights on a heap of garbage. She lived in Olongapo, one of the cities in the Philippines with a thriving sex industry. She worked as a prostitute to survive and had continually been subjected to violations by sex tourists. She died after suffering for three months with a vibrator stuck inside her body. Her case certainly revealed the sordid side of the sex industry. This one incident triggered my interest in issues concerning the commercial and sexual exploitation of children. It is a very complex problem, involving political, economic, social and cultural factors. My senior thesis traces the development of the "Sex and Travel Industries" in Asia and suggests possible solutions to the situation. As this is a problem which I would like to devote the rest of my life to, I did not think that I should leave my research hanging as a mere armchair theory. Thus, after submitting my thesis, I travelled to Thailand and the Philippines for three weeks to have a look at the real state of affairs.