COLUMN ONE : Widening the War on Child Sex : Weak local enforcement has helped South Asia’s vice trade flourish. Now, the U.S. and European ‘consumer’ countries are joining the battle to keep men from seeking young prostitutes overseas.

Early last year, a retired Swedish civil servant was arrested during a police raid in the beach resort of Pattaya and charged with molesting a 13-year-old boy in his hotel room. As is common in prosecutions involving child prostitution in Asia, the case never went to trial.

Instead, the 66-year-old Swede, Bengt Bolin, was released on $4,000 bail and fled the country. Because Sweden has no extradition treaty with Thailand, it appeared that his legal problems were over.

After Bolin arrived in Sweden, however, he received a shock. State Prosecutor Sven-Erik Alhem called Bolin in and informed him that he was being officially investigated--the formal stage before prosecution--for violating Sweden’s own child molestation law with his activities in Thailand. It is the first time Swedish authorities have contemplated using the 30-year-old law for crimes involving children overseas, Alhem says.

While Bolin maintains his innocence and prosecutors are still awaiting key evidence from Thailand before proceeding, the case has become the opening skirmish in a novel, worldwide legal battle to curb the flourishing trade in child prostitutes.

In the past year, Germany, France and Australia have proposed tough legal measures to discourage their citizens from traveling abroad for child prostitution. In the United States, Senate and House versions of a law on child abuse overseas have been sent to a joint congressional committee along with the rest of the current crime bill.

Child prostitution is one of the saddest scourges in developing Asia. Every year, thousands of men from Western Europe, the United States and Australia fly into Southeast Asia in search of children, both boys and girls, as sex partners or to use in pornography. Some poor parents in developing countries sell their children into a kind of slavery, while governments desperate for tourist dollars turn a blind eye.

Previously, efforts to control the trade have largely been a pitiful failure because of corruption. Now, however, efforts around the world have been galvanized in a campaign to adopt strict laws in the so-called consumer countries to discourage men from venturing overseas for underage sex.

The international campaign is being spearheaded by a small group called End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism, which was founded in Bangkok in 1990 during an international conference on tourism. It has offices in 26 countries.

“Our goal is to let people know that if they want a child prostitute in Thailand or elsewhere in Asia that they are doing something illegal,” said Sudarat S. Srisang, a Thai social worker who became ECPAT’s executive director. “Before, there was this attitude that it was OK, that there was an acceptance in this part of the world. Well, it’s no longer OK.”

Although precise statistics are not available, ECPAT estimates that nearly 1 million children are involved in Asia’s sex trade, including 300,000 to 400,000 in India, 200,000 to 300,000 in Thailand, 100,000 each in the Philippines and Taiwan, 40,000 in Vietnam and 30,000 in Sri Lanka. A recent report suggested that war-devastated Cambodia, which has few enforceable laws, is fast becoming a haven for child prostitution.

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The proposed U.S. law would expand the Mann Act, which makes it an offense to travel across state lines for immoral purposes, to make it a felony to travel outside the United States to engage in any sexual act with a minor that would be illegal in America. It would also be illegal for Americans to traffic in child pornography overseas.

Enforced by a special Justice Department office, the proposal calls for punishment of 10 years’ imprisonment for a first offense and 20 years for a second offense. Civil liberties advocates had initially questioned whether it was legal to try someone in the United States for a crime committed overseas. But legal experts said this concept of “extraterritoriality” has been upheld in such cases as the one against former Panamanian leader Gen. Manuel A. Noriega, who was tried and convicted in Miami on eight counts of racketeering, conspiracy and cocaine-smuggling.

“It is outrageous that U.S. citizens are allowed to travel abroad to engage in the sexual exploitation and abuse of minors that would be illegal in the United States and that U.S. (travel) agencies organize and advertise such laws,” Rep. Joseph Kennedy (D-Mass.), one of the bill’s sponsors, testified at a House committee hearing in March. “U.S. citizens and tour agencies should not be allowed to fuel an international industry that results in the physical and psychological abuse of tens of thousands of children. The damaging consequences of this abuse can last a lifetime.”

Late last year, Germany enacted a law providing for prison sentences of up to 10 years for any German who engages in sexual practices with a child younger than 14, even if the crime takes place in a foreign country. France also adopted punitive measures, while Britain promised to provide Asian countries with lists of known British pedophiles so they can be kept out by immigration officials.

One of the most sweeping proposals was adopted by the lower house of Australia’s Parliament earlier this year and is awaiting passage by the upper house. It provides for up to 14 years’ imprisonment for cases involving children younger than 12 and up to seven years’ imprisonment for those involving youngsters between 13 and 16.

The Australian proposal would become one of that country’s few “extraterritorial” criminal laws; the others include war crimes. Among its novel features is a provision to allow testimony to be given by satellite television hookup, which was initially criticized by civil liberties groups concerned that defendants would forfeit a traditional right to confront a witness.

“While we do not expect large numbers of prosecutions, the law sends a message that this country will not tolerate its citizens going offshore to abuse the children of other countries,” Mark Lever, an aide to Australian Atty. Gen. Michael Lavarch, said in a telephone interview.

In some countries, the problem involves mature-looking teen-age girls who become prostitutes while below the legal age of consent. But in other places, customers are specifically looking for children younger than 12, or even 10. Some men believe, for instance, that sex with children will give them longevity, while others hope, equally incorrectly, that choosing a child as a sexual partner will decrease the risk of contracting the virus that causes AIDS. Others are hard-core pedophiles.

“Tourism is providing the context in which the child abuse exists,” said Ron O’Grady, a New Zealand native who was one of the original founders of ECPAT. “You often find that the farther a traveler gets away from home, the more they lose restraints.”

The beaches of Sri Lanka are renowned haunts of European pedophiles looking for pre-adolescent boys. In the Philippine town of Angeles, which is on the outskirts of the former U.S. military facility Clark Air Base, bars advertise prostitutes whom the barkeepers guarantee are virgins.

“Put in a family context, if a man has sex with a 15-year-old or a 10-year-old the damage is equal,” said the Rev. Shay Cullen, an Irish priest who has worked with street children in the Philippines for 25 years.

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ECPAT has focused on enacting laws in the “consumer” nations because only a handful of cases have been successfully prosecuted in Asia, although the number is starting to grow. More often than not, when foreign men are accused of sex crimes with children in an Asian country, they either pay a bribe or flee while on bail.

Once they return home, most offenders are safe from being extradited because Western governments tend not to send their citizens back to face trial in another country unless it has a Western-style judicial system and civil liberties, which few Asian nations do.

The new child sex laws will replace extradition by providing for cases to be heard in the accused’s home countries, with local safeguards, but using testimony and evidence gathered abroad. Officials believe most cases will involve instances in which an accused was arrested in Asia but managed to return home before being brought to trial.

“They have big problems with child prostitution here, so it is important for us to show them how important it is for us,” said Per Olov Forslund, a Swedish detective who is assigned to his country’s Bangkok embassy to gather information on child prostitution.

Thai Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai made the elimination of child prostitution his top priority shortly after he took office in September, 1992. After a series of well-publicized police raids, the trade in very young children moved out of the open in nightclubs and into the shadows, but it still persists on a large scale.

“It’s nice talk, but it’s just talk,” Sanphasit Koompraphant, director of the Center for the Protection of Children’s Rights in Bangkok, said of Chuan’s efforts to crack down. Sanphasit asserted that Chuan had reneged on a pledge to make local officials resign in areas where child prostitution proliferates.

“Despite clear evidence of direct official involvement in every stage of the trafficking process, not a single Thai officer, to our knowledge, has been investigated or prosecuted except in one highly publicized case of murder,” said a recent study by New York-based Human Rights Watch of Thailand’s trade in young girls from neighboring Myanmar. “For the most part, agents, pimps, brothel owners and clients have also been exempt from punishment.”

In a speech last month, Chuan said that child prostitution had become a “transnational trade involving powerful organizations which have a close-knit network.” But he also charged that the problem was being blown out of proportion by the news media.

Chuan’s government has proposed a significant toughening of the child prostitution laws, which is still awaiting passage in Parliament. But social workers and officials agree that the problem is lack of enforcement, not a lack of laws.

In the Philippines, for example, stringent laws against sex with children were adopted in 1992. But officials acknowledge that the laws have not been used.

“It is rumored that the Philippine National Police is very corrupt,” said Santiago Y. Toledo, deputy director of the National Bureau of Investigation, the local version of the FBI. “Besides, you almost never get a girl to file a complaint. They just disappear.”

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One of the most blatant examples of sex tourism in Asia can be found in Angeles, which suffered the departure of 20,000 U.S. servicemen from Clark Air Base and was heavily damaged by the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991.

Even though there are no beaches, nearby mountains or any scenery to speak of, the number of bars in the town has doubled to 173 since October thanks to an influx of single men, largely from Australia and Germany, but also including a sizable number of Americans.

“We hate the fact that our survival depends on these young girls,” said Carlito M. Ganzo, an Angeles city councilman. “But we cannot do anything. It’s an economic reality.”

American Max Rose, who runs an Angeles bar known as Platinum, said the girls working in the bars were licensed by the government as being over 18 and there was nothing the bar owners could do about it. He added that by giving licenses, the government in fact “condoned” prostitution.

Any notion that the girls are working as “entertainers” is dispelled by the requirements of the government license: a yearly test for HIV--the virus that causes AIDS--and weekly checkups for venereal disease.

Romega Anteola, a social worker with a women’s rights group in Angeles, said the government requires no proof of age when it issues licenses, and she estimated that the majority of bar girls are younger than 18 when they start working. “The truth is, they come at the age of 14 and 15,” she said.

A stroll along Angeles’ main street one recent night tended to support her argument: There were scores of middle-aged Caucasian males walking hand in hand with teen-age Philippine girls, some barely half their size.

Cullen, the Catholic priest working with street children in Olongapo, near the former U.S. naval base at Subic Bay, said he believes that 50% of the women working in that city’s bars are underage.

Cullen is outspoken in his criticism of the U.S. Navy for allowing servicemen arrested as child abusers to escape the Philippines, and in some cases, he said, abetting their escape. Cullen estimated that during the 10 years before the U.S. military departed in November, 1992, there were 150 child abuse accusations against U.S. servicemen and all were dismissed at a preliminary stage because the accused had left the country on “unauthorized leave.”

Earlier this year, Cullen brought a child abuse case against an Australian who allegedly abused children aboard a private yacht anchored offshore from Cullen’s offices, known as the Preda Foundation. Some of the children involved were the same ones who had been involved in a child prostitution case involving a U.S. sailor.

Cullen, who traveled to Tokyo in May to campaign for the adoption of extraterritorial child sex laws being considered by Japan’s Parliament, acknowledged that there would be difficulty making a case overseas but said the obstacles were more than offset by the benefits.

“It will be a great point of education,” he said. “People will realize that they may be caught. It will be a great deterrent against ever leaving home.”