Goa tries to repair its reputation

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/02/12/news/goa.php

Goa tries to repair its reputation
By Amelia Gentleman International Herald Tribune
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2006
SINQUERIM, India Alongside the fish menus and water skiing leaflets pinned up in the wooden beach shacks along the Goa coast, tourists have been confronted this season with less palatable posters warning them of the presence of pedophiles roaming the seafront.

The poster campaign is part of a widening effort by local charities to help Goa shake off its emerging reputation as a center for child sex tourism.

Foreigners arriving by charter flights from Europe are given leaflets detailing the penalties for child sex abuse. "Welcome to Goa, land of lovely beaches and friendly people," the pamphlet begins, before declaring that pedophilia has become a "serious problem."

Charity workers have set up surveillance stations on four of the state's most popular northern beaches to help monitor suspicious behavior among foreigners; a team of workers is paid to patrol the beaches to keep an eye on visitors; and tourists are invited to call hotline numbers if they see any fellow vacationers engaging in troubling behavior.

Goa's State Legislative Assembly approved a law in 2003 intended to make the prosecution of pedophiles easier and introducing a maximum 10 years' sentence. But activists said no foreigners have been convicted under the act and expressed frustration at what they regarded as a lack of will on the part of the local authorities to tackle the problem.

Goa's director general of police, Neeraj Kumar, said that tackling child sex tourism was a priority, but he added that he felt the problem was on the decline. "Tourism police officers patrol the beaches to ensure that this does not happen," he said. "But we believe that Goa got a bad name because of a couple of bad cases here in the past, and that bad name has stuck."

In a report entitled "Trafficking in Women and Children in India," published in January, the National Human Rights Commission warned that the situation had reached a critical stage.

"In India the abuse of both male and female children by tourists has acquired serious dimensions," it said. "Unlike Sri Lanka and Thailand, this problem has not been seriously tackled."

Tourism in Goa has increased substantially over the past decade, with the number of visitors rising from 126,130 in 1996 to 2.4 million in 2004. With the increase in tourists, activists believe there has been a parallel rise in the incidence of pedophilia. The scale of the problem, however, is hard to quantify and remains a matter of dispute.

Venicia Cardoso, director of Children's Rights in Goa, a charity that is campaigning to prevent the growth of the problem, said staff members were now handling about four complaints a month, often from tourists calling the numbers advertised on their posters or visiting their beach monitoring centers.

This is double the number in 2000, when the organization began its work, although she said it was difficult to assess whether the rise represented a true increase or was the result of growing awareness of how to deal with the problem. "We get a lot of cases reported to us, so we know that the problem is prevalent," she said. "There is a fear that it will become institutionalized here, and that is what we are campaigning to stop."

"Thailand had this problem," she added, "but now the laws there are much stricter, so they are not going there any more. Foreign tourists find there are children easily available on the beaches here."

Among the beach vendors who sell bangles and peanuts to the tourists are numerous children from India's most impoverished states, drought-prone regions and areas affected by natural disasters, attracted by the high concentration of foreign money in Goa. Some of these children are unaccompanied by their families, making them particularly vulnerable to abuse.

"Because these are often children from other states, migrant workers, there is a sense among the local community that this is not their problem," Cardoso said.

There is no nationwide legislation in India that addresses pedophilia, but the state passed the Goa Children's Act in 2003 to tackle the issue. The legislation included penalties for trafficking in children and it required that the police, tourist officials and hotel owners be "sensitized" to the issue.

"The act is a very progressive act, but the problem in our country is implementation," said Arun Pandey, the director of Arz Goa, a charity made up of lawyers and social workers. "We have seen a lot of acquittals. Because the implementation is not good, pedophiles do find that Goa is a safe haven."