ASIA: Internet Ads Promote teenage Sex

By Haider Rizvi Reprint | | Print |

Haider Rizvi

WASHINGTON, Oct 10 1996 (IPS) - Those running the multi-billion-dollar sex industry in the United States are now exploring new ways to expand their markets abroad.

“Welcome to the exotic world of Asia,” says an Internet Web site provided by the U.S.-based Ultra Infoseek Company. Click on the advisory page, and you will see dozens of pictures of nude teenage Asian girls.

“Asian girls from Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines want to know American/Western men,” says an ad at another site, http://www.meow-meow.com. And so on.

The trend to place advertisements like these on the Internet that specifically target sex markets in poor Asian countries is growing fast.

More than 100 Web sites are used exclusively to promote teenage commercial sex in Asia. The Internet sex site owners charge from 100 to 150 dollars for membership and detailed information about sex workers.

Turning lust into dollars,the sex industry earns about eight billion dollars year from pornography, telephone sex, and Internet sex tours, says U.S. author James Ridgeway in his recent work, ‘Red Light: Inside the Sex Industry’,

The trend disturbs human rights groups.

“We are extremely concerned about it. It must be stopped,” says Sean Parlaman of the Coalition Against Prostitution and Child Abuse in Thailand (CAPCAT), an umbrella organisation comprising dozens of non-profit groups fighting against poverty and child abuse in Thailand.

CAPCAT recently launched a worldwide campaign on the Internet against the California-based company, Earthlink, which provided its web site to the sex-promoting company PVS Publications.

PVS Publications promoted organised sex tours to Thailand on the Internet, offering detailed information about teenage sex workers to its prospective members. The company projected that Western tourists could buy a virgin girl in Thailand for a few hundred dollars.

“How would you like to marry a 14-year old virgin?” asked PVS Publications, as quoted in a recent New York Times article. “Do you know that you can buy a virgin girl for 200 dollars.”

Parlaman, who noticed the PVS commercial while working on an Internet project with Oregon University, says this is “the worst kind of child abuse.”

Featuring “A Gentleman’s Guide to the Erotic World of South East Asia,” the PVS Web site included books, travel guides, and videos on commercial sex in several Asian countries.

CAPCAT says it is relieved that hundreds of email subscribers responded to its call, and that they succeeded in forcing the company to remove its sex tour guide from the site.

But it regrets’that Earthlink company failed to take legal action against those involved in the illegal promotion of commercial sex.

“We want Earthlink to pursue the matter with the law- enforcement agencies and to monitor their customers’ web pages for any other illegal sites in the future,” CAPCAT said in a recent statement.

“Earthlink seemed like a very respectable corporation, and we knew that with a little pressure, they would care,” said Parlaman.

Earthlink says it cannot monitor every site because of a lack of resources. Ativists reject this argument.

“Earthlink has 300 employees,” says a CAPCAT activist. “So I’m not really convinced that they don’t have resources to monitor the sites used for commercial sex. But we hope they will pay a closer attention now.”