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One survey found that more than 50% of Thai child prostitutes are HIV- positive. Still, with Thai men and foreign sex tourists unaware of or unfrightened by those statistics, the country has the world's largest child sex industry, and sex mobsters go to great lengths to find virginal youngsters. Entire villages in northern Thailand along the Burmese border are almost bereft of young girls because they have been sold into prostitution, often by parents willing to sacrifice a daughter for payments that range as high as $8,000. Having exhausted the Thai supply, child traffickers have expanded recruitment into Burma and China. And when the girls are no longer useful, they are tossed away. Prostitutes returned to Burma from Thailand infected with AIDS have reportedly been locked in prisons by the military government or even killed.
A typical victim of the Thai trade in prepubescent sex is Armine Sae Li, 14. She was spirited away from northern Chiang Rai province at age 12 when child traffickers convinced her parents they would give her a good job in a beach- resort restaurant. When she reached Phuket, a center for sex tourism, she was forced into prostitution in conditions of virtual slavery until she was rescued last December by Thai police. But they arrived too late; Armine has tested HIV-positive and will die of AIDS.
During Armine's brief career as a prostitute she entertained two to three customers a night, almost all of them foreigners. In recent years Europeans, Australians, Japanese and Americans have flocked to Southeast Asia by the thousands to engage in sex acts with Thai, Filipino and Sri Lankan youngsters that would win them a jail term in their home countries.
Dozens of tourist agencies cater to this clientele, which is made up of both pedophiles and pederasts taking advantage of lax law enforcement in Third World nations. Pederasts in particular have lots of help in finding a good time in Asia, Africa or Latin America. Numerous gray-market publications and computer networks provide information. One of the most notorious guides to world sex spas for homosexuals seeking boys is called the Spartacus International Gay Guide; available since the 1970s, it is now published in Germany in several languages.
One Mecca for pederasts is Sri Lanka. "There are no ads in catalogs for sex tours, and yet people are coming for sex," says Maureen Seneviratne, an anti- child prostitution activist in Colombo. Guides to the local boy-sex scene are easy to find, she says, and the illegal trysts frequently occur behind the walls of well-guarded compounds where police never venture.
Another favorite destination is Pagsanjan in the Philippines, about 40 miles south of Manila. Many sex tourists return there again and again, and have established permanent relationships with not just the boys of the town but their families as well. According to Ronnie Velasco, secretary of the Center for the Protection of Children in Pagsanjan, the wealthiest pederasts buy homes, businesses, automobiles and other expensive items for the boys' parents. Some even "adopt" boys and take them home to Europe or America.