wowpow
August 29th, 2006, 08:45
Full article http://www.bangkokpost.net/270806_Persp ... ers001.php (http://www.bangkokpost.net/270806_Perspective/27Aug2006_pers001.php)
Extract :
Thailand under a familiar glare
The arrest of John Karr has revived depictions of Bangkok in the international press as a place where even the most taboo of perversions is easily satisfied, but in fact a lot of progress has been made in shutting down the child sex market in Thailand, writes ERIKA FRY
The way "Purple" is going to spend his five-hour layover at Don Muang Airport was up for discussion at InternationalSexGuide.com earlier this week. By the end of an afternoon his ambitious plan to get to NEP (Nana Entertainment Plaza) and get a girl in five hours or less, has drawn a handful of comments and helpful hints, and been resoundingly rejected by the ISG online community. He has underestimated the delays of Bangkok traffic and Thai immigration lines, chides one poster. He has not allotted time for currency exchange or the 15 minutes it takes the girl to get dressed, says another. One fellow suggests he save time and just arrange for a girl to be at the airport hotel.
But the matter isn't completely settled until Senior Member (32 previous posts) "Wolf"' breaks in with a post that says "Purple's" best bet is to skip NEP, skip the pre-arranged tryst at the airport hotel, and skip on up to an MP (massage parlour) on the second floor of Don Muang, where, with a wink and the shucking of his clothes, he can get a girl without even leaving the airport. That these matters are known, that these matters are discussed, and that these matters command the energies and attention of at least five different individuals on a Tuesday afternoon says something about the nature of sex tourism and the sex tourist in Thailand.
The Thailand file folder on InternationalSexGuide.com is stuffed full with 40,000 such posts (twice that of the next most-commented-on sex destination, China, and 40x that of most other Asian countries).
Who has this kind of time?
Yet as sex websites go, this one is incredibly benign. There are no naked pictures, no comments trying to lure young children into sex. There are even rules, asking vaguely for "general politeness" and strictly for grammatical precision (standard capitalisation and full spelling of the word "you", a must). It is a comment board - a space for sex tourists to swap stories (some in tedious bar-by-bar detail) or simply share information on the best places to eat in Pattaya.
The monitor, a strict grammarian, but apparently not a strict linguist, calls the site somewhat redundantly, a "permanent archive of travel records."
That there is the kind of interest to maintain such an archive speaks to the more-notorious-than-ever zeal with which some regard Thailand as a destination (or as for "Purple", a destination between destinations) for sex. Thailand has taken a lot of heat for this image in recent weeks. Ever since American JonBenet Ramsey murder suspect and paedophile, John Karr, was discovered to be living in Bangkok, foreign media has made much of why he had chosen to live in Bangkok.
In just several days, and in far more reports, Bangkok was branded a haven for sex tourists, and worse, a paradise for paedophiles.
2Bangkok.com, a locally run website, monitored the "bad news about Bangkok"and plucked and posted quotes from the worst of it. USA Today ran a story all about the "seamy side" of Thai tourism, Time held a quote from someone saying that "the way Wall Street is to finance - Bangkok is to paedophiles," and an Associated Press story, now inescapable on Google searches, is headlined with mention of "lax laws."
It did not help matters that Karr was a teacher here, nor that he had been previously hired by two elite Thai schools, nor that when he had been fired from one, it had been, for of all things, being too strict. Little mercy was given for the fact that before Karr was arrested as a teacher and paedophile in Bangkok, he was a teacher and paedophile in America, Honduras, Korea and a handful of Western European countries. That Karr was found here, in a city with a sex tourist reputation that often precedes itself, was enough to inspire reports that were unfair or uninformed in their dismissal of the past decade of progress the Thai government and a handful of NGOs have made in addressing the country's child sex tourism and prostitution problems.
These efforts have been aggressive and extensive, and while accurate statistics are impossible to gather, experts believe the number of children being sexually exploited and the number of sex tourists exploiting them has fallen.
Extract :
Thailand under a familiar glare
The arrest of John Karr has revived depictions of Bangkok in the international press as a place where even the most taboo of perversions is easily satisfied, but in fact a lot of progress has been made in shutting down the child sex market in Thailand, writes ERIKA FRY
The way "Purple" is going to spend his five-hour layover at Don Muang Airport was up for discussion at InternationalSexGuide.com earlier this week. By the end of an afternoon his ambitious plan to get to NEP (Nana Entertainment Plaza) and get a girl in five hours or less, has drawn a handful of comments and helpful hints, and been resoundingly rejected by the ISG online community. He has underestimated the delays of Bangkok traffic and Thai immigration lines, chides one poster. He has not allotted time for currency exchange or the 15 minutes it takes the girl to get dressed, says another. One fellow suggests he save time and just arrange for a girl to be at the airport hotel.
But the matter isn't completely settled until Senior Member (32 previous posts) "Wolf"' breaks in with a post that says "Purple's" best bet is to skip NEP, skip the pre-arranged tryst at the airport hotel, and skip on up to an MP (massage parlour) on the second floor of Don Muang, where, with a wink and the shucking of his clothes, he can get a girl without even leaving the airport. That these matters are known, that these matters are discussed, and that these matters command the energies and attention of at least five different individuals on a Tuesday afternoon says something about the nature of sex tourism and the sex tourist in Thailand.
The Thailand file folder on InternationalSexGuide.com is stuffed full with 40,000 such posts (twice that of the next most-commented-on sex destination, China, and 40x that of most other Asian countries).
Who has this kind of time?
Yet as sex websites go, this one is incredibly benign. There are no naked pictures, no comments trying to lure young children into sex. There are even rules, asking vaguely for "general politeness" and strictly for grammatical precision (standard capitalisation and full spelling of the word "you", a must). It is a comment board - a space for sex tourists to swap stories (some in tedious bar-by-bar detail) or simply share information on the best places to eat in Pattaya.
The monitor, a strict grammarian, but apparently not a strict linguist, calls the site somewhat redundantly, a "permanent archive of travel records."
That there is the kind of interest to maintain such an archive speaks to the more-notorious-than-ever zeal with which some regard Thailand as a destination (or as for "Purple", a destination between destinations) for sex. Thailand has taken a lot of heat for this image in recent weeks. Ever since American JonBenet Ramsey murder suspect and paedophile, John Karr, was discovered to be living in Bangkok, foreign media has made much of why he had chosen to live in Bangkok.
In just several days, and in far more reports, Bangkok was branded a haven for sex tourists, and worse, a paradise for paedophiles.
2Bangkok.com, a locally run website, monitored the "bad news about Bangkok"and plucked and posted quotes from the worst of it. USA Today ran a story all about the "seamy side" of Thai tourism, Time held a quote from someone saying that "the way Wall Street is to finance - Bangkok is to paedophiles," and an Associated Press story, now inescapable on Google searches, is headlined with mention of "lax laws."
It did not help matters that Karr was a teacher here, nor that he had been previously hired by two elite Thai schools, nor that when he had been fired from one, it had been, for of all things, being too strict. Little mercy was given for the fact that before Karr was arrested as a teacher and paedophile in Bangkok, he was a teacher and paedophile in America, Honduras, Korea and a handful of Western European countries. That Karr was found here, in a city with a sex tourist reputation that often precedes itself, was enough to inspire reports that were unfair or uninformed in their dismissal of the past decade of progress the Thai government and a handful of NGOs have made in addressing the country's child sex tourism and prostitution problems.
These efforts have been aggressive and extensive, and while accurate statistics are impossible to gather, experts believe the number of children being sexually exploited and the number of sex tourists exploiting them has fallen.