Dirty old men
BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | Glitter jailed for abusing girls
Gary Glitter shouts “I am innocent, it’s a conspiracy” at the trial where he has been found guilty of sexually abusing two young girls at his home in Vietnam. He may be innocent, but his history casts a great shadow of doubt over that, and it’s got to be seen as naive at best to have moved to South East Asia, rife as it is with sex tourism, in the first place. How does that look when you left the UK because you got caught with child porn on your computer?
Glitter is one of thousands of Western men and women of all ages in Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, and in poorer countries all over the world, pursuing relationships with young people that range from the consensual to the abusive – from the Westerners who have settled there and been married to the same person for twenty years, to the middle-aged men who know they only have to go to Pattaya to find a bar girl who will give them everything they want in exchange for security, to the predators who go looking for children. This is no new phenomenon – US soldiers fighting in the Vietnam war headed for the Patpong area of Bangkok for girls, and the girls are still there today.
When I was in Thailand, everywhere you looked you saw shifty looking older men with scrawny young girls. At a beach resort in Ko Chang, a German guy younger than me had hired a girl to have a holiday with him – he seemed to view it as a simple business transaction. I got talking to an English man in his late sixties, a former Marine Commando, in Cambodia. He had a girlfriend who was young enough to be his granddaughter, and told me how he had met her at a coastal resort and come to an ‘arrangement’ with her – she travelled around with him and looked after him, he bought her nice clothes and presents. She was almost a nurse to him. In South East Asia, a great many of the bars and restaurants are run by expats who have married local girls.
Relationships between people of different cultures are obviously common, and mostly mutually beneficial, blameless and happy. Nevertheless in Asia, relationships between Westerners and locals are often built on a simple arrangement – a Western man gets the kind of affection (and gratification) he maybe feels he’d never be able to get otherwise, and the local girl gets the kind of security that she would never be able to enjoy otherwise. Tourism in Asia has this element woven into it – Westerners have money, most Asians don’t. Of course there are genuine romances, and of course there are countless genuine friendships, but many relationships are essentially about money, making prostitution a rather nebulous term that is almost irrelevant. The problem is that hidden away amongst all of this are the children who are exploited and abused by people with the basest of motives.
Children in Asia are exploited in most cases because their parents have either allowed it to happen, or positively encouraged it. I met a brother and sister both under ten years old in Cambodia who were to be sold by their father after the death of their mother – they ended up in an orphanage where they are now very well cared for. Young children spend all night on the main bar street of Siem Reap, Cambodia’s busiest tourist town, begging for money, often with babies in their arms. Many are on drugs. Any money they make is highly likely to go to parents to feed their drug habits. Huge brothels and karaoke bars in South East Asia house hundreds of girls who are living in bondage. If children in developing countries are exploited in such a way, this kind of culture makes it much easier for paedophiles to exploit them without fear of capture – it’s a vicious cycle, perpetuated by money.
Gary Glitter has spent several years in Asia, and was driven out of Thailand and Cambodia for his exploits – now he has been imprisoned and faces deportation from Vietnam. He is just one person, and arguably his punishment is as much as anything about making an example of a disgraced celebrity. Glitter’s punishment is a drop in the ocean. Real change might come about as campaigns against child exploitation gain increasing visibility in South East Asia, paedophiles don’t see the place as a free-for-all, and the organisations that provide children with protection, health and education get the funding they need.
Related info:
- Earthwalkers Fund – run by a friend in Cambodia, raising funds for education, health and development
- ECPAT – campaign to end child prostitution
- The Code – socially responsible travel
