Defining Sex Tourism

International Advocacy, German Law, and Gay Activism at the End of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

This article argues that transnational debates about sex tourism were instrumental to ending the ambiguity around desire for underage boys from a mainstream German gay rights movement in the early 1990s. Prior to the 1990s, West German publications and guides reported enthusiastically on possibilities for sexual contact in popular destinations in the Global South, possibilities which often left the question of age ambiguous. During the 1980s, however, anti-trafficking activists and sex worker activists were engaged in a fierce debate about the best ways to address global forms of sexual exploitation. While many anti-trafficking activists understood sex work as always exploitative and closely related to trafficking and tourism, sex worker activists argued in favor of improved legal and working conditions and attention to structural inequalities These debates, and particularly the debates that took place at the level of the UN, were filtered into the German context through AIDS Enquete Commission, established by the Bundestag in 1987 to develop solutions to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS, as well as ongoing Bundestag debates about multiple human rights abuses against women and children. By the early 1990s, sex tourism had become inextricably intertwined with other forms of highly-publicized sexual exploitation of children in the Global South, including trafficking, pornography, and prostitution, mandating the use of criminal law. Coupled with a series of highly public international scandals involving gay organizations and abuse of minors, the close association between sex tourism and criminal sexual exploitation, caused the SVD to resolutely condemn any desire for underage boys. In so doing, however, the SVD followed German lawmakers in effectively jettisoning a focus on structural inequalities as well as foreclosing criticism of criminal law as a means to address exploitation were jettisoned.