Underage Prostitution Paints Blurry Picture of Costa Rican Tourism

Prostitution has long been part of life in San José and it has become a steadily growing factor in attracting thousands of foreign tourists to the small Central American country every year. But foreign diplomats are concerned that the availability of sex with minors such as Pamela may be helping to create pedophiles back home.

“Underage sex in Costa Rica is becoming a global problem,” says a diplomat at the UK embassy in San José. “People travel from Europe and elsewhere, in some cases engage in under-age sex for the first time, and that creates a risk of them returning to the UK and starting to offend there.”

British authorities are so concerned at the possible link that officers from the UK´s high technology crime unit plan to visit Costa Rica this month to work with government officials to contain and combat the problem.

The UK embassy has already donated computers and other resources to the government to help crack down on under-age prostitution. It is also working to set up a special centre for child victims of Costa Rica´s thriving sex trade.

It is difficult to estimate the exact number of children and adolescents caught up in prostitution and child pornography rings in the country. But Paul Chaves, head of the special investigations department at the ministry of security, estimates that 5,000-10,000 children and adolescents are being sexually exploited.

Rocio Rodriguez, an expert on child prostitution in Costa Rica, says that while most customers are Costa Rican, foreign tourists have also become important consumers of child prostitution. “Tourists have made the problem much worse,” she says.

As director of Alliance for Your Rights, an independent organization to protect children from exploitation and provide victims with free legal assistance and counseling, she should know.

Every week children –typically between the ages of 10 and 16– go to her with stories of sexual exploitation involving foreign tourists. The tourists are mainly American but many are British and Spanish. “We give these children counseling but many of them have had a terrible time, and there are some traumas that therapy cannot resolve,” she says.

One of the problems is that for many years Costa Rican governments refused to acknowledge what was happening for fear of tarnishing the country´s reputation as an exotic, but clean and safe, place to holiday. “We did not want to admit that there was trouble in paradise,” Mr. Chaves says. “As a result, we lost an entire generation of children.”

That state of denial has now changed and the government is making more effort to confront the problem. One example is that tourists arriving at San José´s airport are greeted by posters warning that it is illegal to have sex with minors.