Sustainable Tourism & Childhood When in Brazil do as the Brazilians do: Report the Sexual Exploitation of Children and Youth. Dial 100.

March 31st, 2009 Offenders Beware!

Five European ECPAT groups and six south partners have joint forces and implementing a 3-years project aiming at increasing awareness and knowledge on sexual exploitation of children in tourism and building up the capacity for preventive actions among tourism professionals, students as well as other relevant stakeholders such as law enforcement and governmental authorities. The project ‘Offenders Beware - Raising Awareness, Capacity and Motivation for the Protection of Children from Commercial Sexual Exploitation in Tourism’ is supported by European Commission and several national partners.

The overall objective of the project is to contribute to the protection of minors from Commercial Sexual exploitation in travel and Tourism (CST). More specifically, the project aims to make it more difficult for European perpetrators to abuse minors in developing countries and put pressure on them to refrain from this severe human rights perpetration.

The specific objective of the project is to increase the awareness, capacity and motivation to take action for the protection of minors from commercial sexual exploitation of children in tourism among European actors involved in tourism from the public and private sectors, media and individuals.

The main areas of activities are:
A. Addressing tourism professionals and students through awareness raising measures (including producing materials) for tourism professionals and tourism students in the EU partner countries including an e-learning-course
B. Addressing key persons and multipliers in private and public sectors through advocacy and sensitization activities as well as European and national parliamentarians and other EU/national key decision-makers and politicians; organizing joint expert meetings with the tourism industry, law enforcement, governmental authorities, NGOs and with South partners
C. Information of public and media on child sex tourism through press work, tourism fairs, documentation and publications
D. Train-the-trainer (ToT) seminars and development of training manual and standards for awareness raising measures in the EU partners’ countries

Newsletters project
Newsletter 1: March 2009

International expert meeting
Within the project, ECPAT the Netherland, together with ECPAT Germany organized an expert meeting on 8, 9 and 10 March 2009 about the multi stakeholder approach to combat the sexual exploitation of children in tourism. The role of tourism professionals as well as NGOs in tourism destinations and countries of origin were discussed in relation to law enforcement. More than forty participants from law enforcement agencies, NGOs and tourism businesses attended the meeting. Press here to read the report of the meeting.

Among others the following Powerpoints were used during the presentations on the expert meeting:

Combating child sex tourism: the destinations point of view
Philippines (Shay Cullen, PREDA)
India (Rosemary Visnawath, Equations)
Costa Rica (Milena Grillo, Paniamor)
Brazil (Francesco Rosario, CTI-NE)
Kenya (Elizabeth Wanguba, Solwodi)

Combating child sex tourism: the international law enforcement point of view
INTERPOL (Mick Moran)
EUROPOL (Torbjörn Ull)
Police Schiphol Airport Netherlands (Henk van Ee)

The Code of Conduct as a tool to combat child sex tourism
The Code International (Giorgio Berardi, ECPAT International)
The Code in local destination Costa Rica (Milena Grillo, Paniamor)
The Code in local destination: Russia (Olga Kolpakova, Stellit)
The Code in local destination: Dominican Republic (Luiz Mendez, MAIS)
What experts think on the Code of Conduct (Celine Verheijen, ECPAT-NL)

What experts think on combating child sex tourism
ECPAT interviewed 31 experts from tour operators, hotels, airline
companies, NGO’s, tourism schools and governmental organizations in five countries to gather opinions on how to improve signing, implementation, monitoring and communication of the Code of Conduct. Read the report here.

To download presentations: http://www.defenceforchildren.nl/p/30/1586/mo45-mc75/Offenders-Beware

From: Site Ecpat
http://www.defenceforchildren.nl/p/30/1586/mo45-mc75/Offenders-Beware