‘Child sex tourism’: an anomalous form of movement?

Abstract

Over the past decade, public and policy concern has increasingly been expressed about the phenomenon of ‘child sex tourism’, which is widely understood as an aberrant form of movement that can be cleanly demarcated from ‘sex tourism’ and ‘tourism’ more generally. This paper critically examines that understanding, and argues that campaigns against ‘child sex tourism’ that fail to acknowledge its connections to and commonalities with other forms of tourism are likely to have a limited impact on the problem they set out to address, and may even have unintended and negative consequences for local adults and children.