Nola Peshkin

Honors 232B
Professor Kirsten Foot
Final Paper

The Paniamor Foundation’s Efforts to End Child Sex Trafficking in Costa Rica

While stigma and stereotypes often lead the uninformed public to believe that southeast

Asia is the center of child sex tourism and trafficking, Costa Rica’s numbers in the same sector

are very similar. Due to many reasons, men from all over the world travel to Costa Rica in search

of easy sex with minors, not to mention the almost equally as large market domestically. The

Paniamor Foundation, a Costa Rican based NGO and nonprofit, has made significant efforts to

combat this type of trafficking in Costa Rica, and have even partnered with the local government

and tourism agencies in doing so. Paniamor, created in 1987 and highly active since 2004, is

dedicated to fighting against child abuse and exploitation, and fighting for policies and programs

that improve the quality of life for minors in Costa Rica through fulfillment and enforcement of

the fundamental rights that they are often deprived or unaware of. (4) They focus on combatting

CSEC by raising awareness, working with law enforcement, and running a trafficking

information database. (11) There are many things they are doing well, and many improvements

to be made in the fight against this horrific version of the sexual exploitation of minors.

Costa Rica is the number one destination in Central America for minor sex tourism. It is

estimated that out of more than a million tourists visiting the country each year, at least 5,000

people travel to Costa Rica with the intent to have sex with minors. Child sex tourism is the

largest trafficking market in Costa Rica, utilized by men arriving mostly from the United States,

Europe, Asia, and South America, but there is also demand domestically. Studies in Costa Rica

have shown that the average age for entering the Costa Rican pornography and prostitution

industry is 12. (1) Costa Rica has a highly-organized sex industry, so it is not surprising that
child sex tourism is larger here as opposed to other places. Tour guides hired for the purposes of

sex tourism, often Americans, meet clients at the airport and show them the best spots for sex

with minors. (2) A difficult factor in preventing sex with minors is that prostitution in Costa Rica

is legal over the age of 18, but when a child can pass as 18 police put little to no effort into

verifying their legality, making minors very easy to hide and exploit. There is less police control

in child sex tourism areas because these are usually urban, and with Costa Rica’s consistent

poverty rate of 20% for approximately the past 20 years, many children are very vulnerable to

becoming trafficking victims. Alongside the government’s inadequate funding and resources to

deal with the problem, the desire for buying sex leads to rampant local corruption, so whether or

not a police officer wants to crack down, they are often bribed not to. (1) Because the Costa

Rican government has made little effort to stop the growing minor sex tourism market, the State

Department’s 2016 Report on Human Trafficking lists them as a Tier 2 Watch List nation. While

there are laws that make pimping, prostitution rings, and brothels illegal, these are of little to no

effect because they are so inconsistently enforced. (3)

Nongovernmental organizations have taken more decisive and definitive action in the

fight against child sex tourism than the Costa Rican federal government. One of the most

significant projects was in 2015 when the Paniamor Foundation partnered with the Costa Rican

Tourism Ministry. Together, these two organizations created a catfishing website promising an

“unforgettable experience” for tourists trying to have sex with minors in Costa Rica. They

advertised their campaign on dating sites promoting child prostitution, and when users clicked on

it they were taken to a page that looks like a legitimate hotel website that offers free rooms with

young local girls. Once users navigate away from the main hotel page to make a “reservation”,

they are shown a greeting based on their location (ex. “Hi there in the United States, greetings
from Costa Rica”) that then goes on to describe which laws in both Costa Rica and their home

country consumers would violate by participating in sex tourism. (5) The website also details

shocking statistics about how many girls are exploited by foreigners, as well as the physical,

social, and psychological consequences of being sexually exploited, especially at a young age. (6

– Note: this source is the actual “hotel” website that the partnership built) Through the activity

on this website, Paniamor can track where these pedophilic sex buyers are. They got results from

people in over 100 different countries, spurring the disturbing realization about just how

worldwide the desire for sex with minors is, and how much larger of a hotspot Costa Rica is

compared to other countries where sex tourism is a problem. (3)

Though the Costa Rican government has yet to change their policies or enforce any new

plans or projects since learning about these results, the Costa Rican Vice President, Ana Helena

Chacon, says this raises serious concerns as it “shows that interest in sex with underage people

spreads worldwide”. (3) While it is unfortunate that the government has yet to respond in a

concrete way, I think the Paniamor Foundation has made big steps in addressing the rampant

child sex trafficking and tourism problems. As long as there is demand for sex with minors, the

supply will always be there; the unwaveringly high poverty rate and the high percentages of

uneducated people in Costa Rica make minors vulnerable targets for traffickers because they are

desperate for any method of obtaining food, money, and the prospect of a better life. Targeting

the demand side of the problem by directly addressing the men attempting to buy sex helps to

take out one end of the problem that I believe could be more easily fixed. Changing the minds of

buyers with horrifying realities and statistics is easier and more effective than attempting to solve

an entire country’s consistently high poverty rate. While gathering data on such an underground

problem is a great step, I do think Paniamor could have taken their strategy further by
implementing more concrete counter-trafficking actions. Often just reading the negative impact

of sex trafficking facts is not enough. Men who want to stop buying sex but do not know how ow

where to begin have received no help or resources. I think Paniamor could increase the

effectiveness of their demand prevention strategy by helping connect men who want to stop

buying sex with classes or resources in their area. They should add this resource list to the page

that displays the negative consequences of trafficking. Because most of the men using this site

are tourists and not from Costa Rica, Paniamor should compile a list of where men can find help

near their home, a doable feat because the hotel website already tracks the buyer’s location. I

think that in addition to this (or potentially even instead of it) Paniamor should make their own

online class with the same content. It would be easy for men to navigate straight to the class from

the hotel website, and it is an easy and convenient resource for everyone who has access to the

internet. That way, if the only in-person class offered in a buyer’s home country was too far

away from them or already full, the online materials would serve as an effective substitute.

I suggest they use interpreters to help make the class in a variety of languages, and if they

included videos they could simply add multilingual subtitles of the user’s choice to save time and

resources. One thing that program officers at Paniamor have often noted is that in interactions

with victims, pimps, and buyers, many only see minors as children if they are under the age of 10

or 11 so buyers often view nothing in their actions as morally wrong. (7) I think that this should

definitely be addressed in the class since it is something that has come up in Paniamor’s findings

in many places, cross-sector. If they would like a place to start in how to structure a class of this

type, a good resource would be Peter Qualliotine, co-founder and director of Men’s

Accountability in Seattle, which offers highly effective classes and other resources with the same

goal of targeting the demand for buying sex as opposed to the supply.
 In 2012 Paniamor partnered with the Canadian NGO International Bureau for Children’s

Rights (IBCR) to create a bilateral initiative to combat the sexual exploitation of children in

Costa Rica’s travel and tourism industry. This two year project focused in the Guanacaste

province in 2012 and the Puntarenas province in 2013-2014, two urban and coastal areas which

are particularly vulnerable to sex tourism that exploits minors. The project focused on educating

tourism industry professionals on the negative legal and social consequences of exploitative sex

with minors, and why protecting children from becoming victims of sex tourism is important and

necessary for bettering Costa Rican society as a whole. In order to have the greatest positive

effect on the problem, IBCR and the Paniamor Foundation focused their resources and teachings

on workers from the informal tourism sector that have the most contact as intermediaries

between children and tourists. That list includes taxi drivers, surfing instructors, artisans, beach

vendors, hotel front desk workers, etc. The partnership organized and hosted numerous trainings,

workshops, and educational seminars to break down the myths and stereotypes behind toxic

masculinity and its effect on heterosexual relationships as well as the beliefs and practices that

perpetuate the commercial and sexual exploitation of children. They also held sessions

specifically aimed to combat the social tolerance of minor sex tourism. Because IBCR is a

Canadian NGO and there has been a recent increase in Canadian tourism to Costa Rica, often

contributing to their sex tourism issues, the partnership created and facilitated education for

Canadian tourists going to Costa Rica about the penalties of those found guilty of participating in

the sexual exploitation of minors and reinforced the system for prosecuting those individuals. (8)

Some beneficial other results of the partnership included data collection for a mapping

report of the correlations and connections between CSEC and tourism in the Guanacaste

province and an information campaign in Costa Rican communities about the criminality of
CSEC. (8) I think it was a great strategy to target workers in the tourism industry who would

interact with minors and their traffickers the most, but I think more action than just education

needs to be done. It was great that the partnership formed relationships with Costa Rican police

officials in order to reinforce the necessity of prosecuting minor sex buyers, pimps, and

traffickers, especially considering the Costa Rican police are often corrupt and turn a blind eye to

the issue and face no consequences because the government does not have the resources to

reinforce the rules and importance. As far as concrete action in the informal tourism sector, I

think the partnership should put in place or suggest strategies with hotels or taxi companies to

keep their workers honest and require them to discreetly take action. A good example they could

replicate is the Radisson Hotel in San José’s system with taxi drivers. When drivers believe they

are transporting a minor and his or her buyer, they will flash their lights upon arriving at the

hotel. The hotel will then refuse entrance or a room for the pair. (9) This system is great because

taxi drivers still receive their fare. A huge reason drivers do not report cases or refuse service

where they suspect sex tourism is because they know another cab will turn a blind eye, pick up

the couple, and the original driver will have lost that profit. The partnership between Paniamor

and IBCR should extend their training materials and use this example to appeal to hotel

managers and owners throughout the regions they focused on (and hopefully later to all of Costa

Rica) as solid reasoning for implementing this strategy in all hotels. If this is mixed with the

education program they already have about the negative consequences of sexual exploitation on

minors it would function as a morally appealing counter-argument to hotels who may claim that

they would lose business from turning away the customers. On top of just educating the hotel

owners on the improved taxi system, assuming they agree to do this, they should also encourage

hotel owners to report the cases as well. If the owners would already be denying the buyer’s
business, then they may as well turn them in to the police as well. I recommend that the

partnership look to the Costa Rican Tourism Ministry to put in place a policy making hotels staff

similar to the U.S.’s “mandatory reporters” in that they are legally obligated to turn in a case of

suspected minor sex trafficking if they are aware of it. Paniamor already has good relations with

the Tourism Ministry after their hotel website tracking project, and the Tourism Ministry would

hopefully be open to this policy implementation after seeing the shocking statistics from that

project.

A final example of Paniamor’s extensive counter human trafficking efforts comes in the

form of their collaboration with the NGO ECPAT (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography

and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes) on the implementation of the Action

Programme against Trafficking in Minors for Sexual Purposes project in Costa Rica. The Action

Programme combined a variety of both preventative and law enforcement measures, including

most notably the creation of a website to report CSEC cases, increasing capacity for immigration

officials and border police, creating a judicial database program to track CSEC crimes, training

for responsible personnel, and implementing a comprehensive campaign to raise awareness and

prevent child sex trafficking. This widespread awareness campaign was the biggest portion of the

partnership because it was aimed to raise awareness right as the database for reporting was being

set up. People do not report human trafficking if they do not understand it or know that it exists,

so this strategy was aimed at garnering as much reporting as possible. The campaign included

bus advertisements in high-risk areas, informational bookmarks in minor’s passports when they

were issued their documents, a radio ad, and a prime time TV ad produced by a well-known film

director. As a result of the campaign, Paniamor began to receive more than 10 call-ins per week,
and an increase in reporting of CSEC cases during the time the campaign’s TV advertisement

was being aired. (11)

Part of Costa Rican societal gender norms is the idea of a “machismo” or a “macho man”,

which promotes and allows men to do as they please, buy sex from and exploit minors freely,

and often leads to domestic abuse in both families and relationships. The TV ad challenged these

norms because all the protagonists were young girls who were reclaiming their power and

exercising their right to be protected from sexual exploitation and trafficking. (11) This

campaign has so many good elements, and by targeting harmful gender norms they are

addressing a part of the multi-faceted human trafficking problem that is integral but often goes

unaddressed. I also think that to make this campaign even more effective, they should keep all

their ads going, especially the TV publicity, but produce a similar ad targeting young boys who

are sexually exploited (often also by older men). In general people are quick to assume that

women and young girls are the only targets of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation. In reality,

poverty and lack of education in Costa Rica forces both young boys and girls into selling their

bodies to make a living. Homosexuality is highly stigmatized in Costa Rica, so men, especially

male tourists, prefer to have sex with young boys they find on the street as opposed to an adult

male prostitute. (10) Paniamor’s mission is to prevent CSEC in all victims, and it is just as

important that they make an advertisement geared towards young boys as it is for young girls.

They could save energy and resources by reproducing the exact same advertisement but using a

young male as the protagonist. Having this duality helps boys to also relate to the ad and realize

that their being sexually exploited is also wrong, it is not wrong only when it happens to young

girls. There are few services available anywhere, on an international scale, that offer as
widespread or comprehensive services for male victims as they do for women. Paniamor should

take the initiative in this realm and be a leader and example for others everywhere.

In conclusion, Paniamor is making huge strides and great efforts to combat CSEC in

Costa Rica where the problem is particularly rampant. No effort to combat this problem will ever

be perfect and can always be improved. I hope that executives within Paniamor will take these

suggestions seriously and into consideration because I truly believe each is a small change that

could make a world of difference if implemented thoroughly and correctly.

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