Thailand's kids may benefit from arrest in JonBenet case

John Mark Karr may or may not end up being tied to the murder 10 years ago of JonBenet Ramsey, the 6-year-old beauty queen whose brutal death in Colorado still haunts the nation, but there's no question about what his arrest could mean for the children of Thailand.
That's assuming, of course, the international community has not lost its sense of outrage in the face of clear acts of inhumanity.
Karr, a 41-year-old teacher, was in Thailand because he is a sexual deviant attracted to children. Indeed, he was under arrest in Bangkok on an unrelated sex charges when he offered a shocking public admission that he killed JonBenet.
Since that confession, however, questions have been raised about his truthfulness and whether his motivation for taking responsibility for JonBenet's death was nothing more than his desire to be in the public spotlight.
There was a report over the weekend that while in Bangkok he had made inquiries about a sex change operation. In addition to being a haven for child sex trafficking, Thailand is also known for gender reassignment surgery at a cheap price. The country has a large open transgender population.
But it is the thriving child sex industry that Karr's arrest has spotlighted. National news organizations, both print and television, have done special reports about the way young girls and boys are sought out by men from wealthy countries such as the United States. Thailand and other nations in the region earn large sums of money from the tourism trade, and, unfortunately, one of the big draws is the long-standing and vast prostitution industry.
As the Associated Press reported last week, sex with young teens is not a strong taboo in some Asian cultures, which makes fighting the problem even more difficult.
Law on the books
That is clearly evident in the number of times John Mark Karr visited Thailand. He obviously was not dissuaded by the U.S. Child Protect Act, adopted in 2003 to facilitate tracking sexual predators across international borders.
President Bush, who signed the act on April 30, 2003, told the United Nations that combating illegal sex tourism and trafficking must be a priority.
"The victims of sex trade see little of life before they see the very worst of life: an underground of brutality and lonely fear," the president said. "Those who create these victims and profit from their suffering must be severely punished."
We have long urged a crackdown on Americans who travel to Asia to participate in these crimes against humanity and have called on the administration to let the governments of those nations know that they must do more to protect their children. With so much money being generated, however, corruption among law enforcement officials is rampant.
In the past three years, 20 Americans alleged to have engaged in illicit sexual conduct in foreign places have been prosecuted under the Child Protect law. That does not appear to be a large number considering that there are tours operating out of the United States that are explicitly designed to satisfy the craven desires of individuals such as Steven Erik Prowler.
Prowler was deported from Thailand in May after completing a one-year prison sentence for molesting 15-year-old and 16-year-old boys. He told authorities he often paid Thai children the equivalent of $5 for two hours of sexual conduct.
The absence of international outrage over this industry is disappointing and troubling.
It is to be hoped that the spotlight now shining brightly on Thailand as a result of Karr's arrest in the JonBenet murder will cause the United Nations to launch an aggressive campaign to protect the improvished children of the underdeveloped world.