Addressing child sex tourism: The Indian case

South Asia

India

Social Protection

Addressing sexual exploitation

M Chemin; F Mbiekop

2015

Chemin, Matthieu, and Flaubert Mbiekop. “Addressing Child Sex Tourism: The Indian Case.” European Journal of Political Economy 38 (2015): 169–180.
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Secondary Data: “Crime in India” (https://data.world/rajanand/crime-in-india); National Child Labour Project. (https://labour.gov.in/childlabour/nclp)

2015

N. A.

1994–2005 (range of data)

The study aims to evaluate policies combatting child sexual exploitation.

Children under 21 years old (Indian Penal Code).

The paper studies the demand and the supply sides of child sexual exploitation. The supply side is based on the National Child Labour Project in India, a program that rehabilitates children working in hazardous occupations. The demand side is based on extraterritorial child sex tourism laws adopted between 1994 and 2005 by countries that provide most tourists to India.

• Child-related crimes (importation of girls, kidnapping & abduction of children, procuration of minor girls, buying of girls).

Difference-in-differences

Study design: The goal of the empirical analysis is to test the central implication of the theoretical model developed by the authors, i.e., that the supply side or the demand-side policies in isolation have limited to no impact on child sex offenses, whereas the combination of both efforts matters. The supply-side data comes from the National Child Labour Project. Under the NCLP, there are regular inspections to detect cases of violations of legislative provisions, and the program created special schools for child laborers withdrawn from work. The demand side comes from extraterritorial child sex tourism (CST) laws, in which case child sex tourists can be prosecuted in their country of residence. To evaluate the impact of Extraterritorial child sex tourism laws on child sex offenses in India, the authors construct an index capturing the temporal and geographical variations of their adoption. The temporal variation comes from the fact that countries adopted CST laws at different times. The geographical variation stems from the fact that CST laws will have an impact in districts hosting foreign tourists but will have limited to no effect in districts without tourists. The product of the two indices, (CST _ Laws) t * (Tourism) I, gives a proxy for the importance of CST laws in each Indian district i at time t. Given the temporal and geographic variation of this proxy, it can enter a difference-in-differences framework to evaluate the impact of the CST laws on child sex offenses in India.
Sample: National Sample Survey. The authors use the consumption round and headcount of the number of individuals working in tourism-related activities.
Survey Instrument: the 55th round of the National Sample Survey is used to build the index of tourism intensity at the district level.

The National Child Labour Project has no impact on the importation of girls when considered separately. Likewise, extraterritorial child sex tourism laws alone have no impact on child sex offenses. However, the interaction between the NCLP and CST Laws generates a sizable effect on child sex offenses in India: a one standard deviation increase in the interaction term reduces importation of girls by one-fifth of the variable’s standard deviation.

Forced Labour

Individuals

National

The National Child Labour Project in India has no impact on the importation of girls when considered separately. Likewise, extraterritorial child sex tourism laws alone have no impact on child sex offenses. However, the interaction between the NCLP and CST Laws generates a sizable effect on child sex offenses in India: a one standard deviation increase in the interaction term reduces importation of girls by one-fifth of the variable\'s standard deviation.

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The result of this study suggests that there are some efficiency gains to be made by coordinating child sex tourism laws across national borders.