Child sex tourism has exploded along Kenya’s sunny coastal area around Mombasa, where increasing numbers of tourists flock for more than the beaches, preying on children as young as 10.

According to United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and as reported by Ethical Traveler in 2007, 30 percent of girls aged between 12 and 18 in Mombasa and surrounding resort towns are involved in the sex industry, with nearly half of them entering prostitution as young as 12.

One reason for the explosion of child sex tourism in the coastal resort towns of Kenya is that tougher restrictions in Southeast Asia, a notorious hub of child prostitution, have made the area less appealing to sex tourists, who now operate in the relatively lawless areas of East Africa.

Lax penalties for offenders, coupled with government corruption, political instability and entrenched poverty in which children feel they have no choice but to sell their bodies, ensures that child prostitution has been able to thrive in Kenya.

Although the Kenyan government is aware of the issue, they have been slow to take action beyond token measures such as alerting hotels and tour operators and registering coastal guesthouses. A report released in 2005 by the organization End Child Prostitution Child Pornography and the Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT) about the situation in Kenya was critical of these efforts. It stated that “NGOs feel that more needs to be done with regard to awareness raising, investigation and prosecution of sex offenders and that child protection services are not effective or coordinated enough to tackle the extent of the problem.”

At the end of 2008, the United Nations held a forum to devise a way to ensure that sex tourists face prosecution in their home countries for child abuse committed abroad.

“Many of these pedophiles tell each other, ‘Oh, don’t worry if something happens to you in that country, the worst that will happen is you’ll pay a fine,'” Nils Kastberg, UNICEF’s director for Latin America and the Caribbean, told the Associated Press.

While UNICEF and other child aid agencies are providing some relief, the root cause of the problem must be dealt with in order to bring about real change. As surmised by the New York Times: “The real cure lies in a change at the top, the creation of a culture that values transparency and puts future opportunity in the hands of all citizens. Based on Kenya’s current political situation, the cure seems hopelessly far away.”