Warning: This article discusses child sexual exploitation and abuse. Reader discretion is advised.
This week the world reacted to some deeply unsettling news: an Australian man had travelled to Thailand and allegedly murdered a 17-year-old girl. Grainy CCTV footage shows the man walking hand in hand with the teenager across what appears to be a hotel foyer before he allegedly killed her.
Unfortunately, an Australian national travelling overseas to sexually exploit children is not an isolated case. Just days earlier, the AFP and Australian Border Force announced that six children had been rescued in the Philippines after a 53-year-old West Australian man was intercepted returning through Perth Airport, with officers allegedly detecting child abuse material and communications relating to the procurement of children on his phone. The case, now before the courts, underscores how often Australia’s border and travel industry is often the point at which these crimes come to light.
The stories have shone a light on a type of travel not usually discussed in travel trade press: sex tourism, and, in these cases, the sexual exploitation of vulnerable children overseas.
It’s an area Dannielle Kelly knows well. As head of government affairs and law enforcement outreach at ICMEC Australia, she works with government and tech companies to protect children. Before that, she was partnerships and prevention manager at the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE), AFP.
The issue, Kelly told Travel Weekly, ebbs and flows. Offending surged before the pandemic, then COVID pushed perpetrators online. “Sadly, they all adjust,” she says. “A lot of them went online, and then after the fact they’ve picked up their travel again.”
Kelly avoids the term “sex tourism” – it undersells the reality. “My issue is with the word ‘exploitation’… people think that sounds like something far away,” she says. “Unfortunately, this happens very often.” Offenders who travel for exploitation “sadly don’t usually check age.”
To put the scale of vulnerability in perspective, Kelly points to a sobering statistic: “One in four Australians has experienced child sexual abuse.” Multiply that vulnerability across a poverty-stricken community overseas, she suggests, and the numbers become very difficult to ignore.
While she wouldn’t confirm current hotspots on record, Kelly notes the destinations of concern are historically those easiest for Australians to reach: the Philippines, Thailand, Bali, Malaysia and Indonesia – the last of which has built a strong partnership with Australian police.
Spotting the signs
ICMEC trains Australian Border Force on red flags when travellers re-enter the country. “Is a male Australian travelling overseas with a suitcase full of little girls’ clothes and toys? Are there no clear children with them?” Kelly says.
She stresses this isn’t about suspicion of ordinary travellers. “We don’t want to wreck well-meaning Australians’ trips overseas… but the people in your audience are the front line who can see those things happening.”
She recalls two flight attendants who recognised a passenger from their flight at the same hotel later that day, with several children from another country. They reported it through their airline to the AFP, and Border Force arrested him re-entering Australia. “That tiny piece of intelligence… will then build the case,” Kelly says.
The scale of the problem
David Braga, CEO of International Justice Mission (IJM) Australia, has watched this shift first-hand. IJM’s Philippines work dates to 2005, targeting exploitation in bars, brothels and streets – reducing the crime by 72 per cent in Metro Manila, 75 per cent in Cebu and 85 per cent in Pampanga, per independent university research.
Then the pandemic hit. “Abuse moved from that physical environment to the online environment – and out of brothels into the family home,” Braga says. A 2022 IJM study found one in 100 Filipino children – roughly 500,000 – were trafficked that year for livestreamed abuse material, with 85 per cent of local traffickers being family members.
The buyers are global. Citing the Philippine Anti-Money Laundering Council, Braga says Australians are the third-highest purchasers of this content by value and volume, behind only the US and UK.
He also cites UNSW’s Child Light Institute, which found men who use online child abuse material are two to three times more likely to seek sexual contact with a child if they believe they won’t be caught. Meanwhile, ACCCE data shows this activity has grown 50-80 per cent annually for the past three to four years.
What the industry can do
Both Kelly and Braga point to a key moment of leverage: crossing a border allows authorities to search devices without a warrant – a fact borne out by the Albany case, where border officials’ inspection of a phone led directly to six children being rescued overseas.
“If you notify the AFP, at least that’s a report,” Braga says. “That can build a profile that may lead to that individual being further examined.”
Braga is blunt about excuses around a victim’s age. “The average age of the victim we deal with is 11,” he says. Having visited shelters in the Philippines, he adds: “There is no way you could pretend you didn’t know this child is underage.”
Trust your gut
Kelly’s message to the industry isn’t about alarm – it’s practical. Front-line staff, she says, are often the first to sense when something is wrong, whether that’s a flight attendant, a rideshare driver, or a hotel employee. “People have to trust their gut, or have the ability to speak up when something doesn’t look right,” she says.
That instinct needs somewhere to go. Kelly recommends businesses have a clear internal reporting process, so an employee who notices something troubling isn’t left wondering what to do or worried about the professional fallout of raising it. “If there’s an internal process that they can report to, that can then go back to the AFP, where further investigations can be done,” she says. Crucially, that process shouldn’t have to expose or put a junior staff member’s job at risk to be effective.
For those who don’t have that internal pathway, or who want an added layer of confidentiality, Kelly points to anonymous reporting via the ACCCE at accce.gov.au. She suggests a dual approach – flagging concerns internally where possible, as well as anonymously – gives authorities the best chance of connecting the dots.
Kelly also stresses that a single observation, even one that seems minor, can matter more than people realise. A tiny piece of intelligence – an odd detail, a mismatched pairing, a passenger who doesn’t sit right – can be the missing piece that helps build a case against an offender.
ICMEC Australia also offers training sessions for travel businesses wanting to better understand the warning signs, something Kelly says she’s “always very open” to arranging – whether that’s for large operators or a handful of junior advisors just starting out in the industry.
