Feminists Fume at Alleged Sex Tour Operator
Call for Criminal Prosecution
Originally published at APBnews.com, Jan. 5, 2000
NEW YORK (AP) — Some prominent feminists are urging law enforcement officials to crack down on a Queens travel agency they say runs sex tours to Thailand and the Philippines.
The group, including Gloria Steinem and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, urged Queens District Attorney Richard Brown to prosecute Big Apple Oriental Tours for promoting prostitution.
Maloney said she also wrote to Attorney General Janet Reno on Tuesday calling for action against the travel agency. A federal statute passed in 1994 makes travel with the intent to have sex with minors subject to up to 10 years' imprisonment.
Maloney: "Sleazy"
"They should have had their sleazy doors closed long ago," Maloney told reporters.
"Big Apple Oriental Tours' promotional materials make it clear that money is being exchanged for the company of women and strongly suggest that sex is part of the transaction," she wrote in a letter to Brown.
"We are simply asking that a law be enforced," said Steinem. "By some estimates, the sex travel industry is bigger than the drug industry … and the girls involved are getting younger and younger and younger."
Brown responded in a statement that his "office has expended significant time and resources investigating Big Apple Oriental Tours … [with] the assistance of the NYPD, the FBI and U.S. Customs Service, among others."
"No legal basis to prosecute"
He said he concluded that there is no legal basis to prosecute in Queens because the alleged prostitution occurs outside the jurisdiction.
"The acts alleged to have occurred here in New York have been carefully circumscribed by Big Apple Oriental Tours and its principals to avoid a successful prosecution under existing New York law," Brown said.
Although sex tours are illegal in the United States, Thailand and the Philippines, Equality Now, a New York-based women's rights organization, said no U.S. sex tour operator had ever been convicted under either state or federal law.
No comment from travel agency
Calls Tuesday to the tour agency in the Bellerose section were not immediately returned.
The agency's promotional video shows New Yorker Norman Barabash checking out scantily dressed women gyrating in dimly lighted bars in the Philippines. At the end, it zooms in on naked female "wet T-shirt contestants" being pinched and groped by a crowd of American "judges."
Barabash, who runs Big Apple Oriental Tours, previously told The Associated Press he opposed the term "sex tour." "It's only the media that tend to reduce any kind of romantic adventure to the mere joining of the genitals," he said.
Tour operators deny they provide access to underage girls. They place disclaimers in their ads to that effect. But Barabash previously admitted to the AP: "There's no way of knowing for certain."
"Short of giving women lie detector tests, who can tell?" said Barabash. A Filipina woman in Barabash's video identified herself as "17 years young."
