Social Responsibility and Innovation on Trafficking and Child Sex Tourism: Morphing of Practice into Sustainable Tourism Policies?

Ethical questions related to globalisation, human rights, unfair labour practices and trans-boundary exchanges of capital and workforce create ever more complex challenges for the tourism sustainability agenda. In recent years, the tourism industry has been increasingly challenged by media and governments to provide fast, socially responsible responses to emerging problems resulting from the dissolution of borders and workforce migration. Two particularly challenging phenomena that regularly make headlines are trafficking in human beings and child sex tourism. The main objective of this paper is to present existing good practices for preventing and combating trafficking of human beings and its links with the travel industry, and child sex tourism. Secondly, the paper calls for the morphing of empirical models into sustained innovation and public policies, and reviews several factors that may be necessary for this transformation to begin. The discussion is framed within the context of corporate social responsibility for sustainable tourism.