The complexity of the term sexual tourism: approach to the project to prevent sexual exploitation of children and adolescents

Abstract

In large part, attempts to understand tourism produce inadequate typologies that, in the desire to operationalize the phenomenon, hinder the clarity of the concept and encourage the ill-use of tourist destinations. It is in this way, in the context of globalization that sexual exploitation by tourism arises, associated with the exploitation of under ages in situations of social vulnerability, configure a complex approach to the term sexual tourism. In that framework, this article was elaborated with the objective to analyze the theoretical discussion of the term sexual tourism portrayed in the training courses for multipliers of the Project for the Prevention of the Sexual Exploitation of Children and Adolescents in Tourism of the Ministry of Tourism, in partnership with the Center of Excellence in Tourism of the University of Brasília in the light of the complexity of tourism through the participating subjects - the multipliers. The study adopted the research action and the dialectic method to investigate the level of understanding of the acquired knowledge from these trained actors in the different Brazilian regions, after the institutional training received in the years 2016 to 2017, with the perspective of pointing out possible ways to approach new content that allows the rereading of what may be sex tourism, fundamental to the most responsible practices of tourism professionals.