The case that consumes Belgium would be disturbing enough if it stood alone. Even more horrifying is the suggestion that torturing children was a man’s career. On the basis of Dutroux’s confession, police now are searching for two other missing teenagers in Prague, where he often traveled. While jobless, Dutroux bought several houses in the years following his 1992 parole from prison, where he served three years of a 13-year sentence for raping five girls. Just how he made the money is unclear. But child sex has become a global industry, advertised in underground magazines and on the Internet. For years a specialized market in Southeast Asia, it has spread to the newly freewheeling capitals of Eastern Europe – so much easier to reach from London, Paris and Berlin. As an international conference in Stockholm this week will charge, a worldwide web of slavery and sexual torture now supports a horrific global commerce. And little is being done to stop it.
If the problem has been downplayed, that may be because the adults who purvey and practice sex with children seem so normal. They don’t ““fit any other profile in criminal justice,’’ says Thomas Kattau, a specialist with the Council of Europe. ““They don’t come from the marginalized part of the society.’’ And typically, those who prey on children prefer to do it away from their neighbors in poor countries like Thailand. That’s why the Stockholm conference will urge that more countries enact laws permitting police to prosecute sex crimes committed abroad by their citizens. Only 12 nations now permit such prosecutions, or even allow investigators to look into these crimes in foreign countries. Though some monsters have been brought to justice as a result of transnational agreements, many police still feel that ““nothing can be done,’’ said Madeleine Leijonhuvud, a Swedish professor of criminal law who helped organize the Stockholm conference.
The explosion of child prostitution in the old Eastern bloc has brought the problem to Europe’s doorstep. Investigators say organized-crime networks now shuttle young victims across the old Iron Curtain. Young prostitutes are a commonplace around European railway stations and in such pickup spots as the Berlin zoo. The most lurid trade is in the East. Prague and Budapest now rival Bangkok and Manila as hubs for the collection of children to serve visiting pedophiles. Last year one investigator was stunned to find stacks of child pornography in the reception rooms of Estonia’s Parliament and its social-welfare department. ““Free love is regarded as one of the new “freedoms’ which the market economy can offer,’’ she wrote. ““Simultaneously, sex in the market economy has also become a profitable commodity.’’ In some cases ““children are kidnapped and held like slaves,’’ says Kattau. ““This is happening more and more. It is organized crime.''
In Belgium, police say they’re not sure how far the chief suspect’s business dealings extended. They have implicated at least five people in the case. One alleged accomplice is dead – killed by Dutroux, police say, for letting the 8-year-olds starve while Dutroux was being detained by police in an unrelated theft case. Two others being held are accused of helping Dutroux construct a larger warren of cells beneath a slum building he owned in the town of Charleroi. At the funeral of Julie and Melissa in Lige last week, the priest who delivered the eulogy was visibly angry, his hands shaking as he held a paper in front of him. ““Is the good Lord deaf?’’ he asked, recalling all the prayers that were said for the missing girls. And all of Belgium observed a minute of silence.
