Thomas Markle, estranged father of the Duchess of Sussex, has admitted to travelling to the Philippines “several” times in the past, specifically to have sex with prostitutes. He shared the news that he had previously participated in the practice of sex tourism in an interview with the Mail on Sunday, while vehemently denying that he’d ever had sex with a minor.

“I have never had sex with anyone under the age of 18,” the 82-year-old said, adding that, when single, he travelled to the Philippines at least twice and “slept with prostitutes”.

“I like Asian women, but that is not a crime,” he added. Another report yesterday, suggested that he had allegedly told his first wife that having sex with young girls in the Far East was justified as their families needed the money.

Thomas Markle Snr is said to have told his first wife, Roslyn Loveless: ‘It’s legal over there – that’s how they support their families, by prostituting them.’

Markle is currently facing one count of possessing indecent images of children, allegations he maintains are false. His son (and Meghan Markle’s half-brother), Thomas Markle Jr., alleged that he found a stash of child sex abuse images belonging to their father and turned him in to the authorities. A Philippine interior minister has since told The Guardian that all signs point to Thomas Markle Sr being a “possible sex offender of the grossest kind”.

Whether or not he is guilty will be for the courts to decide. But Markle’s “defence” – that the sex tourism he engaged in was above board because the women involved were adults – is problematic in and of itself.

The case has shone a spotlight on the uncomfortable practice of usually older, middle- or upper-class Western men travelling to the Philippines and other less wealthy nations across Southeast Asia in order to hire prostitutes.

As Dr Jessica Simpson, senior lecturer in sociology at Leeds Beckett University puts it: “Sex tourist destinations are gendered social constructions which are created, promoted and consumed by and for the dominant tourist, that is, the white, Western male. Western men travel to ‘third world’ countries in order to visually and physically consume difference in the form of the exotic female ‘Other’.

“This highlights how both the male and tourist gaze overlap and form a ‘male tourist gaze’ which is privileged within tourist discourses and which perpetuates racial and gendered stereotypes.”

In many of these countries, sex work is not technically legal, but authorities turn a blind eye. That’s largely because it’s big business; a previous estimate valued Thailand’s sex tourism industry at $25bn, equating to 12 per cent of the country’s GDP.

“It’s important to highlight that ‘sex tourism’ is a label that, while catchy, minimises the harm perpetrated on the people in destination countries,” says Lori Cohen, CEO of Protect All Children from Trafficking (PACT), a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to ending child sexual exploitation and sex trafficking.

Though PACT focuses on children, in reality their mission “necessarily involves working closely with adult survivors of the commercial sex industry, who have shared that most of them were initially exploited as children,” according to Cohen.

“There is a fantasy that many adults being sold for sex are doing this voluntarily,” she says. “However, if a child being sold for sex turns 18, does that mean the child is no longer a victim but instead a voluntary sex worker?”

While sex tourism exists throughout the world, it consists of both legally run organisations and businesses whose employees are sex trafficked. It’s difficult for foreign “punters” to distinguish between the two, or to guarantee that they are engaging with the former, rather than the latter. For example, one study found that sex tourists in Thailand who were not actively seeking out child prostitutes would “most likely come in contact with them anyway”.

“This will happen because of the availability of the vast sex industry and the fact that the sex industry markets itself by offering youthful prostitutes,” reads the paper. “About 25 per cent of the prostitutes are under the age of 18; this may lead to some tourists sexually abusing children, even if they were not seeking them out.”

In the Philippines, as elsewhere in the world, most individuals being sold for sex come from marginalised communities with limited access to basic life necessities. As Cohen puts it: “When a person ‘chooses’ prostitution to avoid starvation or homelessness, can we really describe this as ‘choice’?”

Paulo Fuller, director of the Renew Foundation, a Philippine NGO that helps victims of human trafficking and modern slavery, has said that “endemic poverty, unemployment, lax enforcement of the law, and the growth of the sex tourism industry have all contributed to the high levels of prostitution in the country.”

He added: “Sex tourists from other Asian countries, the US, Australia and Europe are flocking to the Philippines, where they can exploit economically vulnerable young women for sex.”

Locals themselves see poverty as the number one motivation for why people work as prostitutes, while tourist demand accounts for the sex trade exploding in certain countries, according to one study on sex tourism in the Philippines, which gauged perceptions of residents toward sex tourism in Makati City. “Regardless of being profitable, people still believed sex tourism should be stopped due to the extreme harm it causes,” reads the paper.

Elsewhere, a research project on sex tourism in Jamaica in 2019, conducted by Julia O’Connell Davidson, a Professor of Social Research at the University of Bristol whose specialisms include prostitution and sex tourism, concluded that: “the majority of our research participants entered sex work due to economic necessity.”

Although most people had not been pushed into sex work through physical force, “they nonetheless routinely experience violence, robbery and exploitation,” wrote O’Connell Davidson. “For sex workers in Jamaica violence is the norm, not the exception.” This violence, rather than coming from traffickers, was often meted out by the customers themselves.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and Girls went so far as to denounce prostitution as a “system of violence” and has called for the abolition of the commercial sex trade. “The commodification of the bodies of women and children turns them into chattel for exploitation by people in positions of privilege,” says Cohen.

In fact, members of PACT’s Survivors’ Council – composed of survivors from diverse identities, backgrounds, genders, ages, and sexual orientations – have rejected the term “sex work,” because they believe that this activity is not about sex, and certainly not work. “From their perspectives, prostitution is about the exploitation of power dynamics between the buyer and the seller, the exploiter and the exploited,” explains Cohen.

In their paper entitled “Sex Trafficking and Sex Tourism in a Globalised World”, Professor of Sociology Ann Brooks and Dr Vanessa Heaslip highlight that those who are the most vulnerable in society – often women, children, and individuals living in poverty – are the ones most likely to be exposed to working in sex tourism or indeed become victims of sex trafficking.

“They are perceived as having little intrinsic cultural worth or value and therefore become rendered as a commodity, to be sold in exchange for money, which is especially prevalent for women and children living in extreme poverty,” they write. “This perception of them as a commodity can be further perpetuated when they enter the sex industry, either by choice or coercion, as they can find themselves dehumanised, perceived as an object with little worth.”

Other academics have pointed out that, unlike ecotourism and heritage tourism, sex tourism is viewed as being something that could potentially threaten an area’s tourism industry as a whole; the seediness that surrounds the practice can understandably make a destination deeply unappealing to other types of travellers.

At the end of the day, the lines between sex tourism, sex trafficking and the sexual exploitation of children in travel and tourism are often irredeemably blurred.

Perhaps it’s time we all stopped turning a blind eye.