No they have not cared, nobody from government has at any rate. Which is probably why it has happened again in Goa. Says Nishtha Desai, who is currently researching tourism-related paedophilia and is actively trying to change the situation in Goa by working with other non-government organizations, the police and local state government, ‘A boy, around fourteen years old, was brought by a fifty-three-year-old German national from Mumbaii to Goa. They stayed in the same room in a Calangute hotel. The boy later testified before the police and a magistrate that the man attempted to have anal sex with him but was unable to completely penetrate because he began howling in pain. The man also had oral sex with him. Anal swabs taken from the boy and man revealed the presence of human spermatozoa. A taxi driver testified that he had driven the man and the boy to the hotel and the receptionist confirmed that they had shared the same room. The female assistant sessions judge found this German national guilty and gave him six years of rigorous imprisonment. The man went into appeal, and the male additional sessions judge ruled that it was not proved that the accused was indulging in unnatural offences against the child. The man left Goa and the country.’

Nishtha Desai’s valid point is that paedophiles need fear no punishment from the Indian judicial system. ‘In fact,’ she says, ‘a New Zealander has opted to be tried in India. Eoghan McBride, the sixty-year-old who was arrested in New Zealand in August 1999 because of an Interpol Red Corner Alert on charges of being associated with a child-sex ring in Goa, is alleged to be an associate of Freddy Peat. He said he wanted to be tried by Indian courts and was extradited by his own country, he was produced before the chief judicial magistrate at Margao on 29 November 1999. McBride has two New Zealand convictions. In 1991 he was sentenced to nine months periodic detention, two years supervision and psychiatric treatment after pleading guilty to six charges of indecently assaulting a six-year-old boy and an eleven-year-old boy. Both offences occurred when McBride was on parole from a two-year jail term for similar offences. At that time his lawyer acknowledged that McBride was a paedophile and said his client was prepared to authorise treatment that amounted to chemical castration.’

Neither McBride nor his lawyer needed to make good that promise since the Freddy Peats case hit international headlines in the same year, and McBride was named in it too.

‘It is getting more and more difficult in Goa for its citizens,’ points out Nishtha Desai. ‘These foreigners stay long-term in and around the place and either bring children from Mumbaii or pick up kids from the beaches. They proposition the Goan school-going children or they simply take their pick from the children of the construction labourers from Karnataka. They also choose from the children of migrant vendors on the beaches or the young masseurs. They tend to come to Goa from England and Germany, avuncular-looking men distributing foreign chocolates.’