John Mark Karr: Charges Dropped
John Mark Karr. Um, yeah — turns out he was making everything up. Dude didn’t kill JonBenet. Looks like he’ll head back to Cali to face those kiddie porn charges after all. I think it’s safe to say that his teaching career is over, however.
Elsewhere, the Bangkok Post’s Erika Fry recently examined Thailand’s efforts to curb the child sex trade and found that authorities are making progress:
Ever since American JonBenet Ramsey murder suspect and paedophile, John Karr, was discovered to be living in Bangkok, foreign media has made much of why he had chosen to live in Bangkok.
In just several days, and in far more reports, Bangkok was branded a haven for sex tourists, and worse, a paradise for paedophiles.
2Bangkok.com, a locally run website, monitored the “bad news about Bangkok”and plucked and posted quotes from the worst of it. USA Today ran a story all about the “seamy side” of Thai tourism, Time held a quote from someone saying that “the way Wall Street is to finance - Bangkok is to paedophiles,” and an Associated Press story, now inescapable on Google searches, is headlined with mention of “lax laws.”
It did not help matters that Karr was a teacher here, nor that he had been previously hired by two elite Thai schools, nor that when he had been fired from one, it had been, for of all things, being too strict.
Little mercy was given for the fact that before Karr was arrested as a teacher and paedophile in Bangkok, he was a teacher and paedophile in America, Honduras, Korea and a handful of Western European countries.
That Karr was found here, in a city with a sex tourist reputation that often precedes itself, was enough to inspire reports that were unfair or uninformed in their dismissal of the past decade of progress the Thai government and a handful of NGOs have made in addressing the country’s child sex tourism and prostitution problems.
These efforts have been aggressive and extensive, and while accurate statistics are impossible to gather, experts believe the number of children being sexually exploited and the number of sex tourists exploiting them has fallen.