There's a growing problem with young girls on the streets because of tourism. They come from the hill-tribe villages around Sa Pa town to sell handicrafts and souvenirs to tourists, but they're out of anyone's control — no parental guidance, most of their time spent on the streets with other girls. The boys from those same villages stay behind, working the fields and helping their families at home.
Some of these girls start as young as six. They tend to stop by fifteen, once it gets harder to sell — tourists seem to find them much more appealing when they're small. After they stop, some marry, others go home to their families. But by then they've missed years of school, even though decent educational opportunities exist for them.
All those girls are really young, some even start doing this work at six years of age — they stop once they turn fifteen, it is harder for them to sell things once they become teenagers.
The number of hotels in town keeps growing, more every year, and shops have multiplied along with prices. Tourism has taken a real toll — local people have started losing their own customs, grown used to visitors and to selling souvenirs, and become noticeably more pushy about it. The minority people learned those sales tactics from the Vietnamese; before, they weren't especially business-minded at all.
Not every tourist behaves the same way, but some are careless — wearing shorts or vests into religious places, for instance. They should respect local customs more. Most of the time, poor behaviour comes down to simply not knowing our culture, and that just leads to more misunderstanding on both sides.
A town getting busier by the year, and a childhood getting shorter along with it.