The Miserable Life of Trafficked Girls in the Philippines

Don't let the smiles in the pics below fool you, they are entirely commercial. These girls live a miserable existence

BY FR. SHAY CULLEN, Preda

A few weeks ago, 69 Vietnamese victims of human trafficking were found in the Philippines. These migrants had been brought from Vietnam by a syndicate two at a time on a tourist visa and made to work for three years on low wages or none at all by human traffickers. They were then abandoned by their gang-masters, declared as indigents and deported.

The Philippines is now a destination for low-paid and victims of slave labor as if the country didn’t have enough problems by itself.

There is significant human trafficking from the Philippines to South Korea using E6 visas. Many Filipinas are also taken to Japan as entertainers. What happens to the thousands of young women there is anybody’s guess.


The Philippines is doing more to combat the trade in persons and has finally reached the US Tier 1 status. It is among the top 39 countries that met the US minimum standards of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. The country made this achievement in 2016 after many years of being on the Tier 2 Watchlist. At one stage a few years ago, the Philippines was on the verge of dropping to Tier 3, which meant a very low standard of compliance indeed.

The Trafficking in Persons Report for 2016 issued for every country by the US State Department states that being on Tier 1 does not mean that there is no human trafficking, just that the government is meeting the minimum standards.

But the sex trade is a growing problem as it expands in towns and cities. Following the successful raids carried out by the Preda Foundation, social workers and the National Bureau of Investigation on sex bars and clubs in Subic and Olongapo, a legal case is still ongoing against an American accused of human trafficking and child abuse.

A search on 'Preda' in this blog will yield several more stories on the horrific condition of hundreds of thousands of children forced into the sex trade in the Philippines. When Duterte has finished cleaning up the drug trade, he needs to turn his attention to the child sex horror in that country.

In that raid a few years ago, retired Australian federal police did surveillance posing as tourists. They were able to identify the customers and the operator. Fifteen minors and young girls were rescued from a sex bar and a sex hotel. About 12 sex bars were padlocked.

But not all the girls want to be “rescued’ although many are victims of human trafficking.

Many were convinced that being in the sex trade is the only thing they are fit for. Most of these girls were conditioned and coerced. Some are drug dependents. Others stay on for fear of being jailed for non-payment of debts.

They borrow money from the club owner to buy drugs and seldom can they pay off their debt, burying them deeper in debt bondage. The young girls seldom have any money left for themselves. The club or bar owner or the pimp give them little.

The girls have to pay for food and a bed space in a dorm at the back of the sex bar. They buy drugs to make life bearable. When they do pole dancing, they have to pay for an ID card with a number and a bikini. The customer calls them out by number if he wants them. It is just a flashy nightclub scene, a glitzy gallery of persons for sale. In that respect, it is like the slave traders of old presenting the slaves for hire or for sale.

Over a thousand young girls are available in the streets and clubs of Fields Avenue, Angeles City. These girls are trafficked from the poorer provinces of Samar and Leyte. Others are runaways from Manila.

Many have been sexually abused in their own homes as young girls and had run away and ended up in the control of a pimp who sells them to a sex bar.

The minors, those under 18, cannot by law work in a sex bar. But many use fake documents or the birth certificate of an older cousin or sister. In one video made on Fields Avenue by ABC New York, a woman offered her 14-year-old niece, a virgin, she said, to the undercover reporters. The girls have no alternative and do not see a way out. Some cannot imagine a better life. They live abandoned and hopeless. That’s why early intervention to help the vulnerable abused child is the best form of prevention of human trafficking.

Prevention is just as important as rescue and healing of the victims. When government works with civil society, the best results are seen. A Preda Foundation human rights education team holds lectures for government officials, parents and teachers and hotel staff on the anti-trafficking and child protection law and trains them how to report and prevent human trafficking.

Behind efforts to save and help abused children is the advocacy for the equality, rights and dignity of women and children. This is at the heart of the campaign to stop sex trafficking and human degradation. We must stand up for these people and protect inalienable human rights.

shaycullen@gmail.com

‘Fallen Angels’: Sex Tourism & Philippines’ Abandoned Fatherless Kids

© RT Documentary

Angeles City in the Philippines is a well-known sex tourism destination, particularly for retired men in search of sex for sale. One frequently ignored offshoot of this is the sex workers’ children, who are subsequently abandoned, by foreign travelers.

Catholicism is the dominant religion in the country but with Angeles once home to an American air base, the city’s reputation became intertwined with the sex industry and is often branded as “Sin City.”

While the booming sex industry has been previously reported, the number of children growing up in the city without a father goes ignored.

Hundreds of young women in city find themselves with no other option than to sell their bodies for sex at various bars and nightclubs across the city. Speaking to an RT Documentary crew, a number of these women, now also mothers, say the fathers of their children will often deny that a child is theirs or just don’t care.

Often, it is the men’s lies that result in these unplanned pregnancies with women, who have sometimes been beaten or raped. One woman, Sarah, explained to RT that the father to her child, an Australian man, plied her with alcohol before she passed out. When she woke up, he told her “nothing happened.”

“I believe he took me by force,” she said. “Later, I asked him what happened. He said ‘Nothing. Nothing happened’.”

When Sarah found out she was pregnant, she told the father but he didn’t believe her.

“I told him he was my only client who didn’t use condoms,” Sarah says, but the man refuses to recognize his daughter. Even though she has a newborn, Sarah continues to prostitute herself to make ends meet and make sure there’s food on the table. Her son is left with her aunt, Nalee, who also has a daughter born of an encounter with a Scottish sex tourist.

In Nalee’s case, the man told her he had had a vasectomy. “But how did I get pregnant if he was sterile,” Nalee asks. “I didn’t know I was pregnant. A month later I did a test and it came back positive... If I’d known I was pregnant I would have taken pills.”

“I don’t care if you don’t want to help me but you have to support your daughter,” an emotional Sarah says. “I’ll keep working at the bar just to provide for my child.”

Sarah is well aware of the dangers involved in her line of work and says she is often “scared that something bad might happen” or that she’ll “get beaten up.”

“That happened to a friend of mine,” she told RT. “There’s a rumor that one of the girls was killed at the American hotel and her body hidden under the bed.”

For this reason, Sarah says she prefers “working" with older clients. “If I tell them I have to go home, they let me and at times they pay me extra, so I can buy milk for my daughter,” explained Sarah.

While the women try and do the best for their children, the kids themselves remain optimistic about their situation but do still miss their fathers. One such child is 12-year-old Jean-Lester, who hopes that one day he might meet his father.

“I’ve grown up, Dad. I hope to see you one day,” he says. “I wish you could come to my birthday.”

Jean-Lester’s father was a German tourist who left before the child was born. His mother then abandoned him when he was 2-months-old, leaving him in the care of a transgender neighbor named Pia.

“I love you very much, Pia. Please don’t abandon me,” Jean-Lester says. “Thank you for taking care of me. You raised me God won’t take her away from me, so I’ll take care of her when I grow up.”

Although their fathers may have abandoned them and they are being raised in slum like conditions, the children are surprisingly optimistic about their futures. Jean-Lester says he wants to become a teacher “and help the children who can’t go to school.”

“I’ll teach them until they finish school and help them any way I can,” the child says. He doesn’t want to stop there though. “After becoming a teacher, I want to become a doctor too,” he adds. “I want to be able to cure various diseases. That way I’ll be able to treat Pia and other sick people.”

A friend of Jean-Lester’s, Mary-Ann, is also a byproduct of the sex industry. The daughter of another German sex tourist who fled, the young girl says she has often imagined what her father looks like.

“I see him with long, pretty hair and a beard, this is what he looks like,” the 12-year-old says. “That’s what a lot of the foreign men that my mum has dated have looked like.”

Although she may be only 12-years-old, Mary-Ann is not oblivious to her history but is not keen to repeat it either.

“I don’t want to work in a bar, like my mom had to,” she says. “I don’t want to only have two years of schooling like her and end up working in a bar because I want to become a doctor when I grow up.”

Another woman told RT Documentary how her son’s father, an American man who still lives in the city, accepts he is the dad. For his part, he pays the mother 2000 pesos ($50) per month but she still struggles to provide food for family, some days having to ask her neighbors for food. According to the man’s neighbors, he has “a lot of girls that have more babies” and that each of them “gets 2000 pesos,” for which they must call to his house at a specific time and date to get the money.

At least one tourist bucked the trend when he visited the city and ended up marrying one of the prostitutes, Jen, after she fell pregnant in 2001.

“I just love her… the smile, she’s very funny and a very good face,” Patrick, an Irishman, told RT. Still living in Angeles, Patrick and Jen have three children but luck hasn’t been on their side when it comes to health. Patrick suffered a stroke in 2013 with his wife, now 34-years-old, suffering one shortly after, for which she remains bedbound and unable to talk, with Patrick caring for her.

For the men that visit Angeles in search of sex though, unplanned fatherhood hasn’t been deterrent and many don’t care about the consequences.

“You can take the girl out of the bar, but you can’t take the bar out of a girl… because they never change, they want the money,” one male tourist told RT. “It’s hard to trust a Filipino woman.”

    Angeles City, Philippines