Editorial: Trafficked

THE release of the results of a study on spending habits of OFWs last week at the Ateneo de Davao University held several insights into the life of an OFW... and the traps that snoop along their path to a life of abuse and servitude.

Attended by members of the academe, government agencies, and several OFWs and their kin, a woman in her 20s or early 30s stood up to relate her harrowing experience in escaping from Lebanon where she worked as a domestic helper from 2005 to 2007.

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She said she went through an employment agency that was registered with the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency (POEA). She checked on that, she says.

But Zenobia Caro of the POEA here said she was most likely a victim of trafficking since there was a deployment ban of workers to Lebanon since 2005. It's not enough to check on whether a recruitment agency has a government license and is registered with the POEA, she says. The applicant must also make sure that the agency is permitted to recruit for that particular work in that particular country.

The big question mark in thought balloons on every OFW participant was almost perceptible among all those in the room. After all, government announcements and warnings always only say, check if the agency is registered with the POEA. A communication gap that is among the traps any OFW can fall in was gaping inside that room on that day.

In the 2009 Human Rights Reports by the US State Department released just last Thursday, trafficking in persons is noted as one of the flagrant causes of human rights violations in the country -- aside from extra-judicial killings, arbitrary detention, killing of journalists, and forced disappearances, among many others.

The report acknowledged that trafficking in person is prohibited under the law, complete with penalties that can go up to life imprisonment.

"Nonetheless, trafficking remained a serious problem," the report says.

Describing Philippines as "a source, transit point, and destination for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of sexual exploitation and forced labor" it noted the servitude forced on migrant workers in the Middle East, North America, and other parts of Asia.

"Women were trafficked abroad for commercial sexual exploitation, primarily to Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and countries in the Middle East and Western Europe.

Women and children were also trafficked within the country, primarily from rural areas to urban areas for forced labor as domestic workers and factory workers and for sexual exploitation. A smaller number of women were occasionally trafficked from China, South Korea, Japan, and Russia to the country for sexual exploitation. Child sex tourism continued to be a serious problem, with sex tourists coming from Northeast Asia, Europe, and North America to engage in sexual activity with minors," the report enumerated.

The laws are there to protect migrant workers and trafficked persons but government action speaks otherwise, and a tip of the whole problem is revealed in one paragraph further on in the report: "The government rarely deported or charged victims of trafficking with crimes; however, police sometimes charged women in prostitution with vagrancy. There were no reliable statistics indicating whether these individuals were trafficking victims."

With no apparent effort to penalize the violators, with misdirected police actions, and yes, seeming no concern to check where prostituted women and children are coming from and to document their cases, even the stiffest of all laws can never stop trafficking. Because in this short paragraph we can extrapolate one glaring fact: the absence in official dockets of trafficked women and children. Without data, without tracking measures and database, these women and children do not officially exist. So how can government solve a problem of people who do not exist? There lies the biggest problem.