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Monday, February 06, 2006
Editorial: Sex in the line of duty
BY THE rules of English grammar, “under the rug” is not synonymous to “undercover.”
However, if you consider as context the police’s standard operating procedure (SOP) of entrapping commercial workers through actual sex, “undercover” has as much sleaze and concealment implied in it as the idiomatic expression, “sweep dirt under the rug.”
Dirty acts
Lawyer Gloria Dalawampu has criticized the police strategy of engaging in “undercover sex” as exploitative and demeaning to the workers. She also said that the police, buying sex in the line of duty, were violating Republic Act 9208, or the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act, which penalizes any person buying or engaging the services of trafficked persons for prostitution.
Supt. Pablo Labra II, chief of the Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Bureau, agreed with the lawyer’s view that paying the bar fine is already proof of trafficking. However, he defended the SOP as important for “case build-up.”
He also argued that no court has yet ruled the strategy as illegal.
Labra cited that the law requires the authorities to have “personal knowledge” of the “habitual practice” to make the charge of prostitution stick.
While there may be some basis for considering prostitution as the oldest profession, it surely is not required that law and enforcement also fall behind the times.
Archaic
In light of evidence of insensitivity and inappropriateness, few SOPs are immutable.
Social welfare workers have modified the procedure that once required a victim to submit to a series of interrogations by different authorities interested to establish that rape has been committed.
The multi-disciplinary team system now interviews the victim only once to avoid worsening trauma caused when a victim is forced to relive the ordeal of abuse.
The press has also stopped its practice of running lurid photos of police decoys caught in compromising situations with sex workers. In the ’80s, local tabloids regularly ran these photographs taken during raids of sex dens and prostitution fronts.
The poses always featured a nude female worker, her eyes covered with a black strip. Only the male companion’s back was captured by the camera. The publication of such photos was denounced by students and advocates of human rights.
Questionable
The authorities’ argument that the SOP of undercover sex is essential for proving prostitution raises questions about its limited application.
When the police talk of going after prostitutes, is it the SOP to concentrate only on bars and other commercial establishments suspected of being prostitution fronts?
Is the SOP of undercover sex also used to net streetwalkers, the so-called unregistered prostitutes or freelancers, which nongovernment workers estimate as equal to the country’s manufacturing sector?
Is the SOP also used to flush out child prostitutes, both female and male, estimated to number 40,000-60,000 in 1997? What about male prostitutes? Or transvestite streetwalkers?
Or do the police reserve the SOP of undercover sex only for entrapping female prostitutes?
How do the authorities deal with accusations that arrested bar entertainers are also raped by their arresting officers as a trade-off for their release?
How effective is the SOP in going after sex rings or syndicates? Sex tour operators?
Is the SOP also resorted to in going after prostitutes in the countryside, which, according to non-government organizations led by the Women’s Education, Development, Productivity and Research Organization, involve local women and migrants from other provinces?
How about the “white-collar” prostitution involving underage and teenage workers soliciting in malls?
Is the SOP useful in going after online prostitutes?
Reserving the most important question for the last: why does the SOP of undercover sex only target the female worker but not the owners of the prostitution establishments, recruiters, pimps, traffickers, and the male clients?
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (February 6, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
Join the Sun.Star message board.Click here.
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