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Wednesday, June 22, 2005
Oledan: Mazes
By Radzini Oledan
Spice of Life
FROM rural to urban areas, women and girls are almost always attracted by the prospect of a well-paid job as a domestic servant, waitress or factory worker.
Traffickers recruit victims through fake advertisements, mail-order bride catalogues and casual acquaintances. They devise several schemes and they go undetected.
It is a confluence of families badly wanting to improve their lot in life; of children, mostly female, who are too willing to sacrifice for the welfare of their loved ones by working elsewhere and of society ill-equipped to handle the situation.
Mindanao has become one of the trafficking hotspots because of armed conflict. Children are trafficked to major cities and neighboring countries, particularly Malaysia. Technological advances such as the Internet that has facilitated child pornography, and sex tourism targeting children, all add to their vulnerability.
Trafficking victims are promised jobs such as domestic helpers or entertainers. Unware of the dangers ahead, children often have their own aspirations of wanting to see the big cities, helping their siblings and family, acquiring material gains, going to Japan for instance as "entertainers", and improving their physical appearance.
An estimated 60,000 to 100,000 children in the Philippines are involved in prostitution rings. High incidence of child prostitution in tourist areas was also noted.
Too often, upon arrival at their destination, these young victims are placed in conditions controlled by traffickers while they are exploited to earn illicit revenues.
Many are physically confined, their travel or identity documents are taken away and they or their families are threatened if they do not cooperate.
Women and girls forced to work as prostitutes are blackmailed by the threat that traffickers will tell their families.
Trafficked children are dependent on their traffickers for food, shelter and other basic necessities.
The lack of systematic research means that reliable data on the trafficking of human beings that would allow comparative analyses and the design of countermeasures is scarce. The weak criminal justice response to trafficking through legislative reform, awareness-raising and training, as well as through national and international cooperation.
The support and protection of victims who give evidence is key to prosecuting the ringleaders behind the phenomenon.
Trafficking in persons is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.
Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs;
Trafficking is a violation of fundamental rights. It is a lucrative criminal activity, which is highly linked to corruption considering it is hidden and hard to address and therefore, rely on the "networks" within agencies.
In addition, children who have been trafficked face a range of dangers, including violence and sexual abuse. Trafficked children are even arrested and detained as illegal aliens.
Poverty, low economic development in communities of origin, gender inequalities, limited employment opportunities, existence of and access to public infrastructure such as roads, schools and health centers and inadequate community awareness all add up to the perpetuation of trafficking.
There are policies such as the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act, which was enacted on 2003 that is charting the national course to combat trafficking. However, more than the policy is the need to strengthen data collection and monitoring systems to better track and document this largely under-reported phenomenon.
There are mazes of abuse and sexual exploitation but it is only through sensitizing parents and communities to change values, attitudes, practices and behavior that can put an end to child abuse and exploitation. We cannot afford to fail.
For Bisaya stories from Davao. Click here. (June 22, 2005 issue)
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