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Sunday, March 12, 2006
Perez: Understanding trafficking
By Joy G. Perez
Sensitivity
THERE is growing concern about violence and abuse against women in different local communities lately. Every police unit in the municipality in the Philippines has women's desk or section, with a woman police officer as in-charge. This section usually tackles cases on victims of women against violence and cases of child abuse.
Women's advocates claimed that growing concerns about violence against women worldwide has put trafficking on the international agenda and its connection with the sex industry.
Impact, a magazine of the Family Health International published in Virginia, USA, noted that estimates of the number of people trafficked each year vary from tens of thousands to millions. However, it stressed that this wide range is hardly surprising given the inherent difficulty of trafficking a criminal and clandestine activity. But it is also a result of different definitions of trafficking.
Tony Bennet, a member of the team that assessed trafficking of women in six countries (Nepal, India, Bangla Desh, Philippines, Cambodia, and Thailand), said that the word trafficking is most often used to describe kidnapping and enslavement of workers-usually women and girls in the commercial sex industry.
Bennet, however, said that some government and international agencies have adopted a much broader definition of the term.
Bennet cited the President's Inter-Agency Council on Women that defines trafficking as: "All acts involved in the recruitment, transport, harboring, or sale of persons within national or across international borders through deception or fraud, coercion or force, or debt bondage for purpose of placing persons in situations of forced labor or services, such as forced prostitution or sexual services, domestic servitude, or other forms of slavery-like practices."
Bennet explained that the definition is deliberately broad, addressing working conditions as well as how a person is recruited.
"This is because not everyone is abducted or enticed away with false promises of good jobs. Others go willingly seeing the trafficker's offer as the best option for themselves or their families, but later regret the decision when they find themselves trapped by debt and fear in abusive conditions," he said.
Of the six Asian countries assessed, Bennet said, Thailand is more open than many countries about the extent and nature of its role in human trafficking. It is generally recognized that Thailand is both a sending and receiving country of women and children who are trafficked.
In Thailand, a number of teenage girls from a Thai hill tribe, liberated from brothels, work on sewing at the New Life Center in Chiang Mai.
Recently in Dumaguete City in central Philippines, Vice Mayor William Ablong said the city government has already enacted an anti-decency ordinance which covers all cases of immoral acts involving women and children. One provision of the ordinance bans the recruitment and hiring of minors for night clubs.
Two years ago, "sex scandals" on video tapes proliferated in key cities in the Philippines victimizing women and some college students. These reached the Internet. Very unfortunate for women! This has become part of the commercial sex industry.
I believe that education is the primary prevention strategy for this growing problem of human trafficking. In local, national, and global communities, people must be vigilant.
Bennet recommended the need to educate families about "evil agents" and procurers who snare vulnerable girls for brothel services.
(March 12, 2006 issue)
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