A CEBU City official acknowledged that Cebu is a hotspot for Online Sexual Abuse and Exploitation of Children (OSAEC), and more efforts should be made to monitor and curtail these practices.
Because of this, Councilor James Anthony Cuenco said the Barangay Council for the Protection of Children (BCPC), a local monitoring mechanism for trafficking operations, must be activated to serve its purpose.
In an interview with SunStar Cebu's news commentary program "Beyond the Headlines" on Monday, September 25, 2023, Cuenco said that the cases of trafficking activities mostly occur in Cebu City barangays with low-income households.
"In Barangay Suba last year, a four-year-old child was rescued after being trafficked by her own mother," said Cuenco.
According to a data from Cuenco, 41 percent of traffickers are biological parents, and 81 percent of them are women.
Cuenco said that although the city had enacted an ordinance to keep an eye on human trafficking activities and penalize those responsible, it had not yet been put into practice.
"Wa man gyud ni ma implement sa atong barangays na overlook siguro ni wa man gyud follow through," said Cuenco.
(It was never implemented in the barangays, maybe because there was no follow-up).
Lawyer Lucille Dejito, director of International Justice Mission (IJM) Cebu, said during a media forum organized by Bidlisiw Foundation on September 19 in celebration of the Cebu Press Freedom Week that human trafficking activities are family-based crimes and that key findings from recent data demonstrate that traffickers are making an effort to hide their activities.
Dejito added that a 2022 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report from the US revealed that the Philippine Government had recorded 1,277 victims of trafficking, of which 740 were victims of sex trafficking and 537 were victims of labor trafficking.
But Dejito noted that there is a problem with these statistics because there is no single source of information, especially in light of the fact that in 2022, almost 500,000 Filipino children were trafficked to produce fresh materials for unlawful acts. (RJM)