PPA to curb trafficking of women, children

The Philippine Ports Authority (PPA) through its Gender and Development (GAD) program has intensified efforts to ensure that the country’s major ports are not used as staging points for the illegal trafficking of women and children.

Visayan Forum Foundation, a non-government organization and partner of the PPA in the GAD program, said around 60 percent or 2.5 million girls and women of the estimated four million, ferry passengers a year, pass through the Manila North Harbor from the different provinces around the country.

"Some of them are victims of traffickers who lure young girls and women into prostitution and other worst forms of child labor by promising facilitation into domestic work, factory work and other decent work situation," Visayan Forum president Cecilia Flores-Oebanda said.

"Most of the victims travel without any information about their destination, work, and employer," she noted. Such cases triggered the need for "interception" of these victims of trafficking at the ports and provide them temporary shelter and counseling at the NGO’s halfway houses.

She said newly-passed Republic Act 9208, or the Anti-Trafficking of Persons Act, confirmed the mandate of the NGO and port authorities to help eliminate human trafficking.

Oebanda rebuffed a news report that claimed Muslim young girls were arrested by PPA port police despite the absence of any violation.

"The halfway house is not a detention center. The intercepted women and children at the ports are not arrested but are given temporary shelter while it is being determined if they are indeed victims of trafficking," she stressed.

On the specific case of eight Muslim young girls referred by the PPA port police to the NGO last Sept. 5, Oebanda said that they only stayed at the halfway house overnight and were turned over the following day to the manpower agency that brought them to Manila. "We are not against migration for work but we are against trafficking for exploitation. And the consent of the trafficked person or the victim here is irrelevant," she pointed out.

She also said that Visayan Forum has always been sensitive about the needs of the people under their care. "As a policy, we give all of them our utmost care and attention while at our centers. We do not discriminate them against religion, ethnicity, or gender."

The halfway house at the North Harbor called the "Bahay Silungan sa Daungan" had so far assisted 1,160 women and children, and 118 of them were Muslims who were turned over not only by the PPA police but also by other port partners.

The pioneering program which started in August 2000 was given global recognition during the recent International Labor Organization Conference in Geneva, Switzerland.