Last Thursday, our guest speaker at the Rotary Club of Cebu (Mother) was Mrs. Gina Disarno-Luage (she speaks fluent Cebuano) of the CURE Foundation, an NGO helping out children who are victims of human trafficking. This worldwide scourge used to be called slavery, which has somehow been repackaged into what is now called “modern-day slavery.” There is no question that the Philippines has greatly benefited from the crusade led by the US State Department (in Cebu, it is the spearheaded by International Justice Mission) and now joined by CNN’s Freedom Project in order to highlight this worldwide problem and needs to be stopped.
Call it coincidence that yesterday the local news in Cebu featured a 30-year-old woman who went with her boyfriend to Bohol and abandoned her 4-year old son in the pier 3, where police found him playing in a garbage heap. The boy has since been turned over to the Mandaue City Social Welfare Services and charges for violation against Republic Act no. 7610 or the Special Protection of Children Against Abuse, Exploitation and Discrimination Act have been filed against the irresponsible mother.
The real reason why this problem exists in this country is due to our poverty. The biggest obstacle that the International Justice Mission (IJM) faces is from parents, especially mothers who lost their morality a long time ago and even teach their little girls that sex will bring them food on the table. This opens many of them to sex with foreigners because I still have not encountered a Filipino pedophile.
Surely you must have seen an old white male Caucasian tugging alone one or two young girls inside the shopping mall who have no real blood relations with them. Their only connection is the wallet in his back pocket. It is disgusting. But what is more distressing is that the ordinary Filipino doesn’t seem to care to do something about this type of criminality.
The problems that the NGO was having were thoroughly discussed in our Rotary meeting. It was then that US Honorary Consul John Domingo told the group that there are many sex offenders in the US who have already served their time… hence they come to the Philippines lured by our tourism slogan “It’s more fun in the Philippines.” What was quite disturbing is that the United States cannot stop these freed sex offenders from taking a flight from American shores to the Philippines.
So you can say that we need to “plug” the loopholes in this fight against human trafficking. It is up to the US State Department or the US Department of Homeland Security to inform perhaps its partners the IJM that this or that sex offender who has done his time in the US is flying to the Philippines. No doubt they come to our shores as tourists. But you know what their real agenda is… to take advantage of our poor people and grab their little girls to satisfy their insatiable evil desires.
One way of solving this problem was the signing by Pres. Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III of the Foster Care Act of 2012. In a world where many couples use contraceptives without realizing that some of its side effects destroy their child bearing capabilities, by the time they want to have children, chances are their reproductive organs have already failed to function.
Hence one very acceptable alternative is to adopt children, and the Foster Care Act aims to systematize foster care in the country. Adoption has always been a worldwide practice… but at least, thanks to P-Noy, he has signed a law that would ensure a bright future for abandoned children. Before this law, they would have fallen prey to pedophiles.
But signing the Foster Care Act… still doesn’t solve the problem of prostitution that still exists in our country today. I have written so many times in the past that the Philippine National Police (PNP) do not even need intelligence funds to find out where these brothels operate. All one needs to do is to call a taxicab and tell the driver to bring you to the nearest prostitution den and he’d bring you there in a jiffy! If you’re in a hotel, ask the roomboy where you can get girls… and chances are he can find one for you.
So while P-Noy signed the Foster Care Act of 2012, he must order the PNP for an all-out war against human ficking and destroy the corruption within the PNP, many of whom are the “protectors” of these brothels where young girls are kept in prostitution dens. Today, the Philippines are still in the “Tier 2” status in the US State Department’s annual assessment of the Global Trafficking In Persons (GTIP) report.
On a positive note, the budget for the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking (IACAT) has been increased to US$ 1.5 million from last year’s US$230,000. This of great help to ensure that those persons who come to our shores to exploit the poverty of our people should be sent behind bars.
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For e-mail responses to this article, write to vsbobita@mo-pzcom.com or vsbobita@gmail.com. His columns can be accessed through www.philstar.com.