Kin, friends send Filipino children into prostitution - study

November 11, 2004

Family and close friends sometimes help to recruit children for prostitution in the Philippines, according to preliminary findings of a rare study on the crime released here Wednesday. The study by the non-government advocacy group End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography And Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT) also found that many of these recruiters think they are helping the children.

The report, which covers 74 former and active child prostitutes from across the country, is one of the few in recent years into child prostitution in the Philippines, where estimates of the number of child prostitutes are vague.

ECPAT estimated in the 1990s that there were about 60,000 child prostitutes here. Officials have been quoted as putting the number at about 40,000 although some activists have put it as high as 100,000.

The study, to be released in full later this year, found that recruiters of children for prostitution could be "immediate family members [or] people known to family and friends," group coordinator Anjanette Saguisag said at a forum on child sex trafficking Wednesday.

Other recruiters were owners of nightclubs and outsiders who promised the children's families they would find them jobs, she said.

Saguisag said recruiters could get a commission of between 500 pesos and 4,000 pesos (around nine and 70 dollars) per child.

The recruiters have "indications of guilt but they often justify it by saying they are helping the family [and] helping alleviate poverty in the community," said Saguisag.

There is also a "perceived obligation of children to support the family," that leads many children to be recruited.

Most recruiters initially told the children they would be getting jobs as domestic helpers, factory workers or entertainers. But they later pressured the children into prostitution, sometimes forcing them to take drugs and often denying them adequate food, sleep and leisure time.

The children, overwhelmingly female, often come from dysfunctional, poverty-stricken, rural families with some having been abused by parents or siblings in the past, the study found.

The study found cases of Filipino children being trafficked as far as Malaysia and Japan, Saguisag said, although her group did not have figures on how widespread the problem was.

The report found that most frequent foreign users of child prostitutes were Japanese, Chinese, South Koreans, and Americans, Saguisag said, although many girls considered all Caucasians to be Americans.

Senior Superintendent Yolanda Tanigue, head of a special police unit for children, said the fight against child prostitution was hampered by reluctance of victims to testify and the inexperience of prosecutors, which often led to cases being dismissed.

Donald Craill, leader of an Australian police team working against sex trafficking, said at the forum that six Australians had been convicted for sex tourism involving children in the Philippines.

This was the highest number of Australians convicted on such charges among all Asia-Pacific countries, he said.

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