Poverty is the main cause of vulnerable semi-illiterate children. As many as 80,000 to 100,000 Filipino children are trafficked into the sex industry yearly.
The money moguls of Manhattan and elsewhere had looted their own banks and corporations, plunged millions into unemployment and dire poverty, granted themselves massive bonuses as prizes for their monumental greed and failures and apologized to no one. The inevitable bank failures, factory closures has brought about a recession that has made life all the harder for poor everywhere. It has hit the downtrodden of the Philippines and especially those surviving on the scraps that fall from the rich peoples’ tables. It seems the rich are keeping the scraps these days.
Jenny, Aniline and Merci (invented names), three young girls 14 and 15 years old living in the stifling hovels of perpetual poverty in Manila, could not bear the cries of hunger of their little brothers and sisters and went to work in a sex bar. There was nothing else, they were semi-illiterate, had no jobs, no hope, no help, no possessions to sell, just their bodies. They were sold to sex tourists every night and earned a pittance.
This is perhaps the most pernicious of evil trades and acts of depravity in the history of humankind. It is difficult to know which causes the most human suffering; the loss of life through the illegal arms trade, drug trafficking or the trafficking and enslavement of millions of people around the world? We are still in an age of slavery, although we might incorrectly think that it ended long ago.
Outsourcing, globalization and the current global recession make the trafficking of human beings and exploitation and cheap labor more widespread—the use of child-workers is now more prevalent than it has ever been. The worst kind is, of course, the use of children as sex workers with most of the customers coming from rich tourist-sending countries in Europe and North America. An estimated 1.2 million single male tourists arrive in the Philippines annually, a large percentage of them are sex tourists.
While this is the Philippine experience, there are important lessons for any country that opens its doors to tourists, is tolerant of the sex Mafia, allows its moral codes to be violated with impunity and the dignity of its people and the nation to be tarnished by the exploitation of its people for the gratification and profit of others.
One million children are brought into the sex trade every year worldwide according to the United Nations Children Fund (Unicef). The International Labor Organization (ILO) states the figure as closer to 1.8 million. This means it is growing annually. Other sources say a global estimate of eight million is more realistic and, of this, 80 percent to 90 percent are girls. They are victims of criminal activity, recruited and paid for in remote impoverished villages. They are usually run-away street children or victims of sexual or physical abuse in the home and are picked up on the city streets by pimps and traffickers and sold to sex bars and clubs.
Poverty is the main cause of vulnerable semi-illiterate children. As many as 80,000 to 100,000 Filipino children are trafficked into the sex industry yearly. There are 34 million children in all in a population of about 87 million. Out of every 100 children, 42 are impoverished, that is 14 million hungry uneducated children and easily exploited like the three girls.
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