The Philippines Is Unprepared to Meet the Challenge of Child Sex Trafficking Online

Tacloban, Philippines — It didn’t run in the family, as the story often goes with some of the poorest households in the Philippines; rather, Angela,* who was 13 at the time, was trafficked by her friend Jessica.*

She was in the eighth grade, at a public school in the City of Tacloban, the largest city in the Eastern Visayas and the capital of the Leyte province, in the Philippines’ eastern archipelago. Jessica had texted her saying that a local man was willing to pay girls for sex — a quick solution to buying a new cellphone, Angela thought. Other friends had done the same.

In hindsight, however, the 14-year-old admits that these friends were “a bad influence.”

“Because of them, I learned how to run away from home,” she said.

Angela was one of the minors rescued in a sting operation in September 2021, led by the Tacloban City police. She and the other children were then brought to the Women and Children’s Shelter of Tacloban City for rehabilitation. Some have been reunited with their families since, said Carmela Bastes, head of the shelter. Others, like Angela, remain.

Child sex trafficking has been a concern for the city government and law enforcement since 2009, and Bastes has been a caseworker in this space for just as long. The trade thrives in Tacloban, she said, because it’s a highly urbanized city, where traffickers can operate in the shadows of the hustle and bustle.

Child victims are coerced or forced into the trade mostly for economic reasons, such as affording school tuition fees. In many cases, their parents have been rendered jobless due to the Covid-19 pandemic or current inflation, which has greatly impacted the prices of basic commodities.

Many Taclobanons still haven’t fully recovered from the devastation of Super Typhoon Yolanda in November 2013. It remains the worst natural disaster that has hit the country in decades, killing over 6,000 people and wiping out millions of houses and establishments.

Lieutenant Rhoda Araos, chief of the Tacloban Police’s investigation and detective management unit — whose former unit, the Tacloban Women and Children Protection Desk (TWCPD), took part in the sting — says that climate-related destitution could be a contributing factor in the growing cases of child sex trafficking in the city. “Especially for those living in the coastal areas, who were not able to go back to their homes and to their previous livelihoods,” she said. “They’re very vulnerable to opportunistic people.”

Peer influence

Recorded cases of child sex trafficking are very few — but that doesn’t mean they’re not happening, sources say. “The most difficult to deal with now is online sexual exploitation, which is often contained within the family as a business,” said Bastes. She’s seen cases of parents facilitating clients for their child because the money is easy and provides a source of income to cover the family’s needs.

“When they exploit their own children, those are the ones that go unreported,” said Bastes. “But when they get children outside the family, that’s when the information gets out.”

That’s how they’ve been finding cases of children being trafficked by other trafficked children, like Angela and Jessica. Peer-to-peer recruitment is conducted through Facebook Messenger these days, said Lieutenant Araos, with friends recruiting friends without knowing the actual nature of the transaction — or its consequences.

Jessica’s case was an example of both.

“She is a 15-year-old girl trafficked by her sister-in-law,” Bastes said. “She came from a broken family and was pimped out when she was only about nine or 10 years old.”

Jessica was in the shelter for five months before she was discharged in August this year. A month later, she was trafficked again and arrested during another police operation.

“Now, she’s a perpetrator herself, charged by the police as a child in conflict with the law,” said Bastes.

Under Philippine law, a child in Jessica’s circumstance “enjoys presumption of minority and all the rights of a child,” which exempts them from criminal liability but still subjects them to a government-imposed intervention program. Now she’s a ward of the state, under the custody of the city’s social welfare department.

Campaigns and challenges

In August of this year, Tacloban City mayor Alfred Romualdez declared Tacloban City an Anti-Human Trafficking City and mandated all local government units to develop and implement programs that would prevent, monitor, and document all instances and forms of human trafficking — including sex and labor trafficking — as well as provide support to the victims.

Lieutenant Araos, meanwhile, said that barangay (neighborhood) immersion has been the most effective strategy with the biggest impact. Before, they gave out leaflets containing information on how to identify and avoid red flags of sex trafficking, but now they visit the barangays and hold community dialogues.

But they don’t yet have a solve for addressing the problem online, which is where most of the trade happens now.

“Perpetrators now are tech savvy,” said the lieutenant, whose department is woefully ill-equipped to handle cybercrimes. “We just depend on the regional anti-cybercrime unit to help us.”

Law enforcement nationwide likewise lack the appropriate resources to attend to an “overwhelming number of reports,” said Senator Risa Hontiveros. She authored and sponsored the Anti-Online Sexual Abuse and Exploitation of Children (Anti-OSAEC) bill, which became law in August. It aims to protect children against online sexual exploitation and punish those who produce, access, and share any form of exploitative materials of children.

“The [National Bureau of Investigation]’s Anti-Cybercrime Unit has very few regional offices, making it more difficult to keep pace with the rapid crimes committed in digital spaces,” she said.

Irwin Maraya, a regional prosecutor for the Department of Justice (DOJ), the country’s lead agency in the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking, said that many families who lost their previous livelihoods due to the pandemic were desperate to find income as they sheltered in place, and even poor families have access to the Internet, as well as their own devices, to connect them to online marketplaces via social media; the country has nearly 84 million Facebook users as of early this year.

“The proliferation of the trade is becoming easier and more rampant,” he said. His office’s intel mostly comes from nonprofit organizations like the International Justice Mission (IJM), as well as foreign agencies in cases where clients come from abroad. “We then locate these local areas involved and conduct operations,” he said. “But you know, with this kind of trade, the perpetrators are also adapting. So, it’s really a big challenge.”

He added that perpetrators learn from the mistakes of other perpetrators, so they try to avoid how others were caught and change their strategy. “It’s like comparing notes,” the prosecutor said.

On the other end, aftercare for survivors is equally lacking, said Lietenant Araos. “What’s being given to them is a temporary solution, so these victims are tempted to go back to their old ways.”

Social workers, like Bastes, often must rely on other, larger organizations, like Plan International and IJM, for funding, training, and consultation.

Simply put, there aren’t enough resources to go around to address the issue at either end. And, perhaps most importantly, the root cause remains unattended: “Intervention should really be about improving their living conditions, which means opportunity to get better jobs, livelihood for their families,” said Maraya.

Without the financial stability to recover from such crises as the global pandemic or devastating natural disaster, poor families will continue to be forced to exploit their own children — and the children, each other — in order to survive.

Report child sex trafficking and online sexual exploitation through these local and international hotlines: https://osec.ijm.org/report-abuse/

*Names have been changed to protect the children’s identities.