Child Prostitution In Olongapo
Document Title: Child Prostitution In Olongapo
Document Ref No: R9203281
First Published: Reflections - Philippine Daily Inquirer
Publication Date: 28th March 1992
Author's Name: Father Shay Cullen SSC
The bases are closing down and a long history - an era, is coming to a close.
What the future will bring no one is sure. I hope that we will see the end
of Prostitution and especially child prostitution that flourished in Olongapo.
Its not ended yet but perhaps the end is in sight. I want to share with
you some of my personal experiences in the fight against child prostitution.
I first arrived in the Philippines 22 years ago I was assigned to work in
a Parish in Olongapo city. Fifty years ago Olongapo was a fishing village
on Subic Bay. In 1969 I found there a sprawling honkey-tonk tourist town
that was was hell bent on satisfying the demands of foreign tourists and
sailors from the nearby U.S. Naval Base.
The commercial sex industry was booming and left in its wake a flotsam of
human misery and exploited people. I began to work helping young people
from broken homes and those addicted to drugs.
My first encounter was with a small boy, about 11 years old who came to
confess he he was about to commit suicide and wanted a blessing and absolution.
He had been sexually abused.
I became aware of the thousands of young women drawn into prostitution and
a life of misery and the hundreds if not thousands of children roaming the
streets begging from sailors and tourists alike.
They hung on to their pants and shirt-tails, they polished their shoes,
they washed their cars, they carried their furniture and souvenirs and local
pimps ever docile to the dollar made the children gratify the tourists desires
for perverted sex.
One tourist paedophile who was in jail pending a hearing was able to pay
a pimp to bring a boy into his cell.
Even though it was going on under my eyes I did not see it. I was ignorant
about child prostitution. Nor did I know that many of the children had been
sexually abused by their handlers and pimps before being sold to tourists.
The children of poverty are made pay a high price for living on the streets.
In Olongapo in the seventies and eighties they had a very rough time at
the hands of the police then and many ended up beaten, jailed and some even
executed by death squads paid to make the streets safe for the tourists.
They still do - only last year a teenager was shot dead by police before
a crowd in Olongapo . Compassion for children is rare and if they can't
be exploited many in authority see them as pests to be eliminated or driven
away.
Child prostitution began somewhere and when the research is done I am sure
there will much evidence to show that military prostitution in Asia has
much to answer for.
In Thailand as in the Philippines during the seventies there were many large
US Military bases and for sure they played a part in the exploitation of
the people in this part of Asia and helped spawn a culture of Asian prostitution
that has grown to gigantic proportions including Child Prostitution.
The AIDS epidemic is fast reaching the children too as sailors and tourists
seek out younger and younger partners in the mistaken belief that minors
don't have AIDS. If they do, its the adults who gave it to them.
In Olongapo and in Thailand in those days the tourists were of many nationalities
buying children for sex but the military mind and heart beats at a different
rate.
Many of them came to the commercial sex centers trying to forget the horrors
that they had helped bring about in Vietnam. I am sure many were haunted
by pictures of children running down the street burning from Napalm bombs.
Even more recently in the Gulf war bomb shelters filled with civilians were
seen on television disintegrating in a ball of fire. I am still haunted
by these images myself but those who were part of it may have used children
for sex to exorcise themselves.
With children they were able to dominate and abuse without fear of retaliation,
without being held responsible for their actions and in the knowledge that
their superiors were ready to shield them from prosecution.
Perverted pleasure was the currency of the day and children were bought
and sold like cheap commodities used and then thrown away.
At first I did not see the broken and bleeding bodies nor could I feel their
absolute isolation and the pain of owning absolutely nothing in this world.
Their next scrap of food had to fall from the rich man's table if they were
lucky to be allowed to eat it.
But there was much more I had to learn about the lives of children on the
street. One day I was informed about a group of children in the Olongapo
City hospital all suffering from advanced stages of venereal disease. The
youngest was only nine, a Filipino-American child, and she and many others
were victims of a child prostitution ring.
But that story will wait for another column.