Annie, Angel of Innocence

There is an estimated 100,000 children prostituted in the Philippines today according to the latest UNICEF survey. There are a million prostituted children worldwide. It is a highly organized trade in children that leaves them damaged and broken as human beings and often infested with venereal diseases or even HIV that causes AIDS. They are innocent children frequently abducted or lured into the prostitution business by false promises of working as a domestic helpers then abused and enslaved in brothels. 

Twenty–three years ago, I set up an organization for children’s rights in Olongapo City, known as P.R.E.D.A.  (People’s Recovery, Empowerment and Development Assistance Foundation). This organization is staffed by twenty dedicated Filipino professional social workers and educational staff. They rescue abused children and provide safe therapeutic family for their recovery. There is protection and legal assistance for the victims and extensive prevention programs to alleviate poverty and strengthen public opinion in protecting children from every form of abuse. Today there are numerous foreign and local pedophiles and abusers in prison in the Philippines as a result of legal action by PREDA and support for the victims.  A few years ago, we helped Filipino children testify in Germany against a German pedophile that abused them and escaped. We pursued him and he was convicted. Hundreds of children have been helped and have recovered with professional help provided by Preda.

Annie was enslaved in the brothel and we had to mount an undercover operation to free her from the brothel and bring her to safety. Our escape vehicle was chased through the city but we eluded the Mafia gangsters who pursued us.

Annie has fully recovered from her ordeal and is going to school and is an active child advocate helping the Preda education team help other children avoid a similar fate.  

The well-heeled sex tourists pay the highest prices for child prostitutes and encourage and promote the evil trade. Some wrongly believe that they will be safe from contracting the HIV virus that causes AIDS. Others are tourists of opportunity; they do it because they can do it without fear of retribution. Others are addicted pedophiles who flee the strict law enforcement in their home countries. 

They are coming to poor countries in their droves from the developed nations such as Europe, Australia, North America and Japan.  They have invested in bars and brothels and invite their fellow countrymen to come and abuse the children and young women. Police corruption and political connivance allows it to spread with little restraint. The sex- tourists become addicted to this perversion and endanger many children when they return to their home countries. There is little chance that they will leave their habit at the airport.  

The arrests and convictions over the years have earned us the ire of the pedophiles and their supporters and they have retaliated with threats, law suits, false arrests and physical attacks against us.  The corruption has tainted the police and even local politicians.

One day, a the henchmen of a local politician that is protecting the sex trade ganged up on me and a visiting journalist on the streets of Olongapo and beat me to the head. I escaped without serious injury.   

Last November 2001, a local official we charged in Olongapo City was found guilty and sentenced to four years in prison for the psychological and physical abuse of children.  This conviction and others like it sends a powerful message to all that would abuse the innocent.    Jesus said, “ For anyone to abuse one of these little ones it would be better that a large millstone be tied around the neck of that person and he be drowned in the deep sea”. Matthew 18, 6. (Mark 9.42-48, Luke 17.1-2).

A few months ago, we were able to find missing children and rescue them on the street from a pimp who offered them for sexual abuse. He was arrested and charged. This rescue was recorded for the forthcoming television program Taking A Stand on RTE 2 in the “True Lives” series, to be broadcast towards the end of February.   

Prevention.

Poverty is one of the main reasons why children like Annie are so vulnerable to the pimps and the slave traders of children. The unfair trade and exploitation of the poor that travels in the wake of globalization like a poison cloud has made the gap between the rich and poor even greater. Fair Trade is in preventing many more children like Annie from being lured away from their impoverished rural villages and enslaved in the brothels.

PREDA helps thousands of mango farmers by giving them interest-free loans, technical advice, and much better price for their delicious fruits. This has broken the power of the cartel and the cycle of poverty and exploitation.  

As a result, children like Annie will do not fall victim to pimps. They are secure with their family and are going to school. The delicious mango fruits are processed and dried by PREDA and are sold in many shops in the UK and Ireland and throughout Europe in the World Shops. Dunnes Stores now carries the PREDA Exotic Dried Mango. So get some and have a taste of Fair Trade that helps children like Annie stay an innocent Child of God. 

  End 

Fr. Shay Cullen is a member of the Missionary Society of St. Columban. He was recently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and received human rights awards in Germany and Italy in recent years for his work protecting children in the Philippines since 1969.

As a writer and journalist, social commentator and an outspoken convention speaker, he upholds Christian values and works for social justice and children’s and women’s rights. He is the founder and president of the PREDA Foundation, an organization working to empower the poor through Fair T