SHATTERED CHILDHOODS

On a trip to the Philippines, Martina Stritesky witnesses the rescue of children trapped in the sex trade

Last July, I visited the Philippines. I wasn’t there to get a taste of the culture or sunbathe with friends on one of the many white, sandy beaches. I was there with a small group of Canadian volunteers to work on a documentary about how children — as young as four — are rescued from the global sex trade.

It was Cheryl Perera, the 21-year-old founder of OneChild, who organized the trip. We had met only a couple months prior, when I worked on a short film for the 2006 FLARE Volunteer Awards (I’m the marketing coordinator at FLARE), which showcased that year’s outstanding Canadian women volunteers. Cheryl was one of six FLARE Volunteer Award recipients last year. Her work and her organization, which she’s been devoted to since her teens, are dedicated to eliminating the commercial sexual exploitation of children abroad. Cheryl’s passion for her cause, and the stories she shared during the awards ceremony, earned her a standing ovation.

I was among those who were moved by what they had heard. And I was eager to get involved. So when Cheryl mentioned she was going to the Philippines, I volunteered to help out.

It wasn’t the first trip Cheryl had made to the East. After being involved with other child-focused volunteer agencies during high school, Cheryl started OneChild when she was 19. While other organizations aim to protect children around the world from abuse and neglect in general, none focus solely on the problem of the sex trade — based human trafficking that traps countless children around the globe. Cheryl’s OneChild is the first of its kind: youth-run, dedicated to rescuing children and aimed at raising awareness about this particular sector of the global sex trade. From the beginning, she approached her cause with courage: in 2002, with the help of the authorities in Sri Lanka, Cheryl (who was 17 at the time) posed as a child prostitute. The sting operation was instrumental in helping to capture a 40-year-old pedophile.

While our trip to the Philippines wasn’t going to call for that sort of bravery, I didn’t realize how much it would change my own view of the world forever.

Cheryl’s attention had turned to the Philippines in recent years due to reports that ranked the country fourth in the world for child prostitution. While the global sex trade is not tracked in a way that delivers reliable statistics, estimates say there are more than one million child sex workers throughout Asia alone. And within the Philippines, it’s estimated that 75,000—100,000 children are trapped in the sex industry with no hope of escape.

I was warned that the towns we would visit are notoriously ravaged by violent crime, terrorism, police corruption and crippling poverty. The Philippines is often described as the kidnapping capital of the world—with many victims being tourists. Add to that our mandate for the documentary and it was guaranteed we weren’t going to see the best side of the country. With my blond hair and blue eyes, too, I knew I’d stand out. But despite all that, I never considered dropping out. Perhaps that’s because, having lived in Canada all my life, I couldn’t relate to the danger. One step into Manila’s Niñoy Aquino International Airport changed all that.

When we touched down July 3, rifle-armed security personnel were everywhere in the airport, not to mention the numerous full-scale security checkpoints. The risk of bombs and terrorist activity was very real. It felt like chaos, and I felt very far from home.

We found our van and driver and began the four-hour journey along ragged, unpaved roads to Olongapo City — a hot spot for the sex trade in the Philippines and the city where we would stay and conduct interviews and film for the next couple of weeks.

Olongapo is where, since 1974, thousands of people — children and their families—have been helped by the work done by Fr. Shay Cullen. He and his organization, PREDA (People’s Recovery, Empowerment and Development Assistance Foundation, Inc.), were to be at the centre of our documentary. It’s with the help of Fr. Shay and those who work for PREDA (including doctors, therapists and social workers) that Filipino children — mainly young girls — can begin healing and move on to some sort of normal life.

When we rolled into Olongapo around midnight, it was as bleak as you’d expect a hub of the international sex trade to be. Glowing neon lights flickered over the city’s clubs and bars. The streets were dirty and people milled about. There was nothing for a tourist to see or do in this poverty-stricken destination unless, of course, you were looking for sex.

We didn’t stay in the city proper but drove up a hill to the headquarters of PREDA, where Fr. Shay greeted us. The priest — twice-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work at PREDA — is a lanky, fit 64-year-old and, as I would come to learn, has unlimited energy when it comes to rescuing and protecting these Filipino children. It appeared he never slept. When he wasn’t actively involved in rescuing kids (at the behest of teachers or parents who feared for the children’s well-being), he was attending to the needs of the kids at the centre, securing financing or making solid plans to get the next shelter up and running.

The next week, we ventured beyond PREDA to see another hub of the sex trade: Angeles City, about two hours north of Olongapo. It was grim and rainy as we walked along Fields Avenue, a narrow, dirty and overcrowded street in the entertainment district, which was lined with seedy sex clubs and bars. Neon signs blinked everywhere, inviting tourists to come in and see the shows — shows that feature girls as young as seven dancing onstage in skimpy bikinis. It was early afternoon but loud dance music streamed out of the clubs, which were already packed with Caucasian male tourists and Asian men. On the street, vendors sold balm’ (fertilized duck eggs) in steaming buckets or tended to woks filled with sweet-smelling barbecued pork and chicken.

As female foreigners, we stuck out as we walked along the avenue. There was one group that reacted to my appearance more than the others, though: the Caucasian male foreigners who hung out in the sex clubs. They were the kind of men you might see on a Toronto subway or strolling through Paris: average, well-groomed, neatly dressed. The difference was these Caucasian men were buying children’s freedom.

For every Asian man, I saw about 20 male foreigners — many of whom held young Filipinas on their laps. It’s possible they had loving families—even children of their own—back at home, but they didn’t seem to have a problem with seeing Filipino children as commodities. And not one of them would meet my gaze. My presence on that street, in fact, had a domino effect: every one of those men I saw turned away from me as I walked by.

I came away wishing their shame was the enduring type—enough to keep them from returning to that region, or any other, to prey upon young girls like Mary Ann. She had, with the help of Fr. Shay, escaped the sex trade by the time we had met her, but she’d been recruited into prostitution at age 13. Mary Ann served as our guide that day in Angeles City, holding up a tiny flowered umbrella to shield us from the rain. She walked us through the streets, pointing out where she had worked and where she last saw many other little girls who were employed. She doesn’t know what has become of many of them.

Today, at 17, Mary Ann is fresh-faced and beautiful and could still easily pass for years younger. The “legal” age for women to work in sex clubs is 18, and I wondered how anyone could have believed that was Mary Ann’s age; she was 13 when she arrived, looking to be a cocktail waitress, hoping to earn money to help her family survive. She tells me that, after she was hired by the bar manager, or mamasan (this manager is typically female), it was only days later she found herself in a rented bikini, standing on the dance stage. Like many, her youth made her a popular choice among the men looking for sex.

The system works this way: young girls are drawn into work at the clubs (some of them are handed over by their own poverty-stricken families), thinking they will be waitressing or modeling, and with the promise of earning quick and easy money. The girls serve drinks to tourists and eventually end up dancing onstage. If a customer buys a girl a drink, she is given a small cut by the mamasan. And for a “bar fine”—equal to about $25—that customer essentially owns the girl for a couple of hours, to do with her as he pleases. The club owners rent the girls their bikinis as a way of keeping them in debt. Some clubs even charge the girls to do their laundry, and all charge the children for room and board. The children are threatened with arrest if they leave without paying. Frightened and alone, they stay put no matter how badly they are mistreated.

One of the only hopes for salvation from that life is Fr. Shay and his staff at the PREDA centre. Fr. Shay’s main program—Childhood for Children— involves rescuing children from brothels and domestic abuse. Believing in “the God-given rights and dignity of every individual,” Fr. Shay works to protect the children, whom he sees as “abused, oppressed and exploited by the rich and wealthy from [the Philippines] and abroad.”

Currently, there are 54 children healing at the centre. When Fr. Shay arrived in Olongapo in 1969 as a missionary from Dublin, the town’s economy was bound up with the Subic Bay naval base, when it served as a port for the United States navy. A thriving sex industry developed alongside. After witnessing how women and children were being drawn into the sex-based economy, Fr. Shay worked frantically to rescue those who wanted out. He raised money to build the PREDA centre, and it’s there that mainly children find not only refuge from those who aim to exploit them but protection from their own memories. By the time the kids leave PREDA—Fr. Shay estimates that more than 1,000 children have been saved since 1974—they have been supported through both their psychological and physical traumas and have received a nonformal education.

I had expected the children to be withdrawn and frightened of us when we arrived, but that wasn’t the case. Laughter echoes in the long white halls of the centre and the children welcomed us with big smiles, dancing and open arms. Within days, the children had given all of us nicknames, greeting us with wide grins in the morning and hugs each night. We quickly began to feel like part of the family, which is when I began to miss my own. The nights were the hardest. I sometimes laid awake thinking about what I’d witnessed and how clueless so many of us in Canada are about what’s going on in places like Olongapo. I realized the stability, love and friendship I get from my own family, friends and boyfriend is what PREDA guarantees for the young girls there.

But with the staggering numbers of children still left in the sex trade, I wondered how Fr. Shay and Cheryl stay positive and keep working to effect change, no matter how incremental. Cheryl explains: “Once you’ve met these children, once you’ve heard their stories of exploitation and abuse and looked into their eyes, you cannot simply stand on the sidelines. It is their sense of spirit and resilience that helps me find the courage to keep fighting.”

And I won’t be able to leave the battle, either.

To contribute directly to the building of the next PREDA centre—an estimated $90,000 US remains to be raised—contact OneChild at www.one-child.ca. For more information about PREDA and the work they do, visit www.preda.org.

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