After the Storm: Trafficking in Innocence
March 4, 2014 ·
Orphaned, destitute children in the Philippines face new danger from human traffickers
By Shay Cullen, SSC
By Shay Cullen, SSC
Social worker Marlyn received a message that a 14-year-old girl named “Princess” had been trafficked and sold to a sex bar here in the Philippines. Marlyn alerted me and we began planning to rescue the child, just one of thousands of children trafficked for sexual abuse each year in the Philippines. In the wake of the devastation of Typhoon Haiyan we fear many more will fall victim to sexual predators.Marlyn, who herself was rescued from sex-trade traffickers, works with me in a Philippine-based organization I helped found 40 years ago called Preda that actively responds to and rescues victims, and then helps them get an education and start new lives of dignity.
This time, we organized a police raid on the sex bar, called the Crowbar, and rescued Princess and five other underage girls who had been entrapped there through debts and fear of retaliation against their families. The operator of the sex bar, a U.S. national, was arrested, and during his arraignment, Princess whispered to her social worker: “I never thought this could happen; he’s rich and connected. I can’t believe we got out.”Princess is safe with us at the Preda Home for Children, at least for now.
Over the years we have rescued thousands of children and youths from the scourge of “sex tourism,” even as the sex industry continues to spread and grow with impunity.This has all been exacerbated by the recent natural disasters in the Philippines. I have been through ferocious typhoons during my 44 years in this Southeast Asian nation, but have never seen anything like the sheer savagery of Typhoon Haiyan, known locally as Typhoon Yolanda.
After this super storm hit the Philippines last November, bringing winds of up to 150 miles an hour, torrential rain, flooding and landslides, I flew to visit the northern towns on Cebu Island to assess the damage with two Preda staff members. Our goals were to deliver aid directly to the people who most needed it and, equally important, to protect orphaned children from would-be abductors and traffickers posing as relatives.Horrible as the prospect of such exploitation is, it has been a cruel reality in times of natural disasters, and Haiyan was the most devastating typhoon known to humankind: as many as 6,500 or more were killed, countless injured and made homeless.
The orphaned children remain the most vulnerable. Their towns and villages and homes are gone and their parents are dead. They face the threat of hunger, malnutrition, abduction and forced degradation in the sex trade and as slave labor.These children need our attention and direct intervention to rescue them from child traffickers and pedophiles. Under the pretext of saving the children, traffickers abduct them and sell them as “brides” to pedophiles, or earn hundreds of thousands of dollars by providing these children for illegal adoption, organ transplants, sexual abuse and exploitation in brothels and as forced labor.
Poverty often makes exploitation easy. Reggie is a clear example. The 17-year-old jobless youth and his family lived on the edge of severe poverty even before Typhoon Haiyan pushed them into absolute poverty and left them with nothing. In the midst of the chaos and destruction, human traffickers forced him and six other youth from Cebu into unpaid labor on a fishing boat, only to abandon them hungry and unpaid. Then, Reggie’s freedom and human rights were taken from him when local authorities jailed him for being a vagrant. He was recently rescued from illegal imprisonment and is recovering and rebuilding his life at the Preda boys home.
Though the work goes on, it never gets any easier to stomach.
Father Shay Cullen of the Missionary Society of St. Columban has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times. For more information on his work against human trafficking visit Preda: www.preda.org.
For more about trafficking in the U.S. see the Maryknoll Productions video Lives for Sale.
