08/26/2008By Juan Mercado
Philippine Daily Inquirer
An older generation dubbed them “palomas de bajo vuelo” (low-flying pigeons). And the local version of this Iberian slur is a literal translation: “kalapating mababa ang lipad.” But scholarly journals prefer CSW, or commercial sex worker.
In a globalizing world, more people are conned or pressured into brothels or slave labor, says the US State Department. Its annual “Trafficking Persons Report” gives insights into this illicit trade within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Thai hill-tribe women are trafficked by criminal syndicates to Malaysia, Singapore and South Africa. Some Malaysians were shipped to Macau, Hong Kong and Australia. Burmese are exploited in Bangladesh and even Pakistan. Vietnamese turned up in Hong Kong, Thailand and the Czech Republic. Indonesians trek into Brunei and the Middle East.
Estimates vary. About 100,000 Indonesian women and children are trafficked annually for commercial sexual exploitation. Three out of 10 female prostitutes in Indonesia are below 18.
Burmese children are trafficked as forced labor, child soldiers or even beggars in Thailand. Many Kachin women and girls peddled to China were forced into prostitution.
Hanoi estimates that 10 percent of Vietnamese brokered into marriages with Chinese men are peddled. Many women in bawdy houses in Dong Tham, An Giang and Kien Giang, Cambodia, are Vietnamese.
Thailand reduced internal trafficking of country women from the impoverished north and northeast. Still, many are lured to Taiwan, Malaysia, the United States and the Middle East by labor recruiting sharks. They’re strapped into servitude because of debts owed to the agencies.
Less than 100 Malaysian women were trafficked abroad. But this declining number is drowned in Kuala Lumpur’s lurid controversy over the 2006 murder of a Mongolian woman, Altantuya Shaaribun, who worked for Deputy Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak.
Transit patterns constantly shift. A number of women and girls from Burma, Cambodia and Vietnam slip through Thailand’s southern border to Malaysia on to brothels in Johor Bahru, across from Singapore.
Burmese, Khmer, Lao and ethnic minority young women cross Thailand to third countries such as Malaysia, Japan and destinations in Europe and North America.
An International Organization of Migration study supplements the US study on the Philippines earlier reported by Viewpoint. (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 8/21/08; read column) Nearly half, or 46 percent, were between 15 and 18 years of age when they took off from Manila for Tokyo, the IOM study noted. Only four percent were professionals. A few (11 percent) had an inkling they could end up as “kalapati.” Shady recruiters, linked with airport police, “facilitated” their exit. Fifty-four out of a hundred carried false passports.
Corruption taints agencies. National Registration Department officials in Kuala Lumpur forged permanent resident identity cards for traffickers. Burmese police officials extort money from economic migrants and others leaving the country.
Legislation varies across ASEAN. As early as 1997, Thailand adopted a Prevention and Suppression of Trafficking in Women and Children Act. In 2003, the Philippines wrote into the books a tough anti-trafficking law. So did Vietnam, which passed the Ordinance on Prevention of Prostitution in reaction to a 60-percent surge in trafficking cases.
Even the Burmese junta went through the exercise of approving in 2005 an anti-persons trafficking law. And in 2007, the Malaysian House of Representatives passed an anti-trafficking law.
But the litmus test is in convictions. These show wide—and worrisome—divergences. The Philippines, for example, secured only three convictions in five years. “This is troubling,” the report says.
In 2006, there were no prosecutions of traffickers in Malaysia. Neither were any Thai public officials or law-enforcement officials arrested for complicity in trafficking.
The Burmese junta did not take action against military or civilian officials who engaged in forced labor. In fact, it clamped “a moratorium on prosecution of forced labor.”
In a high-profile case, Vietnam convicted former British pop star Gary Glitter (a.k.a. Paul Francis Gadd) for sexual acts with minors in southern Vietnam. Hanoi has convicted 500 individuals convicted of trafficking in 2006, and some of them received the maximum sentence.
Singapore does not have a law specific to anti-trafficking. But it enforces other measures to prevent trafficking. In the first nine months of 2006, 23 employers were prosecuted and convicted for abusing their foreign domestic workers.
The report places its finger on a little-noticed consequence of demographic change: the surge in the demand of Chinese men for wives. China’s population policies have resulted in a skewed sex-ratio where men outnumber women.
Human trafficking has other roots: poverty, little education, lack of awareness of trafficking, etc. Because of its relative affluence Thailand’s Greater Sub-Mekong Region is a magnet for migrants who slip through difficult-to-police borders between countries.
Most trafficked women and migrant workers are unable to find jobs when they return to the Philippines. They seek to migrate again.
“A country that coddles looters will send its daughters to the best whorehouses here and abroad,” a Sun Star commentary notes. “Yet, many prostitutes, an unimpeachable source teaches, will enter the kingdom ahead of the traffickers.”
Email: juanlmercado@gmail.com
