Need to consolidate efforts vs. human trafficking

The development community commemorated on Tuesday, May 26 a victory against human trafficking amid various obstacles and problems attending this campaign. It was the sixth anniversary of the enactment of Republic Act (R.A.) 9208, or the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2003.

R.A. 9208 is a major victory scored by the Gabriela Women’s Partylist (GWP) and the militant bloc in Congress. It was the GWP stalwart Liza Maza who primarily championed it. She accomplished this before the militant partylist representatives got sidelined by the arrest of the late Crispin Beltran and the eventual attempts to arrest them on account of allegedly trumped-up murder charges.

With R.A. 9208’s enactment, the Philippines became the first Southeast Asian country to legislate a supposedly tough statute against human trafficking.

R.A. 9208 institutes policies to eliminate and punish human trafficking, especially of women and children and establishes the necessary institutional mechanisms to protect and support trafficked persons.

It aims “to promote human dignity, protect the people from any threat of violence and exploitation, and mitigate pressures for involuntary migration and servitude of persons, not only to support trafficked persons but more importantly, to ensure their recovery, rehabilitation and reintegration into the mainstream of society.”

R.A. 9208 specifically crimina–lizes trafficking for the purposes of exploitation. The punished overt acts include trafficking under the guise of arranged marriage, adoption, sex tourism, prostitution, pornography, or the recruitment of children into armed conflict.

Trafficking of children is made a “qualified” offense, and higher penalties of life imprisonment and a fine of P2 million to 5 million is imposed.

Use of services of trafficked persons is penalized by 15 years imprisonment and a fine of P500,000 to P1 million. Additional penalties are provided for offenders who are government employees.

Human trafficking has reached a frightening level. According to the US State Department, an estimated 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked for forced labor and sex worldwide each year. This excludes the number of those trafficked for economic exploitation as unpaid or low-paid workers.

Eighty percent of this number is women and girls, and most end in prostitution.

 Women trafficked for the sex industry is predominantly from Southeast Asia, the former Soviet Union and South America. This partly explains the ill joke of actor Alec Baldwin, who later apologized for this bad gesture.

Baldwin’s country, the United States, and Japan and Australia, notably among the most affluent in the world, are the top three destination countries for sex trafficking. Experts say that sex trafficking is now an $8 billion international business. Selling women through sex trafficking has become highly systematic, borderless and immensely profitable.

 Filipino women are very vulnerable to trafficking for sex or other purposes, what with a government program that targets the labor exportation of at least one million contract workers. Exporting workers is the big cop-out for countries that have failed to provide jobs at home owing to the lack or failure of a jobs creation program.

From a temporary source of relief from the economic crunch of the late 70s to the early 80s, labor export has now become the main employer and dollar source of many sending countries. The Asia-Pacific region alone has 58 million international migrants, 53 million in Asia and 5 million in the Pacific.

Overseas workers’ recorded remittances in 2007 were estimated to reach $106 million with India, China, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Pakistan accounting for $82 million.

R.A. 9208 has to be given more teeth, if we were to stop human trafficking. Some 427 cases of trafficking were recorded by the Department of Social Welfare and Development from 2000 to 2009, but due to the clandestine nature of the acts, the number could be more.

 “The government, the private sector, non-government organizations and civil society should unite to stop this cycle of abuse among our women,” Myrna T. Yao, chair of the National Commission on the Rights of Filipino Women, said.

 A non-government organization active against trafficking, the Visayan Forum, said trafficking starts in the country as traffickers secretly organize their transport operations via different ports and land routes in the Philippines, and their operations have to stop. Internal trafficking is the springboard for international trafficking.

Unfortunately, human trafficking is facilitated, wittingly or unwittingly, by government personnel, either through deliberate collaboration with traffickers or lax procedures. Their number and operations have to be curtailed.

There is need for more stringent enforcement of the law . RA 9208 may be good, but the Philippines has convicted only 11 persons as of end-2008. While this delisted the Philippines from the US Department of State Tier 2 in 2008, the gravity of this crime continues to reverberate in the suffering of the trafficked and the people they left behind in the country.

It is now time for the government and its Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking (IACAT), composed of government agencies, non-government organizations and other civic organizations, to formulate and implement a comprehensive and integrated program to prevent and suppress human trafficking.