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Asian sex trade: the dark side of the world
| quote: | Carmina is all too typical of female overseas contract workers who go abroad to support their families. Despite the fact that she earned her teaching degree from a provincial college in her home province in Mindanao, she never landed a decent paying job in the Philippines' impoverished educational sector. Her family had staked all their hopes on her, and she felt incredibly pressured to repay their years of sacrifice to put her through school. But she just couldn't do it in the Philippines, and had no desire to move to Manila or Cebu to enter the sex trade.
In desperation, she followed the example of many of her kababayans (townspeople) and sought overseas contract work. It wasn't hard to parlay her college education into a job as "governess" in the Middle East. She was happy to have found lucrative work, liked the fact that her fluent English would make her new job easy, and hoped that the children she would be nanny to would be nice kids. Nevertheless, she experienced some anxiety as she boarded the silver bird, the first time she had ever been on a jet plane.
Upon landing at Bahrain International Airport, Carmina's passport was promptly confiscated and she was quickly transported off in the back seat of a darkened Mercedes to work in a mansion in the desert city of Al Qurayyah, some 25 kilometers from the capital city of Manama and a million light years from the rural Philippines. Her new home turned out to be a high-tech dungeon, her "governess" duties non-existent, and her self-esteem and humanity attacked with a vengeance. She was not allowed to call home or send or receive mail, and she feared that she would never return to the Philippines alive. She had made a horrible mistake but had no way to go back.
Like many other Filipinas journeying to the far corners of the globe, Carmina was victimized and abused, physically, emotionally, and sexually. She prayed the rosary many times each day as she scrubbed floors and toilets. Her employer raped her repeatedly, sometimes bringing his friends over to share in the experience. Carmina couldn't even find out if her remittances were being sent to her family in Mindanao and more than once seriously considering committing suicide.
In the end, Carmina was more fortunate than many others in her situation. She was driven back to the airport at the end of her one-year contract and allowed to board the plane back home. When she got back, she learned that her family had received only the first three months of her salary. She entered a desperate state of clinical depression and angst, a condition that a Western psychologist would immediately classify as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She experiences tremendous guilt about letting her family down, and is terribly hurt by the social ostracization she now faces on a daily basis, especially from macho men who consider her damaged goods. Most days she experiences at least one nasty hallucination of being raped and anymore she doesn't really care whether she lives or dies.
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There are thousands of stories like this one out there. Millions even. And believe it or not, most of them would make this one seem like a fairytale with a happy ending by comparison. There are places all over Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc where you can just walk in and pick out a 12-year-old girl for about the price of a Happy Meal. I'll let you imagine what their lives are like. Actually, i don't we would even come close.
I happen to know a girl who barely escaped from that part of the world, so this hits really close to home. Face, heart and body of an angel, take my word for it. Insists on praying for me every night even though i don't believe in God. Truly the kind of girl you'd want to fall in love with and marry... or at least she would have been if she didn't end up getting raped, having to get an abortion and slashing her wrists while she was still in the Philippines. And because of the shame, her brother and i are the only two people she's told. Her mother is still trying to figure out what nearly drove her daughter insane.
But what really pisses me off is that no one seems to give a damn about any of it. When something like this happens here, it's all over the news. But how many times a year does it happen there? How many 12-year-old virins are exported to Japan and Hong Kong every month, never to see home again? A thousand? Fifty thousand? I'd like to help, but i don't know where to begin. It's a giant, dirty industry and the people in it don't play by the rules. And if they can hire an entire squad of biker assassins for a few hundred bucks, why the hell would they? That's why the cops down there do nothing - it's better to take bribes than die in a hail of bullets.
But i can't just sit here, i gotta do something. I'll post an update on this in a few months. Hopefully, by then i'll have a better understanding of how the system works and some rough sketches of a plan.
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