The dirty side of human slavery in the Philippines



This article is about recruiting, harbouring, transporting, providing or obtaining a person for compelled labour or commercial sex acts through the use of force, fraud, or coercion.

That includes poor families selling their children and coercing them out the door into the hands of strangers, never to return home. That too is a crime. Parents in the Philippines may not sell their children for any form or amount of compensation. But thousands do that crime.


Combatting women and girl sex slavery. The RINJ Foundation. Archived surveillance photo. Photo: Dale Carter.  Art/Cropping/Enhancement: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective-Magazine

Statistics on the occurrence of human slavery range from 40 to 46 million but nobody actually knows the number of human slaves around the world.


Many if not most of the victims are not kidnapped, they go willingly after being lured. They may be enticed or coerced or groomed by a so-called acquaintance who engages a target for weeks or more through faith-based groups, community gathering places, barangay halls, school support groups, parent groups, playgrounds, social clubs, athletics and more.

Most of the victims are adults over 18 and both male and female. Sex-trade adult human slaves fetch a good dollar, but human slave laborers often fetch more money. Sex slave children sell for the most money as they are high earners for the criminals who operate the pedophile crime syndicates. Such criminals pay a lot of money for the hordes of children kidnapped or lured into that part of the underworld.

Out of the many thousands of missing children around the world, most are either dead or working in the underground illegal child sex regime. Sorry if that will dash hopes. Reality is horridly cruel in that world.

This is a 6-month report on:

RINJ 10th Annual End Child Sex Trade blitz

End Child Sex Trade

RINJ Foundation Photo

 

The USA Department of Justice offers a helpful definition of what RINJ Women are talking about.


“Child sex trafficking refers to the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, obtaining, patronizing, or soliciting of a minor for the purpose of a commercial sex act. Offenders of this crime who are commonly referred to as traffickers, or pimps, target vulnerable children and gain control over them using a variety of manipulative methods.” Citing US DoJ

No matter who you are, there is no greater person than the one who stoops to help a child. – RINJ Women


Adult men, women and children with low education and poor income levels, which describes a vast number of the people living in the provinces of the Philippines, are key targets and the most lucrative sales commodity. Buying a hundred cheap laborers and keeping them confined and working hard in some out-of-the-way region of Asia or Africa is worth a fortune in revenue they will generate. For the cost of initial purchase plus bare minimums of food, shelter and work clothing, each “employee” can generate many thousands of dollars per year for a decade or more. Many large American companies have used “sweat shops” to manufacture their goods with a slave labor force, goods sold by even major brands in America and around the world. The true value of a good slave can exceed $10,000 USD, but as all criminals behave, the criminals in the slave trade world cheat each other.

Trading Humans more lucrative and becoming more Violent than the drug trade.

It can be more lucrative, yet more violent trading humans than trading drugs. Sometimes recruiters who are not turning in enough recruits are assassinated becoming another Filipino cause-of-death-unknown—very hard to track. The recruiters eventually come to know too much and once they have exploited and used up all their social and community contacts which all seem to go missing, they have nothing more to offer but have become a grave risk to the criminal organization. The cost is death.

We estimate that the trade in human slavery in the Philippines is far more lucrative than the trade in illegal drugs.


“Like extrajudicial killings in the Philippines which were intended to curb the drug trade, slave trade is out of control. Rodrigo Duterte and his accomplices including Bingbong Marcos had no idea how badly out of control these unlawful activities of Philippines officials could become. Both crimes are still completely out of control,” suggests Karinna Angeles, a RINJ Women volunteer and human rights defender.

“There is something very wrong with the calculation of the value of human life in the Philippines,” she added.


Most of the criminals, especially at a low level, flee the crime organization when civil society investigators, including terrified parents who are missing their children, begin to spread the word that a certain recruiter has become a CI (confidential informant) to law enforcement. Choice: the bosses kill the person or the person flees as do the criminal linch pins to startup somewhere else using different minions. There is no lack of criminal underlings in the Philippines to do the dirty work of recruitment. A huge portion of the 112 million population live in desperate poverty, many homeless or calling an abandoned vehicle or trike a home.

“Sometimes we permit parents or relatives assigned by parents to participate in surveillances where those persons have knowledge of persons of interest in an abduction and can identify such persons. Often this turns into pure madness so we have actually handcuffed persons briefly who agree to that as a term of participation. That way they don’t go berserk, escaping a surveillance van and crashing through crowded markets or sidewalks to assault a subject of the investigation,” said Ms. Carter.

It is important to mention that and make it clear that civil society and law enforcement working together play an important role. Families need to report missing members, if not to police because a police services member has been involved in the abduction, then to a civil society helpline.

This is better for the criminal side and the law enforcement side. Criminals deserve a fair and immediate trial and a prosecutor must have professionally gathered evidence and witness statements.

Honestly, angry husbands, angry fathers, angry moms have been known to go crazy and tear the flesh off offenders or do them some other serious harm, which is in fact a new crime. Committing crimes to prevent crime or committing crimes to prosecute crime is always worse than the crime under investigation. But it happens all the time and the biggest case is what the parent of the missing kid did to the offender’s accomplice etc.

“Investigating and prosecuting human slavery criminals is not an emotional pursuit, it is a cold and calculating lawful bid for a Court to imprison persons found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of recruiting, harbouring, transporting, providing or obtaining a person for compelled labour or commercial sex acts through the use of force, fraud, or coercion. You win some and you lose some but the investigation and the subsequent process can scare criminals out of that crime even if they are not convicted or even if they do not receive long sentences,” explained Dale Carter, security director of The RINJ Foundation. “Thousands of women volunteers are watching for signs of human slave trading, recruitment os selling of slaves.”

Philippines has only a minimal success rate in prosecutions.

Is that because the criminal element includes complicit government officials? Those are people in a position of power and trust who betray those who are supposed to trust them. The solution? Nobody in government is trusted.

“We often tell family members to do this themselves. Even if they refuse to talk to police, report the details of a missing person to the Bureau of Immigration which closely monitors exit visas and persons traveling outside the country without proper documentation. Creating a choke point whereby we keep the victim inside the country gives us a better chance of finding the missing person. The BI can also watch if foreigners come into the country and leave with someone who might be a missing person. If victims are sent out into the world, we estimate zero chance of finding them unless we catch the perpetrators and they talk as part of a plea deal. Plea deals are best because that spares victims and families from being in a courtroom to relive a trauma,” explained Ms. Carter.

“Police in the Philippines have a bad reputation for beatings, raping women complainants and being involved in the drug and slavery trade,” she added when asked about the reluctance of civilians to speak with police about such matters.

When asked about child pornography in the Philippines, she said that “Where there is smoke, there is fire.

In the Philippines, law enforcement does not prosecute many cases. But immigration officials have formed a benevolent choke point that tends to snag victims when criminals attempt to sell their catch offshore.

The Philippines’ Bureau of immigration (BI) in 2021 “deferred the departure of a total of 13,680 passengers, a majority of whom had improper documentation,” according to then Commissioner Jaime Morente in February 2021.

Out of the 13,680 deferred passengers, 688 cases of human slavery were discovered in 2021 by the BI.

BI officials RINJ has spoken with or worked with show a keen ability to spot human trafficking which indicates they are well-trained by a BI that is tuned to its role in preventing this crime.

The BI role is crucial. A large number of persons lured by criminals in the Philippines, often using the promise of money or employment, sell their product (humans) outside of the Philippines.

“I have instructed our officers to keep doing their duties with dignity and patriotism. Social media ridicule will not deter us from performing our mandate to combat human trafficking in our ports,” Immigration Commissioner Norman Tansingco said in a statement last month.

“There will be no letup in our campaign for as long as these traffickers and illegal recruiters continue to prey on our countrymen who are sent to work abroad without proper documents and protection from the government,” Commissioner Tansingco added.

Unfortunately, many netizens on social media are criminals plying their illegal trade using free, tracked internet data provided by Facebook, recruiting, harbouring, transporting, providing or obtaining humans in their human slavery crime syndicate, large or small.


Data anywhere in the world is hard to estimate.

Data is hard to come by in the Philippines because with the exception of the department of immigration, the various departments of the law-enforcement infrastructure are ineffectual in prosecuting these types of crimes because these agencies in the Philippines have too many members of rank complicit in the crimes.

The government of the USA has urged the Philippines to “Increase efforts to investigate, prosecute, and convict complicit officials…” but not just that, The RINJ Foundation which operates a significant project globally to end the human slave trade, especially women and girl sex trade, has learned that officials in government, in banking and in consumer telecommunications in the Philippines, are also complicit in human slavery crime.


Selling young girls is more profitable than trafficking drugs or weapons in the Philippines.


According to the United States State department 2022 Trafficking in Persons Report for the Philippines, the country meets “minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking”.

This all the while America continues to seek every opportunity to ingratiate the government of the U.S. with the Philippines in order to c0ntinue to convince the Bongbong Marcos government to allow the USA the use of Philippines territory for spying on China and in the event of hostilities, launching war attacks on China from the Philippines.

The USA has made the following prioritized and valid recommendations to the Philippines.

  • “Increase efforts to investigate, prosecute, and convict complicit officials and labor traffickers.
  • “Strengthen the capacity of local government units to provide reintegration services for trafficking survivors, including trauma-informed care, job training, and in-country employment.
  • “Increase support to government and NGO programs that provide specialized care for trafficking victims, including child victims of online sexual exploitation.
  • “Establish and implement a process to ensure systematic and ongoing input from a diverse community of survivors on the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of anti-trafficking policies and programs.
  • “Increase efforts to ensure victims receive court-ordered restitution and compensation ordered through civil judgments.
  • “Increase resources for anti-trafficking task forces to conduct timely investigations, coordinated operations, and prosecutions while providing robust victim and witness assistance services.
  • “Increase efforts to identify and assist labor trafficking victims, including by providing training to law enforcement, social service providers, and labor inspectors on indicators of trafficking.
  • “Increase resources for law enforcement units designated to investigate all forms of trafficking.
  • “Consistently implement the coordinated interagency response to providing services to returning Filipinos exploited in sex and labor trafficking overseas.
  • “Create a central database for information on illegal recruiters and human trafficking cases to facilitate interagency coordination in detecting, investigating, and prosecuting traffickers.”

Citing: “2022 Trafficking in Persons Report”:  Philippines – United States Department of State


Confronting human slavery

Don’t Buy a Kid – Stop Child Sex Trade – http://RINJ.org/
Education is vital to preventing sexual exploitation of children. It empowers children to protect themselves. Schools and NGO’s like The RINJ Foundation can teach children to avoid high-risk situations. – The RINJ Foundation