(Statement written by Roseny Fangco and Teodoro L. Locsin, delivered by the latter at the launching of “Inherent Dignity: An Advocacy Guidebook to prevent trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation and realizing the human rights of women and girls throughout their lives” at the United Nations Headquarters, New York.)
“FEW crimes are more heinous, more despicable, than the crime of trafficking sex. It is difficult to conceive how, in this day and age, there are people who scheme and make a profit out selling, soiling and hurting in the worst possible way, the body and personhood of a woman, much worse, of a girl—or even a little boy. We all were born of mothers, and we have children, yet there are many among us who regard women as pieces of meat—articles of trade and sources of profit.
“We shudder at the thought of slavery, but sex trafficking is worse than slavery! Slaves were valued for their strength and skills, even the likes of Andromache and her Trojan court, servants in the households of victorious Greeks. But a trafficked woman is not even valued; she is merely priced every time she is sold; first into a brothel and then to scores of men who do to them what they dare not to the mothers of their children. Every bestial instinct and craving is indulged on a trafficked woman who is then cast away for the night or finally and often fatally when she has lost all shred of womanly attraction. She has lost not only her liberty and her choices; she has been robbed—no, not of her humanity but her sense of it with regard to herself and her abusers. It is her traffickers, the brothel owners, and their customers who have really lost all humanity.
“Repulsive as it is, trafficking yet persists in all societies; and in bad economic times—like that induced by the Wall Street Global Financial Crisis—it thrives. In political turmoil the sex trade booms as the most vulnerable flee from violence into the arms of sex traffickers; never to escape them even in the midst of civilized societies that pretend it does not exist. It is a wonder how a trade in articles so difficult to conceal as full-sized human beings unlike packets of drugs, yet seem to elude law enforcement. And the reason is plain: for as long as law enforcement, indeed governments are run by men, sex trafficking will continue and thrive. This is an evil we can trust only women to fight and suppress.
“But in my country, we elected a president who, though a man of rough speech, had the common sense as mayor to turn over the handling of sex-related crimes and women suspects and victims exclusively to female law enforcers. Another mayor in the capital city had a habit of flinging European pedophiles down the stairs of the lofts where they indulged their perversions; even as he gave foreign gang members visiting our country an iron taste of what it was like to be one of their female victims. Not a single diplomatic protest was lodged out of shame. But it was all hit and miss, anecdotal so to speak, in dealing with a problem that was widely spread and tightly organized—catering to the vice most cherished by men in any position of the smallest power or none—finding in the abuse of helpless women and girls the manliness that otherwise eludes them.
“Today my country has declared all-out war against sex trafficking. I wish it to be as coldly relentless as the war on drugs but that remains to be seen. We are still governed by men; and only twice did women govern us with the greatest benefit to the nation.
“We have started by acknowledging the scale of a problem whose reality we were too polite to admit. We are revisiting legislation to broaden its scope and sharpen its responses. We are establishing inter-agency action, getting all the relevant agencies involved—foreign affairs, justice, social welfare, interior and local government, education, and the police at the frontlines. The offices of immigration, anti-money laundering, youth, overseas Filipinos and the military are involved. But it still seemed inadequate. So we elevated the fight and took a whole-of-society approach as we say here at the UN, engaging civil society, NGOs, faith-based groups, the transport industry, and even informal gatherings like Zumba groups. The more the merrier; and since the focus was sharp, and everyone faced in the same direction of the crime, the criminals and their victims the great numbers did not get in each other’s way to frustrate the desired result.
“We are proud to have attained a level of success such that by 2016 the Philippines achieved Tier 1 ranking in the US Trafficking in Persons Report—the first in Southeast Asia to have attained that ranking which we have kept up to the present.
“We have done it through preventive efforts, protection of victims, prosecution of offenders, and partnerships with foreign organizations. Our government’s tireless effort to be one step ahead of the syndicates resulted in 12,802 victims rescued and 316 persons convicted since 2012. We have conducted awareness-raising trainings for government workers, NGOs, local communities and persons applying for work overseas. Since an army marches on its stomach, the agencies fighting trafficking are mandated to prioritize it in their appropriations.
“The fight continues; we might say we are winning it; the figures show that. We are fighting it at home and abroad, from our embassies and consulates. At the UN, we champion the cause. We collaborate with other governments through forums like the Bali and Colombo Process. We are happy to find an ally in Mercy International Association in a fight that is simple really; except that war against sex trafficking has many fronts including, the UNICEF says, the parents of the victims. But since I am standing here I must speak for myself as well. The figures seem to me small. While I can cite no statistics of my own, I base my sense of a wider evil on two facts, both deriving from the nature of men. Men are limited in achieving good but their capacity for evil is infinite particularly in matters of sex. It must be the Catholic in me.
“Meanwhile the stories of trafficking must be told; the voices of victims need to be heard, if not directly from them, then from the mouths of their rescuers and from those who dig their used up bodies out of the graves into which they were cast like used tissue.
“It is by the telling of these stories that people cannot pretend they are unaware of what their husbands and sons are doing. It is from these stories that the rage, the imperative rage is fueled and the fight goes on until—to borrow melodramatic words of the French Revolution—the last trafficker is strangled with the entrails of the last customer of the sex trade. Thank you.”
The event was organized by Mercy International Association with panelists Ms. Jane Connors, ASG, Victims’ Right Advocate for the UN; Sr. Angela Reed, secondary author of the guidebook and coordinator of Mercy International; Winifred Doherty, NGO representative to the UN Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd.
I had three remarks to make to their presentations. The first was that I disagree that it is a demand and supply problem, the supply being the girls and the demand being of course the animals, which is to say men. And that the answer must be “holistic”— (a term that means nothing aside from being a crime worse than trafficking, which is to say it is pretentious, like calling a development a paradigm shift, which is a term of art in the philosophy of philosophy originating with Thomas Kuhn). But I do understand the argument that to dry up the supply we should work for the long-term economic improvement of the class from which most of victims are abducted and enticed. But that will take too long and that perspective excludes girls trafficked in conflict situations. No, I said, the girls have nothing to do with the supply-demand situation. The supply is the suppliers, the sex traffickers who abduct or entice girls. And while it will take a long time to raise living standards all around, it will take a far shorter time taking out the suppliers (I made the index finger-raised thumb-other three fingers-curled gesture symbolizing a pistol.) Those in the audience were only mildly put out. I think the sisters understand the necessity sometimes of erasures, so to speak.
One panelist said that she did not have so “glum” a view of the role of men in suppressing trafficking. I asked her if spreading respect for human rights to trafficked victims is a solution, when expanding the definition of human rights violations to include non-state actors might help the victims even more. Right now there is a misconception that human rights violations can be committed only by state actors, and the vaunted “responsibility to protect” is limited to the state’s responsibility to restrain and stop its security forces from violating human rights. This makes states recoil at the notion of human rights. She responded that she cannot understand the states’ recoiling reaction.
Well it makes states feel under the gun all the time. For example, in the United States, which is the only guardian of world freedom and therefore the only acceptable world hegemon and not emerging circus states, cops tend to shoot anyone who is black, fat and therefore slow to run and easy to pick off with a pistol. This must stop of course but wouldn’t it be better for cops to be told that they have the responsibility to use what they are best at—the application of violence—to stop human rights abuses by expanding the definition of violators to include the classes guilty of most human rights violations in most of the world today: non-state actors which is to say terrorists and crime syndicates.
She said there is a school of thought that argues as I did but mainstream human rights thinking prefers to hold only states accountable for human rights violations. But imagine if you will, enlisting the efficient brutality of state agents in the suppression of human rights violations; how much fewer violations would be. Let’s face it, security forces do like suppressing and are rather good at it.
And to the Good Shepherd nun I said that when things came to a head in the Philippines when a woman had gone head-to-head against the dictator, and a fragment of the military mutinied raising the prospect of a nationwide crackdown that would scoop her up, she was informed that the US 7th Fleet had a battleship nearby and Marines to escort her on board. But she chose to take refuge in a Good Shepherd convent to the dismay of us, her male supporters. She made the right choice, said one of the panelists. Laughter all around and much appreciation for the anecdote.