When I was 13, my world consisted of a backyard where I ran around and played, sometimes with my pet dog, Tootsie. In the bedroom I shared with my older sister, I had a doll with curly hair, which I trimmed with school scissors, thinking it would grow back soon. My five brothers and a sister have always been protective, knowing that I was the youngest and most prone to misadventures. It was a childhood that I cherished till this very day.
Some children are not as lucky. In a shelter for trafficked women, I saw children, far from the verge of womanhood, that were bound for the Middle East as domestic workers had it not been for the timely intervention of our government. They were recruited from their homes in conflict-affected areas and sent to Manila for distribution to various recruitment agencies. Their “agents” do this in exchange for a hefty commission from agencies that do not discriminate, as long as job orders from Saudi Arabia are fulfilled. I saw some of them in a shelter near our airport, wearing lipstick, to “age” them to match the 23-year-olds that they are declared to be.
Can you imagine the kind of life that these children would face once they find employment in the Middle East as domestic workers? Slavery is too big a word for their young minds to even comprehend. Yet, the likelihood of it being defined through long hours of work, and lack of food, physical abuse and other worse forms of exploitation, looms large
for every victim.
This is the business where human traffickers thrive. Legitimate corporate entities such as licensed recruitment agencies must know that deploying a child or a minor bears serious legal consequences. Under the amended Anti-Trafficking Act, child trafficking is a non-bailable offense that is punishable with life imprisonment. Recruitment agencies are not excluded from the law, thus they should be more careful and discerning when dealing with recruits, especially from conflict areas in Mindanao.
Member-agencies of the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking are cognizant of this vicious form of human trafficking and have launched a counteroffensive. The National Bureau of Investigation, through its Anti-Human Trafficking Division, already has a list of private recruitment agencies that have attempted to deploy minors from Mindanao. The labor department has formed its own task force led by Undersecretary Jacinto “Jing” V. Paras that is also looking into these cases. The nongovernment organization that I head, the Blas F. Ople Policy Center, has entered into a memorandum of agreement with the Department of Justice as cochairman of IACAT that would enable us to monitor the progress of human-trafficking cases involving migrant workers.
There is strong resolve on the part of Justice Secretary Menardo I. Guevarra to make sure that every overseas Filipino worker case involving human trafficking gets the attention it deserves. Undersecretary Emmeline Aglipay-Villar instructed the IACAT Secretariat to make sure that such cases involving Filipinos overseas do not disappear into an abyss of unaccountability. The Ople Center, with the help of the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery, is now developing a case-management system that would be able to track all these cases from when the complaint was received to the actual filing of cases and until the victim is able to reintegrate. By January 2019, the IACAT Task Force Against the Trafficking of OFWs shall start its collaborative work.
Human traffickers who flit from town to town, masquerading as “agents” of recruitment agencies, will soon lose their anonymity and freedom as the IACAT’s campaign escalates. Government cannot do this alone. Concerned citizens are encouraged to report human trafficking and illegal recruitment cases to the IACAT Action Line 1343, under the auspices of the Commission on Filipinos Overseas. The CFO, led by Secretary Francisco “Nick” P. Acosta, a former Court of Appeals justice, is quite active in promoting the anti-trafficking advocacy and is generous with his suggestions on how the OFW Task Force under IACAT should proceed.
When one knowingly recruits a child to work overseas as a domestic worker, then that person is not fit to even be called human. For how can you deploy a human being, not yet wholly formed physically, mentally and emotionally, to a life of great deprivation in exchange for a commission? And as parents, why would they give up the love of their life in exchange for a promise yet unfulfilled of dollar remittances? And those so corrupt in the government, as to bestow these children with valid papers and passports containing fake ages, or escorting them through secret corridors in our airports, have you no shame? To think that these accomplices wear government IDs and look up as our national flag is raised every Monday morning gives me the shivers. They, too, must be unmasked.
The deployment of innocent children to work overseas must stop. Putting lipstick on their lips will not make them older, no matter who gets paid. Let children be children, because no grown-up has the right to profit from their innocence.