Human trafficking, slavery are the same

Finally, after years of operation, the owner and employees of the famous Jaguar KTV Bar in Banilad has been charged by the Cebu City Prosecutors Office for qualified trafficking in persons. It was raided by the police last Saturday, which yielded 146 girls who were rescued from this establishment. That this establishment has been operating in that area for so long so close to many high-class subdivisions is an embarrassment for the City of Cebu.

Human Trafficking has finally been recognized as a worldwide scourge and even the Cable News Network (CNN) has come up with their own advocacy dubbed “The Freedom Project” which lumps human trafficking together with slavery. When we think of slavery, we usually think of the days in American when black people were enslaved and worked for nothing and even sold to other slave owners, which triggered the US Civil War.

Slavery is defined as “The state of one bound in servitude as the property of a slaveholder or household.” But the 1926 Convention (article 1.1) defines slavery as “The status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.” In short, Slavery really is a condition by which another person or a group of persons control or determine the course of your life, where the person or persons enslave have no recourse or control of his or her destiny. As CNN has pointed out, there are some 27 million people who are enslaved under this definition.

Regional State Prosecutor Fernando Gubalane, said that the raid was conducted by the Regional Intelligence Division 7 in coordination of the Regional Anti-Trafficking Task Force, Inter-Agency Council against Trafficking under the auspices of the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking (IACTA) of the Department of Justice (DoJ) with warrants issued by Regional Trial Court (RTC) Judge Ramon Daomilas.

During the raid, officials of the International Justice Mission (IJM) and the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) where present as intelligence sources found out that some of the girls were minors, as one of the girls issued an affidavit admitting that she was a 16-year old girl from Cotabato City. No doubt, all this is happening around us due to poverty. But this should not be taken as a license to exploit the people who are in the poverty line.

All the time I thought that Jaguar KTV was only a bar, but the girl’s affidavit showed that there are rooms where customers can engage in sex with these girls for the price. So in the end, this establishment is, for all intents and purposes, a brothel! What I would like to know from the City of Cebu is whether or not Jaguar KTV will be allowed to operate, now that it is clear that it is not just a bar? If Mayor Mike Rama is with us in this fight against Human Trafficking, then he should order the revocation of the permit to operate given to Jaguar KTV.

Incidentally a few months ago, a brothel, just a few meters from Jaguar KTV was also raided and in a meeting with the Regional Task Force Against Trafficking, the Philippine National Police (PNP) showed us a video of that raid, which positively showed that the place was a prostitution den. Its operators are in custody awaiting trial on Human Trafficking in persons. That place was allegedly “protected” by someone well-connected. But the raid proved to us that in the PNP, there are no sacred cows in this fight against Human Trafficking.

If you noticed that very recently, many cybersex dens were uncovered and raided by the Criminal Investigation Division Group (CIDG), this is due to the relentless effort by the IACAT to stop any establishments that lead a person to a life of slavery and we are now seeing a lot of this happening in the smaller towns in the Province of Cebu.

Mind you, the fight against Human trafficking is not an easy one, especially here in the Philippines, where the major reason why girls are “forced” to become sex slaves often happen at the urging of their poor parents. Indeed, when you are dirt poor, more often than not, morality is thrown out of the window. More so that these girls have sex at an early age and when their parents find out that their girl already had sex with a boy just as poor as they are, they’d encourage their own daughter to shack up with a foreigner, most of then white male Caucasian whom they look up to hoping that the person would give her a better life.

Lucky are those girls who end up marrying an elder foreign gentleman. But there lies the danger where she could end up with a pedophile or worse, someone who will sell her to the flesh market, a market that is considered a worldwide industry.

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