THIS IS a story of the success and victory of Girly, a 15-year-old child that achieved justice by her clear testimony and won her case against her aunt that sold her to a foreign sex tourist to be raped.
On July 30, Judge Dorina S. Castro-Baltazar of the Family Court Branch 2 in Bataan declared her aunt Daday guilty of human trafficking and handed down a long prison sentence, a strong powerful example of the law at work fighting horrific crimes against children.
What worse crime is there against children than to lure, groom and force young teenage children into modern slavery to be sold as sex slaves, to be assaulted, and abused by older men to satisfy their lust and sexual fantasies, for money? This is the meaning of child sex trafficking, bringing a child to any other place to be sexually abused.
A recent study in 2023 showed that almost half a million Filipino children were trafficked by a quarter of a million adult exploiters making images of children being sexually abused. In fact, this is one child in every hundred that is abused in this way. Out of all trafficked persons, 27 percent are children.
This is a worldwide heinous crime and in the Philippines the perpetrators are seldom caught and convicted. They take the risk because the money to be earned is huge. The majority of human traffickers, I regret to say, are women.
Sex tourism is a criminal business that is still thriving with the approval of local governments that issue operating permits and licenses to sex bars, resorts and hotels where much trafficking of minors occurs.
Girly was only 15 years old when her Auntie Daday began posting her photograph on social media over the internet. She was allowed to do it without restraint by the telecoms and Internet service providers who do little to block the human traffickers selling children for sex despite the law ordering them to block all such images. It appears that the telecoms consider themselves above the law.
Daday found a customer online. He came and stayed at a hotel in the Subic Bay Freeport and she picked up Girly after school one day and brought her from Pampanga to Subic Bay to the customer. Then, Daday gave Girly a pill and she felt sleepy and they brought her to a room to rest.
There, the sex tourist raped her. She was unable to resist. He paid Daday a large sum of money. Girly found five thousand pesos in her bag the next day. She hated being sold for sex and her parents were shocked and went to the police.
The social worker saw that Girly was traumatized and referred her to Preda for therapy and healing.
Prolonged therapy over several months is needed by the victims as their life, value system and self-identity are totally disrupted. Their trust in adults is broken and they are left in pain and suffering to live with the memory and trauma the rest of their lives.
They need professional care and help. In the Philippines, the government has no trauma recovery centers. Government social workers send most victims home without help to suffer in silence for the rest of their lives. They don’t understand how traumatized victims of trafficking and abuse are and how much they need psychological help and therapy. (To be continued)/PN
