Pampanga's red light district is one of the biggest and oldest sex destinations in the world. It is already an all-knowing fact that prostitution in the Philippines is unlawful. Penalties range up to life imprisonment for those involved in trafficking, which is wholly covered by the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2003. However, despite all these measures, prostitution in Pampanga, specifically in Angeles City, is legal since the 90s. It is now Pampanga's main tourist attraction generating millions of pesos a year. PROSTITUTION IN THE PHILIPPINES Even though it is widely practiced, prostitution is illegal in the Philippines. There is an organized movement to make prostitution a legal activity in the Philippines. By one estimate a half a million women prostitute themselves. Most of the men who use prostitutes in the Philippines are locals not foreigners. You would not get this impression by visiting one of the better known red
light districts. Local tend to use community-,
neighborhood- and town- based brothel and sex workers. In Angeles City, near Clark Air base, there is one street with bars for foreigners on one side, and bars for locals on the other. Former prostitute Liza Gonzales told the Philippines Inquirer, Women in this field are often looked at as sinners and home wreckers. But we are not criminals We are actually victims, Gonzales said. Some are victims of rape or incest. Some are girls from rural areas who were fooled by illegal recruiters We are victims of different circumstances, but we all fell into prostitution, she said. The police arguably do more to abet prostitution than stop it. One sex worker told the Philippine Inquirer: When cops like the apprehended woman, she is forced to have sex with them. Nowadays, kotong (bribe) ranges from P3, 000 to P4, 500, and transactions begin even before they reach the precinct, she said. Transvestites (cross dressers) also participate in prostitution, especially with unwary foreigners. Male
homosexuals and child prostitutes who created Asias
reputation for sex tourism are concentrated in major metropolitan cities. EARLY HISTORY OF PROSTITUTION IN THE PHILIPPINES When the American troops liberated the Philippines from Japanese imperialism in October 1945, many American soldiers left illegitimate Amerasian children behind. The mothers of these children and their Amerasian children were social outcasts. In order for these mothers to survive, they became part-time prostitutes in the rural areas for single laborers and traveling salesmen and in the cities with all kinds of customers. IMPACT OF THE U.S. MILITARY AND THE VIETNAM WAR ON THE SEX TRADE IN THE PHILIPPINES In 1947, President Roxas signed a military agreement granting twenty-two military bases to the United States. In the following year, the two largest U.S. military bases in the Far East, the Naval Subic Bay
and Clark Air Force Base, were established north of
Manila. Angeles City, located near Clark Air Force Base, later became the Mecca of Sex Trade, the military adult-entertainment capital of the Philippines, with every variety of prostitution, exotic bars, pornography, and sex tourism conceivable. MODERN PROSTITUTION IN THE PHILIPPINES With the advent of information technology and global travel, the old part-time prostitutes have moved to the big cities. Prostitution survives because of poverty, the commercialization of human relations, and the sustained carnal demand. Although for different reasons, all social classes made their contributions to the trade in sexual services. The rich are looking for entertainment and diversity of sexual practices that they would never dare to ask from their wives. These respectable matrons are assigned by society only to bear and raise children, manage households (sometimes businesses), and organize social activities. The out-of-town students, immigrant workers, and wayward youths may be looking for their first sexual experiences and to combat the loneliness of being separated from their family for the first time.
The poor frequent the brothels to affirm their
masculinity by using many women or to relieve their loneliness. GOVERNMENT MONITORING OF PROSTITUTE IN THE PHILIPPINES Although prostitution is still illegal, Filipino society believes that some regulation is always needed, based on the premise that prostitution is regulated in order to minimize the damage to society. Local city councils may require filing an application with the city to establish a brothel, indicating the location for legal reasons and/or tax purposes. Local authorities may also restrict brothels to certain areas and regulate any signs that would identify it as a brothel. Prostitutes cannot reside anywhere other than at the brothel itself, which is her official domicile. Brothels also have to have a bedroom for each working woman. The women cannot show themselves at the balconies or in a window, nor can they solicit in the streets. In order to work in a brothel, a woman has to register with the sanitary health authorities (Bureau of Health). The authorities will check whether she is a victim of deceit or coercion and advise her that help and
assistance is available from legal authorities.
Each prostitute is given a sanitary notebook with her picture, personal data, registration number (if any), and the main articles of the decree that concern her rights as a provider of a service. Her rights include being free to stay or quit the brothel in which she lives and works, debts cannot be used to compel her to stay in a given brothel, and no one can subject her to any abuse. Each prostitute has to undergo mandatory monthly medical examinations for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). If an STD is diagnosed, the brothel pays for medical treatment. The sex worker must show her sanitary notebook to any customer that asks to see it. The manager of the brothel cannot accept any prostitute-candidate or applicant who has not first registered and passed a medical examination. The manager also has to report immediately to the sanitary authorities whenever a prostitute is ill, be this an STD or non-sexual disease. It is easy to imagine the rampant corruption that this naive attempt to protect customers and suppliers of contractual sex alike has produced. Police protection is bought, violations are ignored, and politicians and
judges are bribed, often on the pretext of protecting
the free practice of a fully consensual sex by the client and sex worker. In reality, this law and its application or lack thereof does little to protect the health of the women and their clients. The women have no protection from customers already infected. The prostitutes can request that their clients wear condoms, but cannot demand the performance of safe sex practices. The clients are not subject to compulsory medical control, and many may be infected but not show any symptoms while others suffer in silence and continue practicing unsafe sex with other prostitutes, lovers, and even wives. SEX TOURISM IN THE PHILIPPINES The Philippines has always been known as the Pearl of the Orient Seas, the Land of the Three Ss Sun, Sand, and Sea. A fourth S, Sex, sold in coolly wrapped packages, has emerged to the point where it has already warranted the United Nations attention: sex tourism involving child prostitutes as young as 6 years old. Angeles City in Pampanga, north of Manila, once
home of the mighty Clark U.S. Air Base, is now being
developed as an international airport. But the new airport has also become the center of sex tours to the Philippines, openly promoted abroad, arranged by Filipino tour operators and their foreign counterparts, with attractive come-ons for men seeking sexual activities with virginal or child prostitutes who they hope are free of STD and HIV infections. While the government is making major arrests in this trade, and sex establishments are regularly closed down, the front page of major dailies show bikini-clad young girls being led away by operatives, but never the brothel owners, the tour operators, their cohorts, and pimps. The Philippine Congress is still struggling to pass a law making a customer of a child prostitute criminally liable, even if he does not engage the services of a pimp. An increase of the maximum punishment for child labor and exploitation to twenty years was sought. The 1995 law set the punishment for child prostitution at twenty years in prison; the punishment for pornography and pedophilia, however, remained unchanged.
Sex tourism is the third-highest money-making
industry in the Philippines. But the current penalties and enforcement policies do nothing to have an impact on the business. As in many other countries, the prostitutes are arrested, but not the clients, managers, and others whose enormous profits make this business so attractive. The punishment for committing prostitution is a US$500 fine or twelve years in jail. While this law, in effect for three decades, applies to women dancing in the nude or in scanty bikini tongs, a major element in the prostitution trade, arrests are seldom made because of corruption and bribery. In order to reduce the negative moral and economic effects of prostitution, government and some nongovernment agencies are working together to rehabilitate former prostitutes or entertainment girls who retire or change their profession. The governments Department of Social Welfare and Development has programs to teach these exprostitutes other work alternatives and technical skills as a means to a decent living. A civic action and rehabilitation group, Marriage Encounter, is also
training married former prostitutes to help them move
back into mainstream society and divert single women from the sex trade by improving their personal skills for future relationships and family life. But funds and enthusiasm for such social programs are too limited. PROSTITUTION NEAR SUBIC BAY AND CLARK AIR BASE In Angeles City, a town outside Clark Air Base, U.S. servicemen have been replaced by lonely old men lured by young girls selling sex at very cheap prices. Describing the scene in Angeles, Ages Chan wrote in the Japan Times, Girls in the go-go bar wear tiny white tops and short skirts. They dance on the tables waiting for customers. Once they sit down with a customer, the customers hands move all over their bodies. Describing the scene in the 1990s in Olongapo, a town of 120,000 people outside Subic Bay, Edward Gargan wrote in the New York Times, "When the sunk sinks, the jukeboxes crank, men in T-shirts and jeans straggle the bars, and scantily clad women scan the
tables for prospects. More often than not, a young
man will sidle up to a newcomer and ask, 'You want a young girl? Fifteen only.'" When the base was open in the 1980s, there were 16,000 prostitutes working in Olongapo. Now there are only around 500. Reporting from Angeles City, John M. Glionna wrote in the Los Angeles Times, At a club called Koko Yoko, balding men with bulging bellies sit at an outdoor bar, sipping beers and leering at the young girls who pass on the model's runway gone wrong called Fields Avenue. Many of the girls weigh barely 90 pounds, their high heels pushing their almost adolescent bodies at perverse angles. There are cross-dressers fooling no one, calling out to men with tattoos, Popeye forearms and gray hair on their backs. "Lady boy!" they squeal. "Lady boy!" Some men pass by with girls one-third their age, swinging their hands together like a couple on a first date. Others cavort with three girls at once, the women all clutching their client like daughters competing for Daddy's attention. Fields Avenue, the main pedestrian drag in Angeles City, is a legacy of the time when this row of run-down
bars was the romping ground of restless young
American airmen stationed at Clark Air Base. The U.S. base closed in 1992, and the often-randy airmen have gone with it. But the girls, the sex, the roundthe-clock raunchiness remain. Only the customers have changed. A thriving sex tourism trade attracts foreign customers by the thousands in search of something they cannot find back home: girls young enough to be their granddaughters selling sex for the price of a burger and fries. A young dancer in tight red hip-hugger pants and matching sports bra acknowledges that Fields Avenue may not be pretty, but the money is good. She rolls her eyes at two overweight men who pass by looking like large reptiles dressed in children's clothing. Sure, the sex is disgusting, she says. But at least it's over quickly. Outside Koko Yoko, the doorman, a 33-yearold paraplegic, perches on a wheeled wooden pallet. He says his father was an American who once served at Clark, his mother a local girl. He contracted polio when he was 11 and has worked here ever since. The street, he says, takes care of him. Soon, an idle stripper climbs onto his back, rubbing her crotch into the back of his neck. All along Fields Avenue, the
come-on banners with their Web addresses advertise
good pay (up to $10 a day) for hostess jobs. But applicants must speak Korean, Japanese or Chinese. SEX SCENE IN ANGELES CITY TODAY John M. Glionna wrote in the Los Angeles Times, Once populated by men in their early 20s who started each day with 100 push-ups, the place is now home to older men who need help pushing themselves out of bed in the morning. Most are bused up from Manila, an hour away, on golf and sex package deals. This is no quasi-innocent boys' night out. Rather, it's a single-minded realm of wearylooking loners on a resolute hunt that smacks of feeding an addiction. Many are ex-military men reliving former glories, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper wannabes, some gathering at the local American Legion post before embarking into the night. There is a one-armed man, a retiree with a walker and another dapper gentleman who strolls along in a dress shirt, twirling an umbrella, whistling a private
tune. Many head to the bars with the red-light special
called "The Early-Release": Buy your girl 10 drinks and she's yours, no questions asked. Nobody asks questions here. Nobody gives their name. Credit cards are a joke; who wants to leave behind any economic traces that they ever set foot here? *** Nearby a saggy-faced Australian lights a cigarette. He's been in Angeles City for about a month, his last stop on a sex circuit from Bangkok to Manila after getting laid off from his electrician's job in Sydney. In Thailand, he says, the girls didn't speak the language. Manila hookers were too streetwise, the bars too spread out. But this is Easy Street. He can sit atop his bar stool and ogle hundreds of passing girls fresh from the countryside who perfect the tricks of their trade before moving on to The Show in Manila. The Australian signals a street vendor and buys some knockoff Viagra. He says he prefers the girls working one street over, who cost only 500 pesos, or about $10, apiece. "Anything goes here," he says, lighting another cigarette. He leans over to offer a bit of Fields Avenue inside information: "You can get a young girl here to do anything if you promise to marry her."
A balding man pulls up on his motorcycle, greeting
several other men loudly in German. They already have their catch, and girls jump on the back as the cycles roar off. At the Tourist Assistance Booth, Odysius Garche says the older customers are better behaved than the U.S. airmen were. "I just tell them: 'The girls are inside. Go make your own deal.' "Nearby, a chubby American with glasses eats a hot dog. He says he's a bar manager, but offers no details. He came to Angeles City from California, to follow up on a chat-room hookup. He ended up on Fields Avenue, drinking late with the dancers, hearing their stories. "This is clean fun," he says. "There's no sex shows. These girls are not slaves. They have minds of their own." Behind him, women call out from the doors of bars with names like the Doll House, Club Lancelot, Treasure Island, Club Cambodia, the Blue Nile and the Amsterdam. Suddenly, a group of twentysomething men storms past, laughing and armpunching. The news spreads and girls pop their heads out the doorways to catch a glimpse of boys their own age. One calls after them with a deal she hopes they can't refuse: "Free!" she says, laughing.
GROUP OF FORMER PROSTITUTES HELPS
PROSTITUTES IN THE PHILIPPINES In 2011, the Philippines Inquirer reported: As the night grows older, this part of the city becomes more alive. Women in low-cut, body-hugging clothes start appearing on the streets of Quezon Citys red light district. Some make their move on potential customers. Also in the area are other women dressed more conservatively in jeans and shirt. They are not around to earn money for the night. Belonging to Bagong Kamalayan Collective Inc. (BKCI), they have come to talk to their scantily clad sisters about their rights and to try to inspire them to rebuild their lives.Liza Gonzales, recounting the scene to the Philippine Daily Inquirer, knows what life is like in the red light district. She was once one of those scantily clad women working in that neighborhood. Most of the BKCI staff used to gimmick in Cubao and Quezon Avenue, Gonzales said in a recent interview. We want prostituted women to see that they can have a stable livelihood even if they quit, Gonzales said. Today, BKCIs original five members
have grown to 50. They have found a source of
income not just for themselves but for other victims of prostitution. BKCI recently opened a cooperative canteen. Hopefully our canteen becomes a big, big restaurant so we can help more women, Gonzales said in Filipino. The place is barely half the size of the other eateries along a street in Quezon City, but BKCI members talk about it with pride. What they have now is a far cry from what they had when the Inquirer first met the group in 2005. /*\ They had no canteen then. Engaged in food catering, all they had were a few utensils for cooking meals which they delivered to meetings of various other advocacy groups. To reheat the dishes, they would bring along a super kalan (liquefied petroleum gas tank with a built-in burner). For a time, they also offered laundry service, washing clothes with bare hands. Having no weighing scale, they would go to a nearby market to weigh their clients laundry. They also ventured into small businesses, such as selling homemade soap, but these didnt bring in much money. Three years ago, their money problems worsened. We didnt even have a centavo in the bank, Gonzales said. /*\
There were times when they had no money to buy
food. When you have nothing to feed your children, its tempting to turn to prostitution for fast money but because of our good foundation, we remained strong. We survived without going back, Gonzales said. Even as they struggled to live, they still conducted educational seminars and scoured red light districts in Quezon City and elsewhere on the chance they might help other women trapped in prostitution. Support from allied NGOs and their strong belief that there is life after prostitution kept them going, Gonzales said. /*\ Eventually members learned skills from livelihood training seminars. Some even attended baking classes at Miriam College. Initially, they thought of setting up a bakeshop. But they settled for a canteen because the girls found it difficult to make bread, Gonzales said. With their personal savings and donations from CATW-AP and other supporters, the group earlier this year finally managed to open their 9-square-meter canteen. Their profit and donations help them pursue their mission, support their families and send themselves and their children to school. /*\
Gonzales is the only founder left in the organization.
Carrying thermos, packets of instant coffee and bread, BKCI members still pound the streets of red light districts. Over coffee, they would talk with prostitution victims about laws protecting womens rights and other issues. Most of them are not aware of their rights. When authorities take them to the precinct, they assume that cases are already filed against them even without any inquest, Gonzales said. Afraid to stay behind bars, women simply give cash and their cell phones or, worse, give cops sexual favors in exchange for their freedom. /*\ BKCI and CATW-AP are lobbying for the passage of the anti-prostitution bill, which shifts criminal liabilities from prostituted persons to customers, pimps, brothel and nightclub owners and law enforcement officers. The measure has been pending in Congress for 11 years. Gonzales resents calling women in prostitution sex workers or prostitutes. We call them prostituted women because prostitution is not a job but a violation of human rights. Gonzales said her group did not force women to leave their trade. They have to reach the point when they no longer want to be
there. We have healed our wounds, Gonzales said.
We may not be able to forgive those who abused us, those who raped us. But to be able to heal, to go back to the community and freely express ourselves and fight for our rights, we feel blessed. PROSTITUTES HELPED PROSTITUTE GROUP
BY
THE
FORMER
The Philippines Inquirer reported: Gina (not her real
name), one of the survivors that the BKCI had plucked from the streets, recalled a time when she could not even pay the rent for her familys apartment and she had beg the landlord not to throw them out into the streets. In those hard times, other members lived in the CATW-AP office. One of them, Rem (also a pseudonym), was attending high school and had to sleep in the directors office, where CATW-AP employees also worked. Gina has five children who are all studying. Her eldest is now in college. Rem, 25, said: Before, I could not even imagine myself going back to school. It seemed impossible. She is now pursuing a bachelor degree in cooperatives at Polytechnic University of the
Philippines. Her sister, 20-year-old Rose (also not her
real name) and also a survivor from prostitution, is now a fourth year high school student at Miriam College for adult education. The two sisters want to take up courses on social development so they can better assist victims of sex trafficking. With diplomas and newly acquired skills, some members have left BKCI to focus on their own lives. But others have remained because we need to continue fighting for the rights of other victims of prostitution and be their voice while they are still in the trade, Gonzales said. Said Gina: I am most fulfilled because I am no longer on the streets.