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By Bong S. Sarmiento
Philippine Human Rights Reporting Project

GENERAL SANTOS CITY—Sheila, Valerie and Bridget (not their real names) hail from poor families here and have set their sights to as far as Manila, Brunei and Japan for jobs as domestic helpers to support their families back home.

But instead of finding work as domestic helpers, they ended up as prostitutes and their recruiters – human traffickers — have simply disappeared into thin air.

Promised heaven, they were delivered instead into a living hell.

The trio’s cases were among the 11 filed as of last December in the courts here since the Local Inter-Agency Task Force against Trafficking in Person (LIATFAT) was created by the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2003.

The crime is defined by law as being the recruitment, transportation, transfer or harboring, or receipt of persons with or without the victim’s consent or knowledge, within or across national borders by means of threat or use of force, or other forms of coercion, abduction, fraud, deception abuse of power or position.

It includes having control over another person for the purpose of exploitation including sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery, servitude or the removal or sale of organs.

Violation of the act entails an imprisonment of six years to life imprisonment and a fine of between PhP 500,000 – PhP 2 million.

Dubbed “Tuna Capital of the Philippines,” General Santos City in southern Mindanao is considered a trafficking “hotspot” because of the proliferation of bars and transit houses, according to the Visayan Forum Foundation, a non-government organization that works to monitor and curb the crime. The city with its large seaport is a traditional crossing point to nearby Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia.

But on top of its strategic location, human trafficking thrives in this city because of effective parental consent, according to Rebecca Magante, chief of the local social welfare and development office and secretariat head of LIATFAT.

“The sad fact is that parents egg their children on when they are approached by these people in the hope they will send back money to the family,” she says.

According to Magante, human trafficking is a problem in 21 of the city’s 26 barangays (villages).

“Victims in previous years have been children, but for 2005 to 2007, adults have become the primary victims. Trafficking cuts across all ages,” Magante says. Of the 204 reported cases of human trafficking between 2003 and 2007, 87 were minors. The great majority were female.

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