Asia-Pacific, Development & Aid, Headlines, Human Rights, Population

HONG KONG: Filipino Women Speak of Underground Sex Trade

Daisy C L Mandap

HONG KONG, Jun 12 2001 (IPS) - She was shaking like a leaf as she told her story, but Anna (not her real name) says she agreed to speak about it to spare other Filipino women in Hong Kong and elsewhere the horrors she went through.

Anna, 31, used to be among an unknown number of Filipino women in sex work in Hong Kong. She got to this former British colony after a series of misadventures that followed her quest to escape a life of grinding poverty in the southern Philippines.

At 17, she was recruited into the sex industry by agents of a brothel in the Philippine capital, Manila.

From there, Anna joined a syndicate preying on Japanese tourists in Malaysia, before going back to Manila where she heard of a group promising a monthly pay of 80,000 pesos (1,600 U.S. dollars) for those willing to work as bar girls in Hong Kong.

Because she had two fatherless sons to support by then, Anna jumped at the chance to make what she thought was “easy money”.

She arrived in Hong Kong on a tourist visa in 1984. She was met at the airport by a local Chinese man who hustled her off to a small, barred room in the seedy part of the busy Mong Kok district in the Kowloon peninsula, where four other Filipino women were being held.

Though no stranger to the illicit profession, Anna was shocked when told of what was expected of her: sex with a client every five minutes, any time of the day or night. If she did not meet her “quota” of 30 clients a day, she would not get any food.

Anna said the longest rest she had was two hours, in between meeting clients at the various guest houses where she was taken and guarded by an escort.

She said the girls who got sick were lucky in a way because they got to rest. Those who had their menstrual periods did not get the same privilege: they were injected with a drug that stopped the bleeding.

For the next three days, Anna did as she was told. Then she got lucky. A client who took pity on her paid for five hours’ worth of sex — enough to give her time to get to the airport with the taxi money also given her by the Good Samaritan, and fly back to Manila.

Shocking as this story might be, it is by far not unique, says one church-backed concern group in Hong Kong. The Mission for Filipino Migrant Workers (MFMW) says that as recently as about two years ago, it had sheltered two to three Filipinos each year who were in the same situation as Anna.

MFMW chair Cynthia Tellez says the fact that their help was not sought for the same reason last year was not likely to be due to a stop in the trafficking of Filipinos to Hong Kong. “It’s probably because the syndicates behind this have become more sophisticated in their techniques,” Tellez explains.

In the past, she says, syndicate members would pose as relatives of the Filipino women brought in for sex work, so they were usually granted visitors’ visas of two to three months.

But most of the women are now apparently brought in on six- month entertainer’s visas, or more surreptitiously, on two-year domestic workers’ visas.

This was the case of a group of women interviewed by ‘The Sun’, a publication for the Filipino community in Hong Kong, of which more than 100,000 are domestic workers. It emerged from the interview that some of the Filipino women seen hanging out in the bars of the red-light district of Wan Chai are part of a well- guarded group of sex workers with domestic workers’ visas.

The publication quoted the women as saying the syndicate holds all their documents, including passports and fictitious work contracts. Gang members allegedly take care of looking for dummy employers for the women, and of ensuring that their documents are kept up to date.

What sets them apart from Anna and those working the seedier parts of the territory is that most of these women have now come to take for granted what they are doing for a living.

The main reason is money. Staff interviewed at a remittance centre, where another group of Filipino women plying Wan Chai’s bars regularly sends money to the Philippines, say each girl remits at least 10,000 Hong Kong dollars (1,280 U.S. dollars) a month to her family back home.

This, compared to the minimum monthly salary of only 3,670 Hong Kong dollars (470 U.S. dollars) for a domestic worker here.

The women also say they get help and advice from their handlers in ensuring that they do not fall foul of Hong Kong’s law, or have accidental pregnancies.

All of them have free access to condoms and other birth control devices, given not just by the syndicate that recruited them from the Philippines, but also by outreach groups that work hand-in- hand with the Hong Kong government and bar owners.

At least one such group even has the relatively pricey female condoms to give away, courtesy of some of the 10 government-run “female” clinics across the territory.

At any of these clinics, anyone with a Hong Kong identity card — including most girls working the bars in the territory — can get free advice and check-up. No referral letter is required, and confidentiality is assured.

There are also “drop-in centres” for people with HIV, like the one run by the St John’s Cathedral in Central district. Staff at the centre, however, say that “not a lot” of victims seek their advice, so the centre is now largely used for lectures on HIV/AIDS, including one given to 100 migrant workers last year.

Compared to many other host countries for migrant workers, Hong Kong is more tolerant of those in the sex industry. Its statute books do not cite “prostitution” as a crime — rather, it is “soliciting for immoral purposes” that is forbidden.

Those who want prostitution legalised here thus claim that many of the women who pick up clients in bars are not doing anything illegal as they are not “soliciting”, but only agree, when asked, to engage in sex with another consenting adult.

It is probably this reasoning that makes it difficult for law enforcers to detain Filipino sex workers.

“There are no more Filipino prostitutes as far as we’re concerned,” says a spokesman for the police department, when asked for statistics on arrests.

Police records indeed show that no Filipino woman has been arrested for prostitution for the past year and a half. Of the 3,665 women charged with “soliciting for immoral purposes” last year, most were mainland Chinese holding two-way travel permits to Hong Kong. Three hundred sixty others were classified as foreigners, but not one was Filipino. . More recently, a five-day police sweep in Mong Kok and Yuen Long district near the Chinese border netted 400 sex workers, pimps and brothel operators. Most were mainland Chinese, and the rest, either Thais or Vietnamese. Not one was a Filipino.

But Anna is not comforted by these figures. She believes that at least one white slavery gang, the one that took her to Hong Kong, is still very much in operation.

Months after she returned to Hong Kong recently with the British man she met and married in the Philippines, she was accosted by a group of men in a quiet road near her house. Without a word, the men beat her black and blue and knocked off some of her teeth.

Anna knew better than to ask for an explanation or report the matter to the police. The warning, she says, was clear.

 
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