At 14, Ann is too young to be worrying about getting pregnant or acquiring AIDS, but she is. That is why she uses a condom whenever she has a customer.

She has become so good at it that the latter “does not even have to know that he has been sheathed,” she says.

“We’ve been taught how,” says Anne (not her real name), who, when she turned 13, was recruited to work in a bar in Sto. Tomas, Davao del Norte, host to banana plantation workers and penal colony guards on rest and recreation and located more than 60 kilometres north of Davao City—a major metropolis in southeastern Mindanao.

Anne is one of a growing number of minors making up ‘Lawig Bubai’ (‘Sail On, Women’), a people’s organisation of prostituted children and women in this city. It was set up in 1993 as a result of the peer education programme of Talikala (‘Chain’), Inc., a non-governmental organisation assisting commercial sex workers, including children, within the Mindanao region, one of three major island groups in the Philippines.

Lawig Bubai’s members, some of whom are survivors of prostitution while others are still engaged in the world’s so-called oldest trade, reaches out to other women and children in the city’s populous and prostitution-prone areas.

At Lawig Bubai members are taught ‘survival techniques’, like how to slip a condom on a client without him noticing it. There they also learn about reproductive health and how to take care of themselves.

Anne says the woman who recruited her is based in the same neighbourhood where she lives with her grandparents. She describes her as “old” and a familiar figure.

It is the same woman who recruited her friend, Sarah, also 14.

Anne says the woman assured her work was waiting for her—cooking barbecue—in the city, which paid 200 pesos (4.20 U.S. dollars) a day. Such a sum is a bonanza to her penurious household. Her grandfather is a housepainter, who thus does not have regular work. Her grandmother takes in laundry and earns little. Anne has been living with them since she was born. Her mother was her age when she gave birth to Ann.

She and Sarah ended up in a bar.

Sarah recounts that she and Ann “were simply told they served barbecue there.” That same night, they were forced to dance and perform other entertainment acts expected of bar girls before the male customers gathered inside the establishment. Both girls say there were more teen girls like them in that bar run by a man who would force himself on them whenever he wanted.

“Manyak man ‘tong akong amo (Our employer was a maniac),” Anne says in her native Visayan dialect with a tone of disgust.

There is another bar nearby, the girls say, that also employs young girls. A bar further uphill, they say, has “older girls”, that is, 18 years old and up.

Dang, 14, has a story of her own, although not entirely different from those of the two other girls. She admits to hanging out with the wrong crowd before she turned into a bonafide teenager, started smoking when she was nine and drinking rhum at 12. “That’s how it is when your mother doesn’t love you,” she says.

When she was 13, her friends introduced her to a would-be patron, a widower in Agdao district, who gave them money just to be “stimulated”. It was not long before tongues began wagging in her neighbourhood about her gang’s unusual activities. Her parents soon drove her out of their home.

She has been walking the streets since then, making money from anyone who wants her “services,” including taxi drivers who pay 20 pesos (42 U.S. cents) for a “shine” (street lingo for oral and manual stimulation).

Ann, Sarah and Dang’s collective plight is all too familiar to Inday’s teenage daughters. The 36-year-old mother of nine did not learn soon enough that the money she would occasionally get from her daughters, ages 14, 15 and 16, was not from some benevolent “uncle”.

She learned about her girls’ activities from a concerned neighbour. “It was as if my heart was literally wrenched out,” says Inday, who gave only her nickname. “Whenever I asked them where they got their money, they’d only say it was given to them by ‘uncle.”

In the slums of Davao, ‘uncle’ is a term of endearment and respect the young ones use to refer to an older male, as differentiated from ‘kuya’ for an older boy or young man.

Inday has four more boys, ages 13, eight, seven and four, and two more girls, 10 years and four months old, respectively. Her family’s hardscrabble existence has been made more difficult by the rising cost of living these days. Her husband is a company driver who earns around 300 pesos (six U.S. dollars) a day, hardly enough to feed his large brood. “I don’t know how to stretch our budget anymore,” she says. “We often just make do with porridge.”

Inday’s family has also taken breakfast out of their daily meals, leaving them with two, assuming there is even enough food. When there is not, her children—at least those of them who still go to school—are forced to skip classes. “Their teachers know that when the children are absent, that means we don’t have food,” she says.

Because of his frequent absences, her 13-year-old boy does not want to go to school anymore, opting to go around scavenging for scrap iron. Her three teenage girls have all quit school, the oldest of them reaching only as high as second year high school, the second to the oldest, fourth grade and the youngest of them, second grade.

Amid a worsening economic situation, it appears more children are being lured into the flesh trade.

Both Lawig Bubai and Talikala have observed an alarming rise this year in the number of prostituted girls in Davao City. With or without data, they know the numbers have gone up significantly just by looking around the city. Belen Antoque, chairperson of Lawig Bubai, says her group does not have the resources to embark on an in-depth study to determine the extent of child and teenage prostitution taking place in this city, a prime tourist destination in the country.

“The numbers are increasing across all ages, and these include the children,” says Antoque. They have at least 30 more members this year, 27 of whom are minors, she says. Of their total membership of 630 this year—their ages ranging from 13 to 57—10 percent are minors.

“A lot of recruitment activity (enticing girls into the flesh trade) is going on as well,” says Antoque, who adds that there are more pick-up spots for prostituted girls today than last year.

Whereas prostitution hot spots used to be confined to certain areas such as major streets and commercial establishments, today even side streets and bus terminals have become hangouts of girls on the lookout for male customers. “That’s why we can say there are a lot of them now,” declares Antoque.

Prostituted children in these hangouts appear to be just children hanging out with peers, says Jeanette Ampog, executive director of Talikala. “Sometimes all you see is a group of around 20 children. You’ll think they are just friends hanging out.”

Ampog worries that not only have the hangouts expanded to include sites that are not ordinarily associated with prostitution, the girls are getting younger and younger too, she says.

Both Antoque and Ampog say their respective organisations encourage their wards to return to school, scouring the city for sponsors who are willing to fund their education, believing it will help bring them out of the vicious cycle of poverty. Both groups, which share the same office in the city, also offer livelihood programmes that teach their members entrepreneurial skills.

Fourteen-year-old Dang has learned to make key chains alongside manicure and pedicure. She hopes these newly acquired skills will help her pursue higher education sooner or later. “I dream of taking up social work,” she says.

(*This feature was produced by IPS Asia-Pacific under a series on the impact of the global economic crisis on children and young people, in partnership with UNICEF East Asia and the Pacific.)

“I get an allowance of 50 pesos (about one U.S. dollar) a day, of which 20 pesos (40 U.S. cents) is for fare,” says 17-year-old Dana Jane Estrada.

The second-year college student in a state university in the suburbs of Davao City—a major metropolis in the southeastern part of Mindanao, the second largest island in the Philippines—is taking up Bachelor of Science in Community Development. She is the eldest of three siblings that mainly depend on their father, a passenger jeepney driver, and their mother, a cook for poultry farm workers.

The remaining 30 pesos (63 U.S. cents) is spent for lunch, afternoon snacks, photocopies, Internet fees, and expenses for field work, she says.

Her classmate Jean Batausa, 18, gets even less: 30 pesos. She manages to squeeze her budget by walking home after classes and thus spends only five pesos for a tricycle fare every day. “I do that so I can save,” she says in the vernacular. The rest of her ‘baon’, or allowance, is spent on projects, school supplies, subject modules, and activity T-shirts.

She only rides the tricycle—a motorcycle with a sidecar, which is used for short distances and on smaller roads—to school in the morning when she is in a rush. But she admits there are times when she has to deny herself even such small luxury.

Batausa is the third in a family with four children, who all rely on the income of their father, a chainsaw operator. He only earns whenever somebody wants a tree cut, which is not every day. Her stay-at-home mother earns no income. So, whenever her father does not have work, they run to her aunt.

Both girls admit budget is tighter this year than in the past, although both cannot quantify just how stretched it is.

Batausa says her family “spends only for what’s really necessary” while Estrada says her family has had to forego going to the beach or mall together. The latter adds she has become used to her budget, such that she even manages to save some of it. She has to, she says, because there are days when her school expenses exceed her daily allowance.

Despite the tight budget, both are determined to finish their studies. They have their families to help, they say.

“After graduation, we have to help our parents. Then after that, we’ll help the community,” Batausa says. They intend to do that by sticking to the simple teenage life they know. “We get by with a little music, conversations, bonding in some friend’s house.”

With just a dollar a day—or less—and lots of school expense each day, these two girls are simply scraping by. Yet they are still better off.

Take Sunshine, for example.

“I’m so hungry, ‘Ate’ (a title that denotes kinship and literally means ‘older sister’),” says the 13-year-old girl in her native Visayan dialect as she walks into the interview an hour late. At 10:30 a.m., she says she has yet to have a breakfast.

The staff at Tambayan Children’s Center Inc., a drop-in center for street girls in the central business district of this city, offers her and four other girls a cup of hot chocolate and a cupcake each—hardly enough for her grumbling stomach, prompting her to step out looking for rice, the Philippines’ staple food.

The girls, ages 13-16, belong to a gang in their community—reason enough why they asked to be identified only by their nicknames. While they get help and encouragement from Tambayan (‘hangout’ in Filipino) to remain in school, Alona, 15, says several of their peers have dropped out. “They stopped because it’s difficult to remain in school when you are hungry,” she says.

Those who manage to stay in school have to deal not just with incessant hunger but also the constant worries of not meeting their school needs, what with school projects left and right.

“Each project per subject costs around 20 pesos (40 U.S. cents), and we have several subjects in a day,” Sunshine says.

Asked how they manage to deal with this extra expense, 15-year-old Leah says that most of the time they just appeal to the understanding of their teachers. “But if you don’t have a project, you still get low grades,” she says.

Like many other countries, especially in the world’s poor regions, the Philippines has not been immune to the impact of the global economic crisis. As of January, there were 2.855 million jobless Filipinos, up from 2.675 million in the same month last year, according to the National Statistics Office (NSO). Often the worst hit in any financial crunch are the poor, who comprise a big chunk of the country’s estimated population of 92 million, according to the NSO.

Poverty afflicts 27.9 million Filipinos or 4.7 million families, said Undersecretary Luwalhati Pablo of the Department of Social Welfare and Development during her presentation at the Third China-ASEAN Forum on Social Development and Poverty Reduction, held late last month in Vietnam. Thirty percent of the total population is unable to meet its basic food and non-food requirements, she added.

“We used to be able to buy two kilos of rice for the same amount that we are spending now for one and a half,” Alona, the eldest of in a brood of seven, says.

At the Centre, the girls look no different from one’s average teen, rowdy and full of fun—wholesome fun, that is. But that is only because they must abide by its rules, foremost of which is the no smoking restriction.

Outside, in their communities, vices abound along with girl-boy relationships that have led to many teenage live-in relationships—a convoluted escape from their extreme hardship at home.

Then, too, there is the problem of prostitution. Alona claims she has seen an increase in the number of prostituted girls in and around her community. “We can see them when we walk around with our gang; there are more of them these days,” she recounts.

But while she and others may openly speak of this social malady, some girls chose to keep mum about another societal ill.

“I no longer have a mother, and I do not live with my father,” Elsie, 17, says. She has been living with her ‘barkada’, or peers, for two years now.

Experts say domestic violence is an unspoken problem that girls like Elsie have to live with—or choose to escape from. Children, because of their age, are the most vulnerable sector in society, but they become even more vulnerable when placed in a situation of dire economic straits, says Carla Averilla-Canarias, supervising advocacy officer of Tambayan.

“First is the vulnerability of a child to be abused physically, because parents tend to be short-tempered when they don’t have money and food,” she says. It is even worse for girls, she adds. “There is sexual abuse and exploitation. They are prone to become victims of prostitution, trafficking and pornography, to become dropouts and be involved in drug and substance abuse.”

A study conducted by Tambayan, covering 255, girls in 2007, showed that all respondents experienced some form of abuse and that one of every two were involved in prostitution or at a high risk of being prostituted.

The rest of the findings were no less disconcerting: Four in every five were not in school, four out of every 10 experienced physical and emotional punishment at home, in school and in their communities; one in every five had been apprehended for curfew violation; involvement in gang riots, solvent sniffing, drugs, theft and snatching were not uncommon; and one in every 10 had sexually transmitted infections, with some having had early pregnancies.

As money becomes tighter, situations become worse, forcing children to leave home and yearn for the company of their peers, there being neither food nor solace in their homes.

(*This feature was produced by IPS Asia-Pacific under a series on the impact of the global economic crisis on children and young people, in partnership with UNICEF East Asia and the Pacific.)