US-Arroyo regime: The Philippines' biggest pimp
The US-Arroyo regime is the biggest reason behind the intensification of prostitution in the Philippines. Its policies which have wrought extreme poverty drive growing numbers of women, children and even men into prostitution.
The pervasiveness of prostitution caught the public's eye anew when the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) revealed the shocking statistic that prostitution has emerged as the fourth largest source of income in the Philippines. GABRIELA has reported that there were 300,000 prostitutes in the Philippines in 1997. The number excludes part-time prostitutes, entertainers overseas and victims of sex trafficking. In 1998, the number grew to 400,000, equivalent then to the number of workers in the manufacturing sector. At that rate of increase, it would not be farfetched to say that there may be a million or more prostitutes in the country today.
But poverty alone, no matter how extreme, is not enough to propel prostitution to what it has become today in the Philippines�so pervasive, so organized and extremely profitable for syndicates.
Historically, it was severe poverty in close collusion with the US military bases' long stay in the Philippines and the government's aggressive promotion of tourism that caused the systematic proliferation of prostitution in the country.
It is estimated that by the mid-1980's, prostitution around the US' two large military bases in the country had already brought in up to $500 million. The hundreds of millions of dollars that the government expects to earn from the further growth of prostitution is definitely one of the reasons why the Arroyo regime has been seeking a permanent American military presence and the escalation of US military intervention in the country. Up to 10,000 American soldiers now regularly enter through 22 Philippine ports with the approval of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA).
The regime likewise uses the bodies of women and children as enticements to lure in foreign currency earnings from sex tourism.
In Olongapo City, there is still an estimated 15,000 prostitutes (equivalent to 8% of the city population) despite the closure of the US military base in Subic. Aside from catering to American soldiers aboard warships that dock occasionally in Subic, they serve a regular clientele which includes British, Irish, Australian, Japanese, Korean and other tourists.
It is also the Arroyo regime's official policy to urge women to go overseas as entertainers in Japan in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in remittances. There are at present up to 180,000 women entertainers in Japan who remit up to $200 million annually to the Philippines. Many of them fall victim to prostitution and other sexual abuses in the hands of the Yakuza criminal syndicate.
Meanwhile, there are as yet no estimates of the number of victims of cybersex�or pornography and prostitution on the internet. Through the internet and digital cameras, women and children are shown having sex or performing other lascivious acts for their clients to watch. Modern technology such as cellphones has now made it much easier to create and propagate pornography and more difficult to apprehend the perpetrators.
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