`A Form Of Mass Murder'

THE Third World is not a place but a condition girls with nothing to live on but their bodies are perhaps as numerous, now, in places in eastern Europe as in the more traditional prostitute providing countries. But an organised sex tourism industry, where tours come in from abroad, requires a local infrastructure.

In the Philippines, it so happens US global interests demanded an air base (Clark) and a naval base (Subic), near Manila. The servicemen gone now, but they left Manila and the towns that grew around the bases fully experienced in selling sex to arriving plane loads. The city and the towns have known no other prosperity.

The Ramos government has turned both Subic and Clark over to private investment for development as "world economic zones". This strategy has not so far benefited the poor, and certainly not the women who were "entertainers" when the Americans were in the Philippines.

Increased tourism is a declared goal of the Philippines' development plan. An authoritative recent survey of the bases tourist future ends "Clark is also planned to become the gambling mecca of Asia. With the influx of foreign visitors in the region, it is more likely that prostitution will prosper again."

Already, prostitution is beginning to flourish again in the town of Olongapo, near Subic. There, the economics benefits of the jobs the Americans used to give on the Subic base have gone, but the native Subic Freeport management is encouraging the US navy to return for port visits, and sailors are seen again in the bars and clubs.

You can get special private buses, any day of the week, from downtown Manila to Angeles, the town at Clark. Last year there were more than 5,000 registered "entertainers" in Angeles, even though the Americans have been gone four years. It is a hard life, being an "entertainer". ("Entertainer", not "prostitute" prostitution is illegal in the Philippines.)

According to a report by the Preda Foundation on an undercover visit to Angeles, "the customers select a girl from dozens of young girls dancing on a bar top. They sip beer with a young girl on their knee or in their arms. Outside on the streets, 12 and 13 year old children were offering themselves to tourists.

"We met a middle aged foreigner with a small 12 year old on his way to a cheap hotel. At another time we met Angelita. She is from an impoverished family and was earning money to support them. She started working at 13 in the, Superhead bar but left because she was badly treated by the owner. She did not want to leave the streets despite our offer of schooling and financial assistance."

The Preda Foundation, run by an Irish priest, Father Shay Cullen, campaigns against child prostitution. But there is nothing else the girls can do. An independent report on Angeles says that when the Americans went "there was no clear alternative livelihood. With the withdrawal of the bases prostituted women had the greatest difficulty in gaining entry into the social and economic mainstream".

The money the girls earn does no more than keep them selves and their dependents at subsistence level. The profit accumulated by the bar owners Australians, some of them female, and retired American servicemen.

Nobody, in the Philippines or out of it, is seriously opposed to a whole town like Angeles being a site for the buying and selling of bodies. This despite the statistics for drug abuse, disease, TB, and HIV positive conditions, which show that mass prostitution of poor women is a form of mass murder. Australian feminists, apparently, did recently go to Angeles, to confront at least the Australian bar owners. But the world in general accepts as perfectly normal the prostitution of a whole society of impoverished women by relatively wealthy men.

THE only aspect of prostitution which arouses any moral indignation any more is child prostitution. This has become an issue in Ireland, not least because certain Columban Fathers have been raising consciousness about the Philippines in general for some time. Then, many people heard of the pitiful death of Rosario, aged 12, from the effects of a vibrator breaking inside her when she was being used for sex. Then, Father Shay Cullen particularly in an appearance on Kenny Live on RTE last autumn attracted attention to his work for children and against their abusers, at a time when Ireland itself was beginning to grasp some of the truths about child abuse and paedophiles.

Fianna Fail Deputies Eoin Ryan and John O'Donoghue have a Sexual offences (Jurisdiction) Bill currently before the Dail. It makes sexual offences against children by Irish citizens or residents, committed in other countries punishable in Ireland as if the offences had been committed in Ireland. This kind of legislation has been adopted by the governments of several countries. Already, in Sweden, a Swede has been convicted for an offence against a Thai child, after the Swede got out of Thailand itself unscathed. In the Philippines, paedophiles 40 in the last 10 years have always been deported back to their countries of origin in the rare instances when they could not bribe the police and other authorities to turn a blind eye. But if an Irish child abuser were deported back here now, the Ryan/O'Donoghue Bill, which has all party support, would ensure that a prosecution could at least be contemplated.

In his speech introducing the Bill, Eoin Ryan said "We must let it be known that sex with underage and prepubescent children, boys and girls, no matter where it takes place, no matter how far from home, no matter how blurred the circumstance, is child prostitution, is paedophilia, is illegal and will be exposed and the perpetrators imprisoned in Ireland."

Another way of coming at the problem has been found by Dr Mary Henry. She has presented to the Seanad a "Child Sex Tours Bill". In this Bill a child means a person under the age of 16 years. It makes it an offence to organise travel or to publish any information "with the intention of facilitating" child sexual abuse. What exactly "child sexual abuse" means in the Act is graphically and unsparingly defined. It includes for example, the non penetrative but violent acts allegedly carried out on little girls by an Australian tourist in the Philippines part of whose trial in Olongapo The Irish Times witnessed. Dr Henry has seen in Manila, the very young boys and girls the foreign men flaunt.

These worthy initiatives are part of a First World awakening to the dire situation of children, especially in some Asian countries. There is a London based Coalition on Child Prostitution and Tourism which is calling for raised awareness, a change in the UK legislation to allow prosecutions at home for offences committed abroad, and for pressure to be put on questionable practices in the tourism and travel industry.

An international Congress on the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in Tourism will be held in Sweden later this year.

But it is extremely difficulty to take consolation from any of those efforts when one is actually with abused children, holding their slight bodies to your own, and talking nonsense to their fascinated faces.

MUCH of Manila looks like a place from which government has long fled, taking anything of value with it. The streets are pot holed and broken. The electricity supply fails. In a shelter for street children, in a muddy, broken down yard under a fly over, there is a schoolroom but no teachers. Teachers were promised, but no money came from the government to pay them. Volunteers do what they can. And funds from a French charity, Partage, help pay the eight staff who will try to bring the children who live in this yard some not more than babies to the age of 16. Then they must get out, to make way for new young ones.

These are immensely lucky children 20 saved out of thousands and thousands. But the way some of the little ones wait inside the gate, pressed against it, suggests that some of them long for the freedom of the streets.

The children jostle each other to cling to and kiss the passing strangers. They shyly confess to the most heartbreakingly unlikely ambitions. "I would like to be an air stewardess," a girl says standings there in her bare feet. She will be lucky if she can keep herself in some dignity, perhaps by washing clothes.

Most of the children in the shelter have been physically or sexually abused. Even the baby, sucking her thumb, has been used. And no case has ever been brought against their abusers.

The lawyer who does the shelter's books explains "There is usually no medico legal report. And then, the testimony of the children is rather vague. You could maybe take a raped girl to a private doctor to get a medical report. But then, how could you afford to pay the doctor to come to court?" The year before last there were 1,182 cases of family violence, including incest, reported in Manila. None was pursued.

An hour away, in a district of car repair shops and pecking cockerels and tea stalls and broken billboards, the woman who is in house counsel in a women's crisis centre explains the realities to which First World legislation and FirstWorld congresses are somewhat tangential. There is a new Child Abuse Law in the Philippines, certainly. But the irony is that investigating prosecutors have decided it applies only to foreign paedophiles (not one of whom has ever been convicted) and they will not use it in the far more numerous instances of incestuous and abusing Filipino men.

The counsel in the women's crisis centre recently took a case against a 19 year old boy. He had seduced a 12 year old and when she got pregnant he repeatedly tried to induce an abortion. The baby was born with abnormalities as a consequence of his actions. The counsel wanted him prosecuted as an abuser of children both the 12 year old mother and the unborn baby. But the Prosecutor's Office would only bring a charge of "simple seduction". The boy got six months.

DISRESPECT for children within the judicial system is merely a reflection of a general disrespect. Children are imprisoned with adults. Police torture children in custody. Everyone knows, they know the name of the particular water torture used. Street children themselves torture non street children when they are thrown in together in the government detention centres.

This lawyer's own first baby is just behind us, being cooed over adoringly by her colleagues as we talk in the garden. She has moved on to tell of a two year old who recently died, her abdomen ruptured, from the injuries inflicted during rape by her father. The contrast between her own loved and protected baby, and the child she is talking about, is evident to this lawyer, and she has to pull herself together before she can go on with the interview.

It beggars belief that men will travel thousands of miles to add to the misery of Filipino children. But they do...

Late that night, a water truck was cruising down a central avenue of the city. The slogan painted on it "Keep Manila Clean and Green" was almost funny, since it is hardly possible to imagine a more dirty or more polluted city. Then I saw that the hose was flushing small children out of their lairs in the broken flower beds along the avenue. Those are their homes.

The causes of paedophilia may be obscure. But the cause of child prostitution is absolutely clear. It is caused by poverty. And poverty is caused by injustice.

Those small and completely vulnerable children are on the streets because not one of them is worth as much, to anyone who has ever met them, as a pair of Imelda Marcos's shoes.