Starting Points: Negros Occidental

Sep 1, 2009

Negros is ‘hot spot’ for human trafficking - Manila Times

NGO launches Step UP campaign, a preventive program to curb problem among youth sector in province

By Ma. Ester L. Espina, Correspondent

Negros Occidental joins the list of provinces on the watch lists of groups working to fight human trafficking and worse, has become not just a source of persons being trafficked in various forms of human slavery, but as another “destination.”

Visayan Forum Foundation executive director, Ma. Cecilia Flores-Oebanda said that their rescue and monitoring operation has indicated that the problem has now been categorized as the third-largest underground business and a $30-million industry.

“This is not anymore a simple migration problem but we have been seeing more and more of these trafficked victims sold and resold many times over,” she added.

She said several residents hailing from Negros Occidental and Bacolod City have fallen victims to human trafficking “many of them ending up in the prostitution trade.”

Oebanda, a native of Negros and was formerly a rebel commander at the height of the insurgency said many of those they have rescued and interviewed come from the CHICKS area in southern Negros and from Banago in Bacolod.

“Worse, and the local government should know this, the province is not only a hotspot for source of trafficked persons but has become a destination,” citing that they have monitored night entertainment centers whose workers are mostly from other regions in the Visayas, said Oebanda.

Oebanda was in Bacolod recently for the launching of the STEP UP project that will be implemented locally by the Negros Ecological and Development Foundation (NEDF) in cooperation with Microsoft as a “preventive program” against human trafficking.

STEP UP, which means Stop Trafficking and Exploitation of People through Unlimited Potential, provides information technology and life skills to potential victims of human trafficking.

NEDF executive director, Roseo Depra, said they have established a STEP UP Learning Center in Barangay Handumanan which she said has been also cited as one of the major areas in Bacolod where recruiters would operate in to entice young boys and girls with hopes of employment in Manila and abroad but “unfortunately they end up in prostitution dens.”

For their first batch of STEP UP scholars, NEDF screened and chose 20 out-of-school youth residents in the area who will undergo a three-month program, which includes matching employment after graduation. In the next three years, Depra said they hope to see more than a thousand youth gainfully employed and helping in the anti-human trafficking advocacy work.

She recounted the tale of a 14-year-old girl from Samar who was recruited for domestic work in Manila but ended up in a prostitution den where she found 100 more girls like her in the flesh trade.

Oebanda said that while their early years focused mostly on rescue operations and legal cases against “head-hunters,” they have shifted direction toward prevention through a community-based program.

She acknowledged that the problem stems from economics and the promise of money which is why more and more of the younger set fall into the trap.

“We need to create a counter-move against this culture of deception and we hope that through STEP UP, we will be able to prevent thousands of youth fall victim to human traffickers,” she added.