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Child Prostitution In Olongapo
First Published: Reflections - Philippine Daily Inquirer Publication Date: 28th March 1992 Author's Name: Father Shay Cullen SSC The bases are closing down and a long history - an era, is coming to a close. What the future will bring no one is sure. I hope that we will see the end of Prostitution and especially child prostitution that flourished in Olongapo. Its not ended yet but perhaps the end is in sight. I want to share with you some of my personal experiences in the fight against child prostitution. I first arrived in the Philippines 22 years ago I was assigned to work in a Parish in Olongapo city. Fifty years ago Olongapo was a fishing village on Subic Bay. In 1969 I found there a sprawling honkey-tonk tourist town that was was hell bent on satisfying the demands of foreign tourists and sailors from the nearby U.S. Naval Base. The commercial sex industry was booming and left in its wake a flotsam of human misery and exploited people. I began to work helping young people from broken homes and those addicted to drugs. My first encounter was with a small boy, about 11 years old who came to confess he he was about to commit suicide and wanted a blessing and absolution. He had been sexually abused. I became aware of the thousands of young women drawn into prostitution and a life of misery and the hundreds if not thousands of children roaming the streets begging from sailors and tourists alike. They hung on to their pants and shirt-tails, they polished their shoes, they washed their cars, they carried their furniture and souvenirs and local pimps ever docile to the dollar made the children gratify the tourists desires for perverted sex. One tourist paedophile who was in jail pending a hearing was able to pay a pimp to bring a boy into his cell. Even though it was going on under my eyes I did not see it. I was ignorant about child prostitution. Nor did I know that many of the children had been sexually abused by their handlers and pimps before being sold to tourists. The children of poverty are made pay a high price for living on the streets. In Olongapo in the seventies and eighties they had a very rough time at the hands of the police then and many ended up beaten, jailed and some even executed by death squads paid to make the streets safe for the tourists. They still do - only last year a teenager was shot dead by police before a crowd in Olongapo . Compassion for children is rare and if they can't be exploited many in authority see them as pests to be eliminated or driven away. Child prostitution began somewhere and when the research is done I am sure there will much evidence to show that military prostitution in Asia has much to answer for. In Thailand as in the Philippines during the seventies there were many large US Military bases and for sure they played a part in the exploitation of the people in this part of Asia and helped spawn a culture of Asian prostitution that has grown to gigantic proportions including Child Prostitution. The AIDS epidemic is fast reaching the children too as sailors and tourists seek out younger and younger partners in the mistaken belief that minors don't have AIDS. If they do, its the adults who gave it to them. In Olongapo and in Thailand in those days the tourists were of many nationalities buying children for sex but the military mind and heart beats at a different rate. Many of them came to the commercial sex centers trying to forget the horrors that they had helped bring about in Vietnam. I am sure many were haunted by pictures of children running down the street burning from Napalm bombs. Even more recently in the Gulf war bomb shelters filled with civilians were seen on television disintegrating in a ball of fire. I am still haunted by these images myself but those who were part of it may have used children for sex to exorcise themselves. With children they were able to dominate and abuse without fear of retaliation, without being held responsible for their actions and in the knowledge that their superiors were ready to shield them from prosecution. Perverted pleasure was the currency of the day and children were bought and sold like cheap commodities used and then thrown away. At first I did not see the broken and bleeding bodies nor could I feel their absolute isolation and the pain of owning absolutely nothing in this world. Their next scrap of food had to fall from the rich man's table if they were lucky to be allowed to eat it. But there was much more I had to learn about the lives of children on the street. One day I was informed about a group of children in the Olongapo City hospital all suffering from advanced stages of venereal disease. The youngest was only nine, a Filipino-American child, and she and many others were victims of a child prostitution ring. But that story will wait for another column.
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