Andrea was 14 years old the first time a voice over the Internet told her to take off her clothes.
“I was so embarrassed because I don’t want others to see my private parts,” she said. “The customer told me to remove my blouse and to show him my br**sts.”
She was in a home in Negros Oriental, a province known for its scenic beaches, tourism and diving. But she would know none of that beauty. Nor would she know the life she’d been promised.
Andrea, which is not her real name, said she had been lured away from her rural, mountain village in the Philippines by a cousin who said he would give her a well-paid job as a babysitter in the city. She thought she was leaving her impoverished life for an opportunity to earn money to finish high school. Instead, she became another victim caught up in the newest but no less sinister world of s*xual exploitation – cyber-s*x trafficking.
Misled
After arriving at the two-story house in Negros Oriental — located in the central Visayas region of the Philippines — Andrea found that her new home would become both workplace and prison. She was shocked by what she saw.
“The windows were covered so it was dark. There was a computer and a camera where unclad girls would say words to seduce their mainly foreign customers.”
She said customers would ask the girls to perform sexually with each other.
For the next few months, Andrea said she was one of seven girls, between age 13 and 18, who spent day and night satisfying the s*xual fantasies of men around the world. Paying $56 per minute, male customers typed their instructions onto a computer and then watched via a live camera as the girls performed s*xual acts. She said the girls were often forced to watch the men they served on screens.
Police threat
Andrea dreamed of returning home but her employer, an uncle, slept downstairs and kept the front door locked. “I was told if I tried to escape, the police would put me in jail. I believed it. I was very innocent — I grew up without TV and had never left my village before,” she explained.
Convinced that earning enough money to finish her education was the only way to help her family out of poverty, Andrea forced herself to work. But “doing whatever the customer asked” eventually took its toll. “I wanted to cry but I could not. I wanted to cover myself with a blanket. I had goose bumps because of the shame. I would feel like I was floating,” she recalled.
Andrea’s story is only one of many playing out every day in a nation where the conditions — widespread poverty, an established s*x trade, a predominantly English-speaking, technically-literate population and widespread Internet access — have made it easy for crimes like this to flourish.
Difficult to stop
Jo Alforque, Advocacy Officer with End Child Prostitution, Child p****graphy and Trafficking of Children for s*xual Purposes (ECPAT Philippines), an NGO working to combat child s*xual exploitation, explained that because cyber-s*x dens can be located anywhere – from Internet cafes to private homes and offices — they are extremely difficult to identify. Anyone who has a computer, internet and a Web cam can be in business.
Whether part of large international criminal syndicates or smaller operations, their independent nature and lack of coordinated structure make it easy for cyber-s*x operations to remain hidden, she said.
According to Andrey Sawchenko, National Director at the International Justice Mission Philippines, the private nature of the technology allows the crime to take place in a venue that law enforcement can’t easily access – and that makes it harder to gather evidence against perpetrators.
Although no official statistics exist, Ruby Ramores, a former Executive at the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking (IACAT), believes tens of thousands of women are involved in the industry and that most of the girls are recruited by friends, family — sometimes even by their parents. Poverty can often drive parents to sell the services of their children, she said.
Family pressure
Delia (not her real name) now aged nine, said she was just 7 years old when her mother made her undress in front of their computer at home. “I stood there unclad. That’s all I wanted to do, not the other things, like when mama said to spread my legs, I didn’t want to,” she recalled. “I would be scared of my mother. Because before I didn’t know what she was doing was bad, I only knew later on.”
Rescued after three years when her father found out about her mother’s cyber-s*x operation, Delia is now under the care of a government-run temporary shelter for abused young girls and spoke to CNN in the company of her social worker.
According to Ramores, parents who submit their children to cyber-s*x — especially the ones from rural areas — think this is something that won’t violate their children in the way that traditional s*x crimes do because it is just a camera and just the body being shown, and there is no touching with anyone else. “So, it’s a better option than being pushed to prostitution which has physical interaction,” she said.
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