Child rights and WCST

I wrote the other Wednesday about the exposé of WCST in the Philippines by Terre des Hommes Netherlands (TdH), leading to international calls for governments to crack down. WCST means “webcam child sex tourism,” where minors are made to perform live shows on the Internet for pedophile customers.

I thought I had heard the worst until Peter Dupont, a Belgian journalist, sent me two of his articles that shocked me. The pictures were properly pixelized (blurred) but were still gruesome.  There were accounts, too, of children recruiting classmates, and of incest.

How did we get to be so depraved?

WCST is only the latest in a longer history of child sexual exploitation.  In the 1970s and 1980s Ermita’s red-light district in Manila included a street, Sta. Monica, notorious for pedophiles and child sex workers.

Pagsanjan in Laguna was also the subject of many news articles and TV documentaries in the 1980s, with the town’s residents able to identify houses put up by pedophiles to support boys and their families.

Pedophile paradise

But it wasn’t just Pagsanjan. The entire country was paradise for pedophiles and it was not uncommon to see them in resorts and hotels, sometimes one person with several child sex workers.

Running parallel to pedophile tourism was child pornography, with a brisk trade in photos and videos that exploded when the Internet came around. Countries like the Philippines supplied the child models for the photos and videos.

Because of pressure from women’s organizations and child rights’ groups, governments began to crack down on the sex tourism and Internet child pornography. All kinds of laws and ordinances were passed, and even the Interpol was drawn in.

The pedophiles went underground… and into the Internet, which offered new opportunities for them. As broadband services began to offer higher speeds, it now became possible to have live or streaming videos.  The TdH report on WCST had one story about a Filipino woman first offering herself for webcam sex, and then meeting someone who said he wasn’t interested in her but in her children. She then began putting her daughter, and her daughter’s friends, on the webcam.

Pedophiles don’t need to spend to travel to countries like the Philippines to find child sex workers.  They can do this now on the Internet, in fairly safe conditions, because the webcam services are virtual, with no fixed addresses.

This does not mean pedophiles have completely stopped traveling. The webcam services have also become ways to contact child sex workers (as well as to prey on children in social media sites). Once in the Philippines, they run fewer risks because they already have the contacts.

There is no lack of laws against child pornography, cybersex, and child prostitution in the Philippines.  The problem is enforcement, with police waiting for reports by victims before they raid suspected dens.

But we also need to begin asking: Why has the Philippines figured, time and time again, as a favored destination for pedophiles?  Why are our parents so “cheap,” so willing to sacrifice their children?

The usual answer given is “poverty,” but there are many other countries poorer than we are, and which do not have this sex tourism problem.

Children as chattel

I propose we go back to fundamentals: How do we look at children?

For all the talk about Filipinos’ love of children, many consider children almost as chattel, private property, who must be totally obedient and subservient. Parents reproduce with the view that someday, these children will have to take care of them.  All too often, that “someday” starts as early as childhood.

It’s not surprising we have so many children sent out to the streets by their own parents to beg or to sell flowers and flannel (often sounding more like beggars as they urge you to buy the flowers so they can get food).

Our professed love of children is questionable. The later the night, the younger the children seen in the streets. I cannot understand why the Department of Social Welfare and Development can’t crack down, once and for all, on the parents of these child vendors.  We take this for granted, thinking it’s part of poverty, but even visitors from poor countries have told me they don’t have as many street children as we do, and certainly not to weave in and out of traffic on busy streets. Besides the child vendors, we have thousands of other child workers, in all kinds of hazardous work situations, all the way up to mining.

Remember the era of the “japayuki,” when many young Filipino women were going off to Japan to work as entertainers? When that was happening, I actually heard parents, and, at one time, a grandmother, talking about how they push their daughters to study hard, to finish high school, so they could go to Japan to work.

Together with this idea of children as chattel, many parents still think of minors almost as innocently mindless—“walang muwang” in Filipino.  Corporal punishment and physical trauma are seen as ways to shape a child’s character.  The idea of psychological trauma is even more distant.

Betrayal

We have to confront all these perceptions, and try to reshape them.  There have been studies of victims of WCST, the children found to be suffering from all kinds of problems.  There’s traumatic sexualization, where a child’s sexual development is hastened through rape, sexual abuse, or this WCST. Trauma-induced sexuality is of course filled with anxieties, often masked because the children will, on the surface, appear to be callous and tough.

The children also feel betrayed by the people they trusted so much. The TdH report notes: “Children exploited in family-based WCST operations show deeper internalization of the idea that performing sexual acts on camera for money is acceptable, in some cases necessary. As their parents have repeatedly told child victims that the behavior is harmless and not at all shameful because the children are not physically touched, these ideas are more deeply instilled in these children’s minds when compared to children exploited by non-family relations.”

There’s a sense of powerlessness, too, especially among those who are victimized by trafficking and taken away from their families to work in virtual brothels.

Finally, there is the issue of social stigmatization. It is shocking to read about how these Internet dens are found in neighborhoods, with the community—like an entire barangay in Cebu—knowing about the operations.

We need to intensify education about children’s rights, and change local concepts about children so older people understand that children start thinking early in life. Even more difficult is explaining that children do have sexuality, and that usually, they will develop this sexuality across time, in a healthy way. If abused, though, the traumatic sexuality that emerges will be extremely problematic, affecting the children for the rest of their lives. These children will someday become parents as well, and I shudder to think how they will raise the next generation.

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