Sex Tourism-- Philippines... And Jamaica: Unrestrained Capitalism Taken To The Extreme

Not the Philippines, not Jamaica-- snow, cold... Sweden

One of my friends has taken to fantasizing out loud about "Swedish girls." He should just go get a dvd; I'm sure there are scores of them on the topic. Instead he keeps asking me about planning a trip with him to Sweden. I should probably tell him that since 1999 it's been illegal to hire a prostitute in Sweden-- and that 10 years later Norway adopted the same approach. It's not illegal for the prostitutes to offer their services... it's illegal for the johns to buy them though (the Kvinnofrid law... try the Google). Brothels are also illegal. I suggested he take his fantasies to Bangkok. I don't know if they have Swedish girls in the brothels-- Roland tells me there are foreign girls working there these days-- but I suspect that if you have enough money to spend, you can get whatever you'd like there... kind of a Randian Republican dream market. Alas, he's programmed against Asian women. Plenty of Caucasians aren't. Asian sex tourism is rampant.

The other day the U.S. Ambassador to the Phillipines, Harry Thomas, was forced to apologize to the whole nation after claiming that 40% of male tourists to that country are there for the sex. He sent a cellphone text Friday to Philippine Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario, who was on a visit to Vietnam, expressing regret for his comments.

"I should not have used the 40% statistic without the ability to back it up. I regret any harm that I may have caused," Thomas said in the text message, which was released to journalists.

The US embassy spokeswoman Tina Malone said Thomas "offered his deep regret" for his comment made during a conference last month.

The US would continue to be a "strong and dedicated partner of the Filipino people in combating the global scourges of human trafficking and sexual tourism," she added.

Thomas also told the conference on human trafficking in the Philippines last month that the sex tourists included Americans and that it was "something I'm not proud of." He urged Philippine authorities to prosecute all foreign sex tourists, including Americans.

The Philippines is trying to revive its tourism industry and erase its reputation as a sex tourism hotspot.

Wikileaks had posted several U.S. diplomatic cables about the rampant sex trade industry-- including the exploitation of children-- in the Philippines. "Sex tourists reportedly came from Asia, Europe, North America, and Australia to engage in sexual activity with minors," said a leaked embassy cable dated February 17, 2010... "In 2009, the Bureau of Immigration deported two foreign sex offenders and pedophiles, and in a joint program with the Australian Federal Police denied entry to 19 Australian sex offenders upon their arrival in the Philippines. The government also cooperated with the US in prosecuting American nationals under the terms of the U.S. PROTECT Act of 2003, which criminalized the commission of child abuse by American nationals overseas, including child pornography and other sexual offenses against a minor." Another leaked cable named Sabang Beach in Puerto Galeraand the province of Mindoro Oriental as well known destinations for sex tourism.

Trafficking of Philippine women and children for sex is an international business. And according to Rene Ofreneo, a former Philippine labor undersecretary and an expert on the sex trade, "the number of prostituted persons in the Philippines is about the size of the country's manufacturing workforce." That same report cites a recent study that showed there are about 75,000 children, who were forced into prostitution due to poverty. The Washington Times reported that "Teen-age girls are being forced into prostitution due to the Asian economic crisis. In Davao City, the Philippines, there are more than 1,000 prostituted teen-age girls; customers pay as little as from 50 cents to $2.50. This rise in prostitution increases the spread of AIDS, especially as contraceptive costs have gone up with the currency collapse and bankrupt government cuts in distribution programs." Most of the customers are Filipinos but the country is one of the top destinations for pedophile sex tourism, much of it financed with Japanese capital.

A Philippine Adventure Tour costs $1,645, including round trip airfare, hotel accommodations and guided tours to the bars where men purchase sex from prostitutes for as little as US $24. Tour owner and operator Allan Gaynor promises that customers "never sleep alone on this tour" and recommends that the customer have sex with a different girl every day "two if you can handle it."

...13,000 Australians, second in number to Americans, a year visit Angeles City, a center of prostitution surrounding the former Clark U.S. Air Force base in the Philippines... Men from Australia and Great Britain are primary suspects as perpetrators of child prostitution in the Philippines. Two of the three-pedophilia cases recently decided by Philippine courts involved British nationals, although there are reportedly more Australian suspects.

Maybe this is where Ambassador Thomas got his statistics:



Maybe while hubby's away exploiting child prostitutes in southeast Asia, his wife is off on a little sex tourism of her own though:

Jamaica 0508

Decay is an old friend and colleague. Most people who know of him, know him because of all the grammy awards and platinum records he's won for producing albums by artists from Sublime, Sugar Ray, and the Bangles to Tony Bennett and Paul McCartney. To me he's just a super tuned-in, ultra creative guy I've been talking with for almost 30 years. I've been asking him to write for DWT for a couple years now and today he sent me a meditation from Jamaica:

Went to a church to rehearse with their boys choir, getting ready for a chorus they will be singing on a new Matisyahu song, "On Nature."

We are men of nature,
We are made from the Earth.
At the end of my eighty
I'll return to the dirt."

The church is on the same grounds as a school that is affiliated with the church. About 15 kids are standing in the street outside the gate with handwritten signs that say "park." There's a cricket match in progress across the street, and the school/church grounds are being used as a parking lot.

The school building windows have bars on them, even the second floor windows. We have just passed a prison, and it looks the same. One set of bars keeping people in, one keeping people out.

We pull up to the church, and I notice that many of the panes of window glass are broken out. I ask the driver why so many windows are broken, and he points down & up, "There's rocks, and there's windows." Of the windows that are still unbroken, the glass varies in kind-- some wired, some bathroom glass, some clear. They fix the broken windows with whatever they have available. It has the effect of a church window, a mosaic with a message, yet this sacred meaning is hidden, other than the sense of necessity.

Inside the church, there are 30 ceiling fans spinning. As I look up, I see the roof open to the elements on the right side of the transept. Six pieces of wood are broken and gone out to the sky, and all the plaster is missing over a large area around the holes. There is water damage on the walls and floor, and down through the nave there is water damage on the ceiling, showing that the leak has traveled back about 80 feet towards the main church opening. The plaster is ready to go, an ongoing drama, falling action.

The boys are practicing a Christmas song, even though it's still May. I ask a woman about the roof, and she says they'll have to do a concert to get the money to fix it.

The choir director doesn't seem that interested-- or, he's skeptical-- about doing the Matisyahu piece. They're getting $2,000, and I'm now thinking about the roof repair, but he is circumspect with me. I'm in the middle of Kingston, and I'm the only gaijin I've seen for 30 minutes, since I left the hotel lobby. So I'm trying to figure out if I'm paranoid, or if the song lyric breaks a rule that I'm not aware of, or a combination.

We're supposed to rehearse, but after I play him the song on a car CD player, the director asks if we can just rehearse at the studio. That would be better for me because it would be more focused, but I can't get his angle. I ask him bluntly if this singing is something that he really wants the choir to do, because if he doesn't want to be involved, it's ok with me and I can keep looking. He says "No, we'll do it." I still don't feel that he wants the boys involved. But, the roof...

It's so complicated. The poverty, and the dignity, hope, and the need to destroy. The immense effort to keep a society intact, to teach, to try to keep the kids from going bad, to keep one church window unbroken... To remove the bars...

Standing outside the church, the kids sound so sweet singing the high Christmas song in the heat and humidity. Boys' voices, unchanged, not yet broken by time, or whatever it is that breaks things.

-by Decay