We are in Quezon City today visiting the Third World Movement against the Exploitation of Women and Children.
This UN-affiliated project was founded in 1980 by the charismatic Sister Soledad Perpinan, a Sister of the Good Shepherd. From its roots as an advocacy movement to protest against Japanese sex tourism, the project now mainly provides shelter and transitory for women who have been victims of abuse.
Sister Sole, now confined to a wheelchair because of rheumatoid arthritis, is clearly an expert in deploying a full range of techniques to get attention for her work. This includes managing to get a letter to the Pope by persuading the Sisters who make up his room to leave the letter on his pillow case. She tells us the colourful inception of the organization, and regales us with anecdotes of her jet-setting social mission-led past: conferences in Brazil, speeches in New York: all for the girls and women that are rescued, some of whom appear shortly to sing us songs.
We feel privileged to be allowed to interview some of the girls, who tell us their harrowing stories.
One in particular sticks in my mind afterwards. She is 17 years old, and has been raped twice. In a quest to help her family, who were short of 300 pesos – they sold peanut butter sandwiches and some customers had not paid – she asked around about who could help. She was told that a teacher at her school could help her. He took her on a long trip on his motorbike, locked her up in a room, made her remove her clothes, and raped her. He told her if she told anyone, he would harm her family. She said nothing for a year. A year later, the principal of her school asked to see her. Clearly in cahoots with the teacher, he too proceeded to rape her. She found a friend to whom the same thing had happened, and people in the school began to talk. Her family found out and they attempted legal action. The case was dropped however. She is now in lonely exile waiting to finish her schooling, unable to be with her family. She wants to study to be a nurse.
That night, we go with a group from Ayala to Pasay, a street lined with girlie bars. Girls wearing sparkling pink cowboy hats and satin outfits lure customers in. Inside the bars, more girls, all wearing matching bikinis, are squashed like so many tinned sardines on bar-level stages. Under the spotlights, they dance for customers. Some look bored and barely move, others perform acrobatics. One nearly falls over trying to do a cartwheel on the bar. There are not many men at this early hour (it is nine p.m) but those we can see are very focused on the dancers.
A social worker arranges for us to meet one of the girls, who attends the Third World Movement against Exploitation of Women drop-in centers. We pay 2,000 pesos for her time. She has a son by one of her British clients; the child is now one and a half. She shares her flat with her cousin and a few others, sleeping six in one bed. She earns 150 pesos just to dance and upwards of 2000 for ‘bar fines’ when a client, mostly businessmen, Koreans, Singaporeans, Japanese and Americans, wishes to sleep with her. She likes the Americans best as they are the most understanding. She is exhausted. Her working day ends at 7 am when she goes to sleep, but her little son wakes her up at 10 wanting to play. However, she prefers to keep him with her than to take him home to her family and leave him in order to work. She has no real plans for her future but she would really like to be a cleaner – she loves to clean. She can’t find a cleaning job in Manila though.
Tags: Ayala Foundation, Pasay, Sister Soledad Perpinan, Third World Movement against the Exploitation of Women