From an airplane window, Hong Kong’s skyscrapers, busy harbors, and shopping hubs look like a paradise, often provoking hearty applause among travelers touching down at Chek Lap Kok airport.
But not everyone craves the former British colony for shopping binges, its mouth-watering dimsum, and other Oriental attractions.
Every now and then, a plane unloads an often unnoticed batch of desperate Filipino women, who disguise themselves as tourists down to the cheap sunglasses and padded shopping wallets, but who end up in Hong Kong’s sleazy underworld as pick-up girls in bars and discos.
Hong Kong is an economic magnet that has drawn tens of thousands of migrant workers from a booming Asia that’s still plagued by poverty and joblessness. The shopping and entertainment mecca is home to hundreds of multinational corporations. It glitters with names like Giordano, Jacky Chan, and Disneyland, which opened in 2005.
More than 25 million tourists, about half from mainland China, visited Hong Kong last a year in a new tourism record.
Budget airlines, including the Philippines’ Cebu Pacific, have bridged Asians into this economic watershed. Along with the tourists and traders came what is feared to be a growing number of trafficked women from mainland China, neighboring countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand, and some from as far as Colombia who are coerced into prostitution.
Unlike other well-off countries regarded as human trafficking hotspots, Hong Kong has officially denied being a major destination or a source of trafficked people. It has acknowledged some incidents in past years but says steps have been taken to eliminate even the negligible number of human trafficking cases.
In a report released in June 2007, however, the US State Department continues to tag Hong Kong as “a transit and destination territory for men and women trafficked for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor.”
While primarily a transit point for illegal migrants, Hong Kong to a lesser extent is a destination for Asian women, including those from the Philippines, “who travel to Hong Kong voluntarily for prostitution or jobs in restaurants or hotels but are deceived or coerced into sexual servitude. Some of the foreign women involved in Hong Kong’s commercial sex trade are believed to be trafficking victims,” according to the US report.
While legally allowing sex workers, Hong Kong—to protect its relatively wholesome image—has deliberately ignored such sinister byproduct of the local commercial sex industry as trafficked women. As a result, it has become blinded to many aspects of the problem, such as its magnitude, nongovernment watchdogs say.
“It would never admit that it has a human trafficking problem because of its image as an economic blockbuster,” says Adrielle Panares, director of the International Social Services, a Hong Kong government-subsidized group that helps workers in distress.
“The government is not really tackling the issue.... It’s not the priority,” says Elise Chung of Zi Teng, a group that takes up sex workers’ concerns.
“I can say that this attitude is more related to the discrimination of migrants especially if you’re a prostitute,” she says. “Hong Kong’s image is always associated with economic prosperity. It wants to show the world that its GDP [Gross Domestic Product] is high and that this is a place where people can voice out what they feel.”
Deception
While denying the problem, Hong Kong has been praised for consistently enforcing steps that could prevent human trafficking.
Hong Kong fully complies with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking. The government has continued to implement strong anti-trafficking measures, including training law enforcement officials, collecting information on suspected cases of trafficking, and conducting undercover operations in establishments with suspected trafficking victims, the US State Department report says.
It prohibits all forms of sex trafficking, which is criminalized through at least three ordinances on immigration, crimes, and stowaways. Penalties for commercial sexual exploitation are commensurate with those for rape, and penalties for all forms of trafficking are sufficiently stringent, according to the US report.
But human traffickers have gone around the law. Many of their victims cooperate by agreeing to acts of deception to gain entry to Hong Kong, only to discover later that they would be forced into sexual servitude, Panares says.
“Hong Kong has a different situation...most victims enter legally either as tourists or entertainers with valid visa. But once they arrive in Hong Kong, everything is distorted,” Panares says.
“The promises of the recruiters are not kept, the rights of the victims violated, the activities the victims engaged in are illegal, mostly in prostitution,” she says.
Such complicity, along with admissions by some victims that they knew they were destined for sex work, has sparked debate whether they could be considered trafficking victims within the definition by the UN Protocol on Trafficking.
The UN protocol defines human trafficking as “the recruitment of persons... by means of deception... for the purpose of exploitation.”
A 2003 study of the University of Hong Kong says “it would be irrational to label those women who come to Hong Kong with full knowledge that they will be working as nightclub/escort workers as ‘victims of trafficking,’ unless their living and working conditions are abusive.”
“However, a woman who is not given the full picture and is then later pressured to engage in escort work is, in our view, a victim of trafficking,” according to the study by the university’s Center for Comparative and Public Law, under its Faculty of Law, which focused on migrant Filipino women engaged in such work in Hong Kong.
The study concludes that the women who were interviewed lacked information on the nature of their would-be jobs, in particular expectation to do escort work; were pressured to do escort work to be able to pay back recruitment fees; worked long hours with little time off; and had very limited freedom of movement.
Some women were not allowed to refuse particular clients, it says. “It is arguable whether these circumstances could amount to trafficking within the definition in the UN Protocol,” the study concludes.
“Nevertheless, they are issues which could, and should, be addressed as human rights issues,” it says.
Such issues, along with Hong Kong’s refusal to acknowledge human trafficking as a key problem and a tendency by victims not to surface unless faced with grave dangers, have made it difficult to fathom the depths of human trafficking and its potential to worsen in the bustling freeport.
The US State Department says estimates of international trafficking victims in Hong Kong “are modest,” but generally adds that “there have been many reports of debt bondage and confiscation of documents among women in prostitution—consistent with international definitions of trafficking.”
Last year, it notes, 10 suspected traffickers were arrested in three different trafficking cases. Of those involving women forced into prostitution, one individual was formally charged under a crimes ordinance, specifically for trafficking women to Hong Kong. Five were charged with related offenses, and the rest were released as the criminal cases against the traffickers collapsed following the victims’ repatriation.
The Hong Kong Scene
The Philippine consulate says they have documented 13 cases of human trafficking so far this year.
A cursory visit to nightclubs frequented by sex workers and expatriate customers easily provides a glimpse of the flourishing flesh trade that fosters human trafficking.
At Fenwick Bar, a basement nightclub in Hong Kong’s bustling Wan Chai tourist district, scantily dressed Filipino girls outnumber expatriate customers one to six, mobbing each man that strides into the pub and discotheque. Girls stand close to the door to have a better chance of grabbing any incoming customer. One, already dead drunk, has her head slumped on a table, a customer groping her.
The dance floor, pulsating with a live band rendition of a Madonna tune, is a picture of bedlam.
The girls scream to the disco music’s fast tempo and blinding laser disco lights, while lost in a gyrating “dirty dance” with clients. Couples unabashedly engage in necking, the men’s hands groping everywhere. The dance floor serves as a negotiating ground. Amid the tempest, couples talk in whispers as they haggle over the price of sex, then step out of the club’s confines for more privacy elsewhere.
It’s impossible to tell who embrace such a fate willingly, or are forced into it.
Outside, more heavily made up women stalk the nightclub strip in search of customers from bar to bar, their hips swaying awkwardly as they walk on cheap stilettos and very tight miniskirts that barely hide anything. Gay Thai cross-dressers, looking resplendently like women, stand in wait along the teeming sidewalks. It is close to midnight on a Friday, but the crowd has just started to peak.
Girls earn if customers buy them a drink, usually the popular HK$100-per-glass Long Island, a bittersweet mix of vodka, gin, rum, and soda. They get a stub from the bar for each ordered drink which they later exchange for a cash commission, usually 50 percent of the price (roughly half of P590).
On a lucky night, a girl could down as many as six glasses with as many as four men, bringing her to a serious state of drunkenness that makes her ready for more daring exploits with the customer like quick sex, which fetches $700 (more than P4,100) per hour. She gets 50 percent and the rest goes to a bevy of exploiters: the bar owner, an array of middlemen and her recruiter, who is constantly on guard to get her payback for recruitment costs, food, and rent.
A bouncer usually collects a fee at the door, $80 (P472) for the more glamorous Fenwick that allows a customer entry to the bar and a free glass of Coke, beer, red wine, or scotch.
Wan Chai is a pit stop for foreign tourists and expatriates, including executives and employees of multinational corporations. Local Chinese traditionally hie off to Mong Kok and Jordan districts in nearby Kowloon Island for paid sex.
The dreaded Triad crime syndicate is believed to be overlooking the flesh trade like mafia overlords in cahoots with some bar owners, usually affluent Chinese. The US State Department report says there has been no evidence that local authorities and the police have a hand in the flourishing business.
A Fenwick bar waitress says the number of sex workers masquerading as Filipino tourists in Hong Kong has risen tremendously in recent years, outnumbering Filipina domestic helpers, who moonlight as bar and sex workers at night after their day work. The waitress, who spoke on condition of anonymity for her protection, has been granted resident status by the government, which requires at least seven years of continuous stay in Hong Kong.
In most of those years, she has worked in several Wan Chai bars, giving her a keen sense of the edgy world of Filipino sex workers.
“The bars used to be filled with the DH, but now they’re filled to the rafters with tourists,” the waitress says. DH stands for domestic helpers, or housemaids.
A big number of girls from Colombia who commanded a higher price used to provide stiff competition to Filipinos, according to the waitress.
After the South China Morning Post published a news report about Colombian bar girls peddling drugs on the side, Hong Kong policemen quietly cracked down on them. They gradually vanished from the bar scene.
Modus Operandi
There are endless ways to skirt legal obstacles for girls desperate for money and recruiters, locally called mama-sans, who are masters of the local terrain.
Many bar girls who enter as tourists and are given only the standard 14-day visitor visa could legally stay in Hong Kong for months by briefly venturing out of the territory. Many take a roundtrip train ride to Shen Zhen in China or a popular ferry trip to Macau, earning them a fresh two-week tourist visa upon return from a 45-minute trip.
While bars are prohibited from operating as sex dens, owners stay away from arrests by arguing that the bar girl decides on her own whether or not to have sex with a customer when the couple steps out of the bar premises. This has given the girls an image that they’re “willing victims,” commonly used as ammunition by those who challenge the belief that the girls may be regarded as victims conned through deception by human traffickers.
A small number of victims, who managed to escape from human trafficking syndicates and gave written testimonies to the Philippine consulate in Hong Kong, has provided a crucial insight into the tangled world of ragtag human trafficking gangs and their victims.
The modus operandi involves a measure of complicity among some victims bundled off as tourists but who knew they were destined for work as bar girls. Some say they were later forced to have sex with customers to earn more income and pay off exorbitant fees exacted by their recruiters.
Some knew very well they would enter the flesh trade—choosing that lesser evil over the horrors of poverty back home—only to discover later that the working conditions were much worse than described by recruiters, like having sex a number of times more than they could physically handle each night.
Filipino girls talk of separately going to bed with two to four customers a night, considering first the relatively large amount they have to earn daily to pay back the loans demanded by their recruiters before they could even work to earn for themselves and the family waiting for financial support back home. Some often work up to dawn, struggling to sleep in the day to recover for the next night.
One girl, labeled by the Philippine consulate as an “alleged human trafficking victim,” reported that she was lured by a recruiter she identified as “Gladys.” The recruiter told her she could earn a lot of money in Hong Kong by just having a “drink, [smoking and dancing] with guys,” the victim wrote in her testimony to the consulate.
She was given a roundtrip ticket to Hong Kong and first brought to a hotel. She was later ordered to wear “daring clothes” then taken to a Kowloon-area nightclub, where she was forced into the sex trade on her fourth day there, according to a consulate report forwarded to the Department of Foreign Affairs in Manila on March 14, 2007.
Traumatized by her ordeal, she escaped with the help of a Nigerian customer. She later found her way into a police station, which called Philippine consulate officials. She needed to be hospitalized after showing signs of mental stress.
“All I want to do before my flight is to earn more money because the economy in the Philippines is doing badly,” she wrote in her testimony.
In a bar, she says she was surprised when she saw fellow bar girls being groped by customers on a smoke-filled dance floor. She at first refused but wrote that she relented after a few days, eventually also agreeing to have sex with customers. “I have no choice because I have no money to buy food and I wanted to send money to my mother in the Philippines,” she says.
Three Filipino women recruited in March this year by a certain Alice Pangilinan in the Philippines to work as Hong Kong bar receptionists say they were told that they could earn as much as P30,000 a day if they agreed to go out with customers for sex.
“She told us that if we don’t want to have sex with customers, we could earn as much as HK$50 per tequila drink bought for us by customers in a bar or disco,” they said in a joint affidavit executed before an official of the Philippine consulate on March 28, 2007.
As soon as they landed in Hong Kong last March, the friendly demeanor of their handlers changed. They were billeted in a Hong Kong flat owned by their manager identified as “Liza,” who said they should agree to have sex with customers “to pay back the money we purportedly owed her.”
They were told by Liza that they each owed her P40,000 plus US$50 for the roundtrip Manila-Hong Kong ticket. Additionally, each of the three was asked by her to pay HK$500 (close to P3,000) each week for accommodation in her Wan Chai flat, where nine other Filipino women also working as bar girls stayed.
They were accompanied by old timers, who helped them find their first customers. “Liza always pushed us into going from one bar to another until almost 5 a.m. everyday so we could earn money to pay the debt that we are supposed to owe her,” they recounted.
They eventually escaped and were helped by the consulate to stay in a Catholic shelter for distressed migrants before taking a flight back home the day after they complained to Philippine officials here.
Vulnerable Prey
Other than the money, Hong Kong provides a small but extremely vital comfort: it is very close to home. The almost two-hour flight from Manila or central Cebu compares to a jeep or bus ride to a shopping mall on a bad traffic day in the overcrowded Philippine capital. It is so unlike the longer journeys by Filipino laborers to such job meccas as the Middle East which make their departures seem to relatives as permanent as death.
The short distance seems to dull the uncertainties of a strange new land, especially for the uninitiated—mostly young folk women looking for an escape out of rural poverty and ensnared by human trafficking syndicates whose paid recruiters are often relatives or close friends of the gullible would-be victims. Some of the poor victims haven’t even set foot in Manila or even once ridden a plane, their small-town innocence turning them into excellent prey.
“Based on our experience, usually the traffickers or ‘recruiters’ are relatives of the victims or somebody close to the victims,” Panares says.
“They’re the ones who’re welcomed in homes, known by the parents or people in a community where they’re targeting somebody for recruitment,” she adds. “They’re good at convincing parents of victims, telling them it’s easy to get jobs in Hong Kong even if one enters as a tourist.”
“We always tell them that the minute you’re told there are no expenses, they should be suspicious,” Panares says.
Upon setting foot in Hong Kong, the victims’ alleged financial obligations start to pile up.
Fresh recruits are housed in a flat or boarding house, brought to a beauty parlor to be made up and bought sexy clothes. On the same day, they’re given a bar tour and briefed on the tricks of the trade to elude arrest—such as always bringing their passport with tourist visas and plane tickets in their hand bags in case of surprise police raids.
Despite stories of abuse, recruits keep on coming, largely to escape desperate lives back home.
Panares recalls the ordeal of a Filipino bar girl who was found lying bloodied after being badly mauled behind a popular bar two years ago. “I thought she was dead because she was lying unconscious in a pool of blood and had many cigarette burns on her body and appeared to have been tortured.”
Panares brought her to a hospital then took care of her in a shelter for two months. The victim later told her she was a victim of human traffickers, who forced her into prostitution to be able to pay back recruitment costs. She escaped and returned home but later returned to Hong Kong and worked as a bar girl on her own.
Her recruiters, however, saw her and mauled her to near-death. “She heard their familiar voices as they were attacking her,” Panares says.
The victim was sent back to a shelter for abused workers in the Philippines because she could not return home and disappoint her family with her sad plight. Despite her horrible experience, she again tried to return to Hong Kong months later.
“Sadly after she recovered, she planned to return to Hong Kong again because she had two children to feed. We managed to stop her from leaving,” Panares says. “We always tell victims that they should not return. We tell them that they start with nothing and end up with nothing.”
The crusade against human trafficking is a formidable task, Panares says. “It’s hard to cure a disease that has no physical manifestation,” she adds. “Human trafficking is a silent injustice. Victims will not report it until they are trapped.”
Photographs: Dante Peralta
Read more about this and other issues related to human trafficking in Asia in Newsbreak’s special issue. For orders and inquiries regarding the special issue, email editorial@newsbreak.com.ph and ads@newsbreak.com.ph or call (632) 687-5523 or (632) 687-5525
