The 21st century slavery

[caption id="attachment_1148" align="aligncenter" width="405" caption="On Tionko Avenue near the Central Bank, street-level prostitution is thriving."][/caption]

Among the places in Mindanao, Davao City is lucky enough to have been spared from the wars that continue to ravage its neighbors. But it has not been spared from what Nicholas Kristof, a Pulitzer prize-winning columnist in The New York Times, dubbed as the 21st century slavery—prostitution.

Today, October 5, Davao City is celebrating the “No Prostitution Day.” This is the fifth time that the city is celebrating it.

Does the celebration mark the end of prostitution? No, far from it. In fact, the work to end prostitution has only become enormous as more and more girls are driven into this lurid trade.

Recently, one local newspaper reported that "“the number of prostituted women in Davao has increased by 24.23 percent since 2007.”

“According to Belen Antoque, Lawig Bubai chair,” the same news report said, “the city now has registered a total of 2,784 prostituted women with occupational permits from 2,241 in 2007. Of the latest figure, 637 are children. The youngest is 11 years old.”

The reason why women opt to be a prostitute is as old as prostitution itself: poverty.

Solving it therefore requires more than just pulling these women out of the streets, or wherever they are working.

Yet some continue to cling to ways that we know don’t work. Sometime in October last year, as part of our requirement in school, we interviewed the Barangay officials manning Tionko Avenue, where prostitution is thriving.

We asked the officials what they have done to solve the problem in their barangay. Their response was as shocking as it was revealing. “Gipangdakop naman namo na sila,” one official said. “Pero wala man miy kabutangan sa ilaha, gipang-buhian na lang namo sila.”

We know from experience that saturation drive just won’t work. Plucking out one set of prostitutes will only be replaced by another. Solving prostitution then requires us to recognize that while these women, who were seen as the problem, are also part of the solution.

"Women hold up half the sky," says the Chinese proverb. But the reality presents a different picture. "In a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos," said Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who have written a book called "Half The Sky."

They added: "There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution."

The same kind of thinking—or paradigm, to use the development parlance—can be applied in dealing with prostitution at the local level. Gladly, there are women’s and children’s organizations that are heading in this direction.