The Filipino mothers selling their children for online sexual abuse

According to a study by the Washington-based International Justice Mission (IJM), the children’s own mother or another female relative is often the trafficker in many cases in the Philippines.

Col. Sheila Portento, who leads the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Division of the WCPC, said the mothers often justified their actions by saying  they did not inflict harm on their children because there was no physical contact with the pedophiles.

WCPC is the lead unit of the Philippine National Police (PNP) in dealing with OSEC.

Mothers also told their children that “it wouldn’t hurt if mommy” touched them upon the instructions of the customers, she said.

“I keep asking myself if they’re not terrified of their actions. It seems not. Their moral fiber seems very thin,” said Portento.

There were more than a dozen inmates at the WCPC lock-up cell in Camp Crame during PCIJ’s visit. Most of them, like Carmen, were mothers who sold their own children for sexual abuse online.

One who was weeping inside her cell, and who was holding a rosary so tightly in her fist, admitted to taking videos of her nine-year-old daughter performing oral sex on her father. Investigators who rescued the child found the video in her storage disks.

She, Carmen, and the rest of the women gathered to pray when the sun was about to set at 6 p.m.

The disconnect has left a bad taste in the mouth of the police, many of them also Catholics. An investigator said one of the inmates had a Santo Niño statue – a Filipino representation of Jesus when he was a child – outside the room where her child was being abused.

Short of saying that they are not faithful Catholics, Irish priest Shay Cullen said these kinds of people only performed the rituals of the church but did not understand that faith also demanded commitment to human rights and human dignity.

Cullen founded a child rights organization in Olongapo City, Preda Foundation, which rescues sexually and physically abused children and offers them treatment and recovery programs.

“(For them) it’s only rituals. Like you go there, you get the sacrament and you’re saved,” he said.

 

Mothers blackmailing children

The relationship between mothers and abused children is often complicated. In many instances, the children are subjected to different forms of emotional blackmail, said Portento.

She recalled a rescue operation in Pampanga province in 2020, where a 16-year-old victim screamed at the sight of police officers who were there to rescue her. She was quick to defend her mother and tried to drive the cops away from the house where she was being abused.

But the girl’s attitude changed when the cops whisked her mother away in handcuffs. “Will my mother be jailed?” she asked the social workers.

When they told her she might, the girl said: “I hope she rots in prison because she’s a demon.”

In another rescue operation in Batangas province, Portento recalled a 10-year-old victim bawling inconsolably when her mother was arrested. She carried the child to a room where she couldn’t see her mother in handcuffs and spoke with her to ask why she was still defending her mother.

The girl replied: “If I don’t do as I’m told, we can’t buy milk for my younger sibling.”

“Convincing, guilting the child was easy,” said Portento. “Mothers don’t even have to lift a finger because their children trust them. If there’s one person the child knows would protect them at all costs, it’s [supposed to be] their mother.”

Mothers have also blackmailed their children into thinking that their family’s livelihood and survival depended on their cooperation.

“I talked to a mother facilitating OSEC. She was the same age as I was, and her kid was the same age as my youngest daughter. I told her: ‘How could you do this? How did you convince her to do this?” Portento said.

The mother supposedly told her daughter that their electricity supply would be cut if she didn’t perform for the online customers.

But they weren’t as cash-strapped as the mother would like her to believe. When the cash transfer was made, the mother told her she’d buy her new shoes in exchange for the “trouble.”

“That’s how shallow and selfish [these mothers could be],” Portento said.

Help from other countries

The real extent of online child abuse in the country is hard to ascertain. In many cases, OSEC is a secret crime, one that usually has no witnesses.

IJM reported that 793 OSEC victims were rescued in law enforcement operations from 2011 to May 2020. About half were under 12 years old and 57% of the perpetrators were relatives or close family friends of the victims. The youngest was a three-month-old infant.

IJM is part of PICACC, an alliance also composed of the PNP and the National Bureau of Investigation, as well as the UK’s National Crime Agency, the Dutch National Police and the Australian Federal Police.

The total number for 2020 was not yet available as of posting. (The NBI declined to provide data to PCIJ, citing confidentiality.)

OSEC was once run by organized criminal syndicates but it turned into a cottage industry in the past decade, with perpetrators driven by poverty and aided by technological advancements that allowed easy connection to paying customers.

A cheap web camera and an internet connection are basically what they need to set it up.

Widespread English proficiency among Filipinos is another factor why OSEC thrives.

The countries where the paying customers come from have come to help the Philippines address the problem.

The DOJ receives cyber tip line reports from the NCMEC, for example.

The organization established by the US Congress receives millions of reports of child sexual abuse and exploitation from social networking and electronic service companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter and more.

The tips typically include the IP addresses of Filipino facilitators and other perpetrators of abuse.

A study published by IJM in 2020 showed that 64% of OSEC cases filed in the Philippines from 2014 to 2017 were initiated by referrals from international law enforcement agencies. Most cases came from the US or Scandinavian nations (22%), Australia (12%), UK (7%), Canada and New Zealand (2%).

“Referrals from foreign law enforcement counterparts have exploded during the pandemic. Kids are forced to stay at home and many people lost their jobs,” said Lt. Noeralyn Tamayo, a PICACC Philippine police deputy.

Remittance centers

One way the crime is being tracked is through the remittance centers. The financial service providers that allowed the country’s army of overseas Fipino workers to easily send money to their relatives back home have also been used by foreigners abusing Filipino children online to pay the facilitators.

The Philippine government’s Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) has required remittance centers to submit suspicious transaction reports (STRs) based on a study containing a “typology” of OSEC-related transactions.

AMLC Executive Director Mel Georgie Racela said the typology was essentially a list of red flags that should prompt financial institutions to report a transaction as suspicious and related to OSEC.

“What you’ll do is scrub that database to determine whether or not your customers are part of that study and then you will report an STR on those customers or persons of interest in the study,” Racela told the PCIJ.

For example: If the amount of money sent to the Philippines was worth at least P2,500, came from a country under the AMLC’s watchlist on OSEC, and did not come from a relative, the compliance officers of remittance centers, banks and electronic money apps can flag these transactions and send them to the AMLC for investigation. The AMLC sends these reports to law enforcement agencies like the PNP and NBI.

From January 2019 to June 2020, remittances from the US recorded the most number and the highest value of suspicious transactions – 10,927 reports involving P39.6 billion.

Recipients of these  suspicious transactions were mostly in the provinces of Rizal, Cebu, Davao del Sur, Bohol, Iloilo, Bulacan, Quezon, and the cities of Taguig and Manila.

From 2015 to 2018, about 3,000 persons of interest in child trafficking and exploitation were referred to the AMLC for money laundering probes, Racela said .

“We did an update to cover 2019 to the first half of 2020. So that’s one and a half years, and you’ll be interested to know that persons of interest increased from 3,000 to 23,000 only for that period. So adding it up, it would be 26,000 POIs,” Racela told PCIJ.

The AMLC has yet to publish a new study, but Racela said they were also expecting an “exponential increase.”