Has anyone here watched the movie Taken? Basically it’s about how the daughter of an ex CIA agent gets “kidnapped” while she’s in Paris. She’s then sold to the highest bidder as a prostitute. In the movie, hundreds, if not thousands, of foreign women were taken advantage of this way. I never imagined that this could actually be happening in the real world… until now. Apparently Filipinas all over the globe are being sold like merchandise to the highest bidder.
Here’s an article on Inquirer.Net that details how Filipina OFWs are constantly being treated as “slaves”. The problem here is that women who seek employment outside the country keep on getting victimized by illegal recruiters. They end up working in a distant land, cut off from their family, and what’s worse is they get physically abused – sometimes molested… and they don’t even get paid. It’s literally modern day slavery. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
The story of Alice
Alice enjoyed a comfortable living in Hong Kong. True, she was a domestic helper but her employers were kind and she was earning P40,000 a month. When her contract ended, she decided to come home for a brief vacation with her family in Pampanga. She was offered a job by an illegal recruiter who promised her a good employer, a higher salary, and quick deployment to Dubai, a place that she had heard good things about.
She arrived in Dubai sometime in February 2006. Her first employer tried to sexually molest her. She complained to her agency, which transferred her to a different household. Her new employers included an indecent grandfather who kept trying to open her door at 2 o’clock in the morning. Alice learned to sleep with a knife under her pillow and her bed against the door. Fearful for her life and honor, she called the Philippine embassy to seek help but before it could send someone to rescue her, she was asked to pack and leave.
Her agency had sold her contract and passport to another agency in Oman. As she was unwilling to go into prostitution and now having found the strength to assert her rights, her foreign agent in Oman decided to sell Alice to another agent, this time in Damascus, Syria.
If you have friends and family who plan of becoming OFWs, please tell them to make sure that the recruitment agency is accredited by the POEA. They have to research and make sure that they are not just being fooled and being sold to global crime syndicates.
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Tags: Filipina Slaves, OFW Philippines, POEA