Justice Secretary Leila de Lima’s warning against human trafficking syndicates during the 1st International Dialogue on Human Trafficking curiously comes amid the recent arrest of an American retiree named Harold Glover at his home in barangay Taytayan, Bogo City over the weekend.
The retiree was caught literally with his pants down by Bogo City police inside his room with two Filipina underage girls. That scene alone is incriminating enough to lock him up in jail for the remainder of his natural life which won’t be much since he’s already 69 years old.
If that wasn’t enough evidence there were also cellphone videos and photos of him molesting the girls. His arrest was the result of weeks of surveillance and a testimony from one of the girls whom he victimized.
The girl admitted to being one of his victims because she had no money to buy school supplies. It was learned from the Children’s Legal Bureau (CLB) that Glover had been in the Philippines for five years and his activities would not have come to light were it not for one of his victims.
Glover didn’t need a syndicate to reach out to these girls. He only got acquainted with one Filipina who served as his pimp and is now in hiding following his arrest. But as the CLB said, the Bogo city minors may not be the only victims of Glover.
Two foreigners were already arrested for similar prostitution/trafficking activities in Bogo city which has employed a registration system of sorts to track down foreign visitors who chose to stay in their area.
We hope this system is already in place not only in Cebu province but across the country. For it is in the barangay or village level where Filipinos can track down and arrest foreign predators who dangle money and all sorts of favors to impoverished families desperate to sell their children for a few dollars.
But that would entail a proactive community that would report these predators both foreign and domestic to the local officials. The reason why predators like Glover and others continue to operate under the radar is because the community had either been used to and tolerate their presence or they simply don’t care.
That is a dangerous situation yet despite this, the Philippines is ranked as a Tier Two country in the Global Trafficking in Persons (GTIP) report by the US State Department.
This means that the government’s efforts towards curbing human trafficking had been acknowledged, though it bears watching that trafficking occurs because of the presence of foreign predators like
Glover, which means that the US and other First World countries should also keep tabs over these detestable hunters at their end. The campaign against trafficking won’t be over until everyone contributes to ending the menace for good.
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