Trafficking Casewatch

What does a trafficking victim look like?

On the bed is where she could end it, she thought. She’s 16, he’s six months old.

Defying wind and rain, children romp around the white sand beach leading to this 2-hectare village of houses on stilts where mothers tend their homes and men their fighting cocks.

Inside a small room at the Tawi-Tawi Provincial Police Station, leaders of the local anti-trafficking task force had been trying to pry information out of five women who had just been intercepted by the police getting off a boat from Zamboanga City.

Her city is not among the known human trafficking hotspots in the country yet the cause has found a champion in Regional Trial Court prosecutor Ruth Bernabe.

After super typhoon Yolanda swept away her home in Guiuan, Eastern Samar, 14-year-old Noemi was forced to beg for food. Her family lost everything, and had nowhere to go.

When authorities intercepted here 48 Filipinos believed to have been recruited by human trafficking syndicates for work in Malaysia, they thought they were doing the potential victims a favor. Little did they know the victims considered them villains.

They were arrested by authorities for illegally working in Malaysia, and detained for months in cramped cells where they were fed only twice a day. Yet the four Filipino deportees said they would give up everything for a chance to go back, even if it meant going through the whole ordeal again.

Lawyer Darlene Pajarito had her first brush with human trafficking in 2004 as an assistant prosecutor in Zamboanga City.